Recently, Wired.com writer Issie Lapowsky wrote about a “new formula” of startup business called “the startup factory,” “startup studio,” or “parallel entrepreneurship.”

Quote:

“You start a business, your business experiments with lots of ideas, many ideas fail but some succeed, you turn these ideas into new businesses, and the formula repeats on its own. Or at least, you hope it will.

There are lots of examples among successful entrepreneurs in the internet-centric startup sector:

• Zynga founder’s Mark Pincus’ Superlabs
• Uber co-founder Garrett Camp and Naveen Selvadurai’s Expa
• Kevin Rose’s North Technologies
• Twitter co-founder Ev Williams’ Obvious Corp
• Former MySpace CEO Mike Jones’s Science Inc.
• Serial entrepreneur John Borthwick’s Betaworks
• Vimeo co-founder Jake Lodwick’s Elepath

But does a short (or even long) list of examples reveal a trend? The answer, of course, is no. (Among journalists, there is an old joke: How does a reporter count to three? Answer: One, two, trend.)

I live in Nashville where there are lots of companies (called publishers) that set up factories where lots of talented people are “paid” (advanced against future earning) to come up with the next big act or number 1 hit. Most of their ideas flop, but the few that don’t are great examples in the wisdom of parallel entrepreneurship. The same is true in other idea-drive professions: movies and TV, for example.

But this isn’t limited to the world of entertainment. Over the past three decades, I’ve known lots of business owners who sold their companies and were left with nothing but a massive bank account. Soon they had nothing to do but drink lattés at Starbucks.

A few months after they sell their business, you run into them and ask what they’re doing and they say, “I just started a couple of businesses with a some people I met at Starbucks.”

They are shocked when you tell them that they’re a part of the nascent studio startup movement.

Starting a faux trend is something they never imagined they’d do. But starting a business is something they can’t imagine not doing.