Sponsored by powerlist 100 - Venture Capital › asset › docs › GCV2013Powerlist100.pdfSponsored...

powerlist 100

The corporate venture executives shaping

the future of the industry

Sponsored by

Global Corporate Venturing December 2013 2

Welcome to the Global Corporate Venturing Powerlist 100.

As corporate venturing has begun to garner more and more headlines over the past five years, the people on this list have made this happen.

This is our second look at the biggest names in the industry, and we have attempted to reflect who the most important players are.

Perhaps a mark of the solidity of the list is that of last year’s top 20, only one left corporate venturing, with Chevron Technology Ventures’ Trond Unneland being replaced by Kemal Anbarci. We have expanded the top rankings to incorporate 25 people and we have also provided a list of five new entrants to watch.

We now track more than 1,100 corporate venturing units and whittling down the list to only 100 individuals is a tricky task. Given this challenge, we have limited those put forward to the most senior people in their function, although many great people make these organisations effective places to work.

This year we decided to move Intel Capital’s Arvind Sodhani to the top of the list, to reflect its success, even garnering plaudits at its summit this year from Intel Corporation’s incoming chief executive Brian Krzanich. Such praise is important indeed, as many a corporate venturing unit has found the handover from leader to leader is a potentially tricky moment in its history.

Intel Capital itself has now made more than $11bn of investments, and Sodhani has helped cement the unit as part of Intel having been at the head of the group since 2005. He also expanded the group to have four additional investment sectors this year and they have secured 24 exits globally.

However, many on the list could equally have won the top spot. We chose South Africa-based media

company Naspers’ Charles Searle last year, and he secured the number-two slot this year, given his investment unit’s investment picking prowess, which saw it back China-based internet giant Tencent early on, and has remained strong with banner deals like backing Russian portal Mail.Ru.

Our top 10 also included Nagraj Kashyap, of Qualcomm Ventures,

US-based media company IDG Capital Partners’ Hugo Shong, Siemens Venture Capital’s Ralf Schnell, IBM Venture Capital’s Claudia Fan Munce, Junlian’s Zhu Linan, Google Ventures’ Bill Maris, Citi Ventures’ Deborah Hopkins and GM Ventures’ Jon Lauckner.

The global backgrounds of the Powerlist 100 and their interests in numerous sectors and regions underlie the importance they bring to bear on creating the future – not just for their own companies but also for the entrepreneurs striving to make the world a better place.

We are pleased to continue to recognise the people on this list for their significant contribution and skill in helping to shape a bright future. Many of those on the list will be speaking at our fourth annual symposium in London on May 20 and 21, which has now been opened for registration.

Join them there: gcvsymposium.com n

Toby Lewis, editor

Great people shape the industry

http://www.globalcorporateventuring.com

http://gcvsymposium.com


The top 25 4New entrants to watch 25Sponsored comment 27The rest of the 100 28 Multi-sector funds 51 State-owned funds 54

Contents

Address: 4 Arreton Mead, HorsellWoking GU21 4HW

Published by Mawsonia Ltd™, all rights reserved, unauthorised copying and distribution prohibited. ©2013

Editor: James MawsonEmail: [email protected]

Editorial: Toby Lewis, Editor, Global Corporate VenturingEmail: [email protected]

Managing Director: Tim LaffertyTel: +44 (0) 7792 137133Email: [email protected]

Research Editor: Jo Foster

Production Editor: Keith Baldock

Website: www.globalcorporateventuring.com

Corporate Global Venturing


mailto:[email protected]?subject=

mailto:tlewis%40globalcorporateventuring.com?subject=

mailto:tlafferty%40globalcorporateventuring.com?subject=



Arvind Sodhani, Intel Capital

Perhaps the greatest sign of a corporate venturing unit’s success is when it can gain the backing of its next chief executive. Arvind Sodhani, president of US-listed semiconductor company Intel’s corporate venturing unit, Intel Capital, secured this feat when Brian Krzanich, the chipmaker’s incoming chief executive declared himself “a big fan” of Intel Capital’s Global Summit, which hosted more than 1,100 delegates last year.

The news indicates how Sodhani has helped cement the organisation as part of Intel having been at the head of the group since 2005. He became an executive vice president of Intel Corporation in 2007.

He has served as director for several other companies, including Nasdaq, Clearwire, Smart Technologies, among others.

Sodhani received a Master’s Degree in Business Administration from the University of Michigan in 1978.

With a portfolio of more than $11bn invested in the past 20 years, Intel Capital is perhaps the largest technology venture investor globally and one of the most successful.

Sodhani said: “Our focus on adding value to portfolio companies will not change. We will continue to focus on helping entrepreneurs scale from start-up to global corporation with tools and knowledge they need to succeed, whether it is providing access to our business development programs such as Intel Technology Days, global network, worldwide customer access, brand capital or tech expertise. This collection of unusual factors is what sets Intel Capital apart and strengthens our relationship with entrepreneurs. We will continue to be stage agnostic and will invest and support our portfolio companies in any stage of their development, from seed all the way to initial public offering (IPO) as well as post-IPO companies. We will continue to lead rounds and invest in follow-on rounds.”

He added: “What will evolve are our focus areas. With offices in 26 countries and 200 employees, our size and global reach means Intel Capital is everywhere innovation is happening. Intel’s industry position lets us see the future of technology and how to get there, giving Intel Capital the unique ability to build technology ecosystems. We are always evolving and shifting our technology horizon to what’s next. Today this includes wearables and other ultra-mobile devices, experiences and perceptual computing, connected automobiles, big data and cloud technologies, and many more. Tomorrow, it will be something different, but we will assuredly be at the front edge of innovation. It is everyone’s job at Intel Capital to maintain our leadership and resulting commitment to entrepreneurs. This focus on investing in emerging technologies and ecosystem enabling creates value for entrepreneurs, consumers, and Intel Corporation benefits when new services and products expand computing technology worldwide.

This year Intel Capital created four additional investment sectors: Datacenter Software Sector, New Devices and Wearables Sector, Security Sector, and Ultrabook and Perceptual Computing Sector, taking it to nine investment sectors. Intel Capital had 24 exits worldwide year to date in 2013.

1



Charles Searle, Naspers

Talking at the Global Corporate Venturing Symposium last year, Charles Searle, who runs internet investments for South Africa-based media company Naspers, spoke of “the halo effect” created for the business’s corporate venturing operations when it backed runaway success story, China-based internet company Tencent.

Naspers owns large stakes in Tencent, and in London Stock Exchange-listed internet company Mail.ru Group, which is Russia’s largest internet company. Naspers direct continues to look to pick the best companies in emerging markets, such as sub-Saharan Africa, south-east Asia, Latin America and India.

Searle joined Naspers in 1997 and has been instrumental not just in the initial deals but the strategy of holding on to the winning investments and reaping returns through dividends and joining up portfolio companies through Naspers’ strategy days so lessons can be learned and applied across borders.

He joined Naspers after working at communications company Cable & Wireless in corporate finance from 1994 to 1997 and at accountancy firm Touche Ross, which merged to become part of what is now Deloitte, from 1989 to 1994. He studied management at Harvard University and economics at University of Cape Town.What is the future of your sector?Searle said: “The future of the Internet sector looks as bright as ever. A few general global themes and observations that might impact investment decisions over the next few years – smartphones and mobile becoming the primary work and play device and method of accessing the internet, e-commerce taking an increasingly large share of overall retail, and the need to achieve scale, which may drive consolidation among internet businesses, especially in e-commerce.”

2



Nagraj Kashyap, Qualcomm Ventures

Nagraj Kashyap, senior vice-president of ventures and innovation at US-based semiconductor company Qualcomm, was raised in New Delhi, India, moved to the US in 1992 to gain a master’s degree in computer science from University of Texas, Austin, and never left.

He joined Qualcomm Ventures in 2003 and oversaw the North America ventures team until 2007 when he was appointed head of global venturing.

Kashyap said: “When I joined Qualcomm Ventures in 2003, we made two investments that year. In the last three years, we are averaging 18 investments per year.” This makes the business consistently ranked a top three corporate venturers in terms of activity.

Kashyap grew the portfolio to more than 100 investments from ten in 2003 and grew the team from five to 30 today with 20 investment professionals. He has secured three exits worth more than $1bn – Mems chip company Invensense and antivirus company Netqin, which were both listed, and traffic navigation app Waze, which was sold to search engine Google – and the portfolio has had more than 35 exits.

The group is now present in seven geographies – US,China, Europe, Brazil, India, Korea and Israel. The group started with a $500m US fund but has subsequently announced a $100m China fund, €100m Europe fund and $100m Qualcomm Life fund.

He began his career as a software engineer at Nortel, Motorola and 3Com/US Robotics before moving to management consulting firm PRTM, now part of PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Kashyap serves on the board or as an observer at Brain Corp and Sotera Wireless. Previous board or observer positions include Bitfone (HP), Novarra (Nokia), Gaikai (Sony) , Clicker (CBS), Avaak (Netgear) and Airvana (initial public offering followed by acquisition). In June this year the group launched a $100m fund to invest in mobile health opportunities and has so far made six investments in that field, while Qualcomm Ventures has also supported early-stage deals with its QPrize.

Kashyap said: “This is one of the most interesting and fun jobs you can have, from matching people and technologies to Qualcomm, to helping take small companies to the next level.”

The corporate venturing seed fund Kashyap started, QPrize, is able to close investments in three weeks.

In 2008, Kashyap took over business development/operations for Qualcomm’s corporate research and development (R&D) efforts and managed a team of more than 15 people.

Kashyap said Qualcomm “incubated Vuforia [Qualcomm’s free computer vision software platform for developers) within corporate R&D. Vuforia now has the largest footprint among developers for computer vision SDK’.

He added: “We are viewed as a strategic sensor for Qualcomm but the group also has very strong financial discipline. If the investment does not fare well financially, there is no strategic benefit. Corporate investors need to align with all the stakeholders in the ecosystem – entrepreneurs and financial venture capital firms and being financially disciplined allows corporate investors to do the same.”

3



Hugo Shong, IDG Capital

In 1993, as managing editor of Electronic Business Asia Magazine, Hugo Shong, founding general partner of IDG Capital Partners, assisted IDG’s founder, Patrick McGovern, in establishing the $50m IDG Capital venture fund in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong, when the Chinese venture market was largely overlooked by investors.

McGovern said in a Global Corporate Venturing profile: “Everyone laughed at me for backing them [Chinese entrepreneurs] as there was no stockmarket and companies could not issue stock, so they said it was not the right environment.

“But I talked to China’s then president, Jiang Zemin, and he promised stockmarkets by the end of the 1990s and we were encouraged by that and started investing in 1994. These investments included Tencent, where we invested $1.2m and sold it for $200m, Baidu where $2m turned into $700m, Soufun where we invested $1m for 10% that was worth $100m and Ctrip where $1m became $26m.”

Shong, now 52, led many of these deals and oversees IDG’s businesses in 15 Asian countries. The company has established a partnership with top-tier Silicon Valley venture firm Accel to back both China-based entrepreneurs and US companies wanting to expand into China, such as Razer and BlueSprig.

At the time of the BlueSprig and Razer deals in December last year, Shong said: “China has the world’s biggest number of internet users at more than 600 million people and large numbers of mobile phone users and we are now in the mobile internet age, which is creating very exciting opportunities, especially for China. The mobile internet will be the prevailing technology that will drive economic development in the next five to 10 years. The Chinese entrepreneurial community is very sophisticated, not just those that have studied abroad, so we will invest more there than outside China.”

Before travelling to the US to study, Shong was a reporter for China’s Xinhua News Agency – a background similar to venture capital firm Sequoia’s chairman, Michael Moritz, who was a reporter for Time magazine. Shong also studied at Hunan University before gaining a masters degree at Boston University and finishing graduate programmes at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy in 1987 and the Harvard Business School in 1996.

His boardroom seats include dentistry company Glamsmile, Media China Corporation and Mei Ah Entertainment Group, according to news provider Bloomberg.

4



Ralf Schnell, Siemens Venture Capital

As chief executive, Ralf Schnell has overseen a transformation of Siemens Venture Capital (SVC), the corporate venturing unit of the Germany-based industrial corporation, repositioning its focus entirely after he took it over in February 2005. It has now grown to more than €1bn ($1.3bn) under management.

In his more than seven years in charge of SVC, the group has been repositioned via the secondary sale of assets, shifting the focus on the communications business to a generalised group reflecting Siemens’ four business units as well as being a fund-of-funds manager for both Siemens’ pension fund and investors outside Siemens.

Schnell said in an interview for last year’s Powerlist: “It is quite a unique set-up in the industry now. We had the idea in 2007 that we should merge into what I would call today the private equity competence centre for Siemens, where we are the prime contact partner for private equity, venture capital and growth equity. We have 30 people covering all of this in four locations [Munich, Palo Alto, Boston, Beijing].”

He added: “Before joining Siemens, I built Infineon’s corporate venturing activity from the ground up since 1998. I worked with two colleagues, Rudolf Ohnesorge, who is now a partner at Ambienta, and Joerg Sperling, who is now a partner at venture capital firm WHEB.”

Prior to joining Infineon Technologies in 1998, Schnell worked with Siemens for 11 years after obtaining his diploma degree in physics from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and his PhD in physics with research work in semiconductor surface physics at the synchrotron radiation laboratories in Hamburg and Berlin.

Schnell added: “I did the secondary sale of Infineon Ventures almost the same day I signed the contract for SVC. We sold the Infineon portfolio on December 24, 2004. On December 23 I signed the contract with SVC and joined in February 2005.”

5



Claudia Fan Munce, IBM Venture Capital

Claudia Fan Munce, managing director at US-listed technology company IBM’s Venture Capital Group, has taken a leadership position for the industry as the first corporate venturing board member of US trade body the National Venture Capital Association and is one of the most vocal advocates of the creation of “a corporate venturing community”.

This endorsement follows 13 years of pioneering work by Fan Munce. IBM Venture Capital commits to many venture capital funds and eschews direct equity investments. By backing venture capital funds, IBM sees their portfolio companies and is an avid acquirer to boost its revenues.

Fan Munce, one of the founder members of IBM Venture Capital and managing director since 2004, said she had initially resisted being moved to the group. Prior to her role with the venturing group, Fan Munce was head of technology transfer and licensing for IBM Research after joining the unit in 1985, and she refers to herself with pride as “a 28-year IBMer”. Fan Munce holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer.

She recalled: “It was not an easy decision to move. I fought it. I said to them any thing you want we can build here.” However, she now says it became clear a decision to interact with start-ups through venture capital showed “tremendous foresight” on the part of IBM.

Now the group has gained plaudits and expanded through the creation of SmartCamps to connect more directly with entrepreneurs and the wider venture ecosystem. Fan Munce said: “IBM’s model really has not changed at all. We are not looking to get a financial return through equity, but we are looking for top-line revenue growth through innovative partnerships with start-ups. Slowly things have evolved. Now the idea of corporate venture arms has really come into its own. Many groups, including Harvard Business School, have said how innovative the IBM model was. Now it has become a standard strategy for corporations.”

In fact some of the hottest venture capitalists turn to the company for help, in areas such as geographic reach, which even the most successful financial investors cannot rival corporations for. science from Santa Clara University and an MBA from Stanford University.

Fan Munce was on the board of the Latin America Venture Capital Association for many years.Fan Munce also recalled she started her career at IBM instead of computer rival Hewlett-

Packard partly because IBM’s internship programme paid less than a dollar more. She joked: “For a poor student a dollar per hour was a big difference.”

6



Bill Maris, Google Ventures

As managing partner of Google Ventures, Bill Maris has rapidly established search engine Google’s independent corporate venturing unit as an investment force, securing a mandate to deploy $300m a year, having originally been provided with $100m a year in 2009.

Silicon Valley admires Maris’s resources, with Felicis Ventures’ Aydin Senkut telling the Wall Street Journal: “I do not know of any other corporate venture firms that have put scores up on the board so quickly.”

Maris has sat on the boards of companies such as US-based heating company Nest and US-based antibody discovery business Adimab and his other investments include energy management group Silver Spring Networks, personal genetics start-up 23andMe and weather service Climate Corporation. The diversity and number of deals struck by Maris – and more broadly Google Ventures – in the past four years indicates why the firm is well-regarded.

The firm is also beginning to make larger investments, backing US-based on-demand car service Uber last year in a $258m deal.

The aim is to use academic insights to devise a strategy as a self-proclaimed “radically different kind of venture capital fund” and then back the vision with plenty of cash. Google Ventures under Maris backs a large number of early-stage companies as the search engine is looking for disruptive start-ups in almost any field and then applies a corporate style of organisation in supporting them through the portfolio companies’ stages of development.

Maris worked at Sweden-listed investment fund Investor. After leaving Investor, Maris founded web hosting company Burlee, reportedly when he was in his 20s, which was sold to Web.com in 2002 for an undisclosed sum. Maris previously worked at Duke University’s neurobiology department as a researcher and graduated top of class in neuroscience from Middlebury College, California.

7



Deborah Hopkins, Citi Ventures

A meeting at the offices of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, in October 2009, first convinced Deborah Hopkins, US bank Citi’s chief innovation officer and chairman of venture capital initiatives, to travel to Palo Alto, California.

Hopkins said in an interview for last year’s Powerlist: “I had a smaller team based primarily in New York, and then I had a breakthrough in 2009. I was in Silicon Valley at Kleiner Perkins [KP] listening to the chief executive of Shopkick, Cyriac Roeding. I was blown away by this young man whose view of the world was not limited by the way things are today but was focused on how things should be tomorrow. I remember saying in the parking lot: ‘This is crazy. We need to be out here.’ I shared this instinct with our leadership and they liked it. So we based the Citi Ventures team in Palo Alto in early 2010.”

Roeding said of the meeting with Hopkins: “I was an entrepreneur-in-residence at KP at the time, incubating Shopkick, and describing our idea for our charity-based trial app Causeworld. It was literally one sheet of paper, and not a single line of code had been written yet. We needed to find a sponsor for the charity dollars in order to realise the project. I explained the concept and Debby’s eyes lit up. She immediately saw the opportunity.”

Hopkins herself had come to the innovation role after talks with Citi’s top management at the height of the financial crisis. She said: “In 2008, when the focus in the banking industry was putting out the fire, Don Callahan [Citi’s chief technology and operations officer, to whom Hopkins reports] and Vikram Pandit asked me to be Citi’s chief innovation officer. The key goals were to help establish innovation as a core capability central to the company’s strategy and return Citi to being the world’s most innovative bank.”

Hopkins has twice been named one of the most powerful women in business by Forbes magazine. She has also been head of corporate strategy and mergers and acquisitions as well as chief operations and technology officer since joining Citi in 2003. She was previously chief financial officer for Lucent Technologies and Boeing. She was vicepresident of finance at General Motors Europe.

Hopkins is on the board of business intelligence software company Qliktech and the advisory board of private equity firm RiverWood Partners.

8



Zhu Linan, Junlian

Zhu Linan founded Legend Capital in 2001 with a $35m fund, and is now the chief executive of China-based computer maker Legend’s corporate venturing group, which was renamed Junlian in February last year.

Junlian’s team of 50 now manages five US dollarfunds and two RMB funds with aggregate assets under management of more than RMB13bn ($2bn). It has invested in more than 150 companies, of which 20 are already listed, including Saturday Shoes and Peak Sports where Zhu remains a board member.

He has also led investments in Joyo.com, Shanghai Huahong, Zhaopin.com, SolarFun – now known as Hanwha SolarOne – Phylion Batteries and Yuto Printing.

Zhu started his career with Legend in 1989, when he joined Shenzhen Legend Computer and rose to general manager of the company. In 1993, he left Legend to start a venture engaged in IT system integration and software development business.

After four years, he rejoined Legend Group and served in succession as general manager of business planning, vice-president and senior vice-president of the group. As a member of Legend’s executive committee, he was responsible for the business development of Lenovo Group, and the management of headquarters and regional platforms.

Zhu holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Shanghai Jiaotong University.

9

Oriental perspective: Junlian in Chinese



Jon Lauckner, GM Ventures

Jon Lauckner, president of GM Ventures and the parent company’s chief technology officer and vice-president of research and development, is effectively responsible for driving General Motors’ advanced technology strategy.

Lauckner led the creation of GM Ventures as a separate subsidiary in July 2010 at the request of Steve Girsky, GM vice-chairman. GM Ventures won a corporate investor of the year for 2013 from Cleantech Group based on its portfolio having the largest percentage of companies in the Global Cleantech 100 List. GM Ventures’ current portfolio consists of 19 companies – most are undisclosed.

In April of 2012, Lauckner took on the additional responsibilities of chief technology officer and head of research and development for the US car manufacturer, as well as retaining his role as head of GM Ventures.

Lauckner began his career with General Motors in 1979, working in several assignments in powertrain and vehicle engineering. Later, Lauckner worked in the marketing and product planning staff. From 1992-2005, he worked in various product development assignments in South America and Europe. He moved back to the US from Europe in mid-2005 to lead a new position as vice-president of global programme management and in mid-2009 was named vice-president of global product planning.

Lauckner received a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering from University of Michigan in 1979. He earned a master of science degree in management from Stanford Business School in 1990 through the Sloan fellowship programme and attended the GM-Harvard senior executive programme in 2001.

One of Lauckner’s favourite projects was developing the Chevrolet Volt, General Motors’ multi-award-winning plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. He said: “It was a terrific opportunity to create a car that many so-called experts said could not be done at all and certainly could not be done within the timeframe we had established. We announced the concept car in January 2007 and the first Volts were on the road in November 2010. The Volt has led us to innovations in batteries, electronic motors, charging systems, control systems and many other areas. And it drove us to develop technical capabilities that we will leverage for many years to come.” Lauckner is a board observer for several of GM Ventures’ portfolio companies. He is a board member of the Michigan Venture Capital Association and is on the University of Michigan Engineering Advisory Board.What is the future of your sector?Lauckner said: “The technology in automotive will change rapidly over the next five to 10 years, presenting a lot of new opportunities for start-ups. This trend will not only be focused on traditional automotive technologies like propulsion, emissions and materials. Rather, a surge of completely new technology is already on the horizon and a lot of it will probably be developed by start-ups and suppliers that are new to the automotive business. These new hotbeds of innovation include infotainment, connected car telematics, active safety and autonomous driving and cybersecurity technologies, to name a few.”

10



Reinhard Ambros, Novartis Ventures

Seven years ago, Reinhard Ambros became global head of Novartis Venture Funds for the Switzerland-based pharmaceutical company, when it had $175m under management. Today, it has more than $800m in funds under management.

Ambros said it had been another busy year for the corporate venturing unit. “In 2013 we made five new investments up to now and have led three of the largest clinical follow-on investments (Tokai $30m, Akebia $40m, Opsona €33m) plus four large IND-stage follow-on financings ( Aileron $30m, Merus €33m, Covagen CHF32m, Thesan $46m) so a lot has happened. Fortunately we also had a really nice exit with the GSK acquisition of Okairos,” he said.

Ambros said in an interview for last year’s Powerlist: “Novartis Ventures was a small unit, making small investments and had never led a round. It was more a follower than a leader. I said: ‘I will build it into the largest corporate venture biotech group in the world.’ People said: ‘That is a good ambition.’ But they were not really convinced it could be done.

“Now we are the largest biotech corporate venture unit in the world, making the highest number of new deals and are considered the most influential group by your publication.”

Novartis Venture Funds has more than 60 portfolio companies and an average ownership stake in individual portfolio companies of 20% to 25%. Ambros is on the board of Cylene Pharmaceuticals, Forma Therapeutics, Genedata, Tokai and Symetis and also a director of the Novartis Option Fund, an innovative $200m programme to support early-stage healthcare companies.

Ambros was trained as a banker and scientist with a PhD in medicinal chemistry and pharmacology in German and a post-doctorate in the US. He said: “I found a very interesting job at Roche in Basel [Switzerland] where I was involved in a number of their development projects. At that time project management was one of the hottest jobs around. I was one of the few lucky people to see programmes move to approval and discussed with the FDA [the US Food and Drug Administration] multiple times in different therapeutic areas.”

He added: “I then moved to Novartis, to manage a key oncology project but got quickly interested in business development and licensing. From there I went to the mergers and acquisition group for a period working on acquisitions, before I was offered the position of head of Novartis strategic planning. After four years I became tired of predicting the future of pharma and wanted to be again much more hands on science and business [and became managing director of the Novartis BioVenture Fund in the US].”What is the future of your sector?Ambros said: “I think most (corporate) funds have a too narrow a portfolio in respect to therapeutics, technologies, platforms, devices, diagnostics, but also on geographic coverage. That does not mean one has to have one’s own people on all grounds, but having a network may help. I also think we come into a time when mergers and acquisitions will take place later and later and at the moment only the initial public offering window helps, but what if this is closing again. I prepare for later-stage funding support for all my companies now.

“Overall the future of the sector is going to be stressful and evolution will take its toll on venture capital partnerships but some will do well and form a new group. I am certain we will be among them and it helps to be an leader in this field.”

11



Woi Hong Choi, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation

When Woi Hong Choi became chief executive of South Korea-based electronics conglomerate Samsung’s corporate venturing unit, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation (SVIC), in 2009, his inaugural website message said it would be the number-one corporate venturing organisation globally by 2018.

So far, his plan seems on track. As part of its $400m fundraising in February 2012 from Samsung’s business units, which range from electronics to chemicals and heavy industry, SVIC has expanded its team and set aside part of the commitment to take seed-stage deals initially in the US. SVIC now manages about $1.2bn with units based in South Korea, Japan, the UK and the US – achieving its goal of managing more than $1bn earlier than anticipated.

Founded in 1999, SVIC has a majority of its team in Korea, including its investment committee, but it is understood about 80% of its deals by value came from the US and the group is looking at whether to expand to China or other regions and how to structure the group for further success.

His online CV said Choi has worked across Samsung after joining in 1980, rising to leader of the financing and accounting team for the management support division in 2004 before joining the venturing unit. He has a bachelor’s degree from Kyungpook National University.

12



William Taranto, Merck Global Health Innovation Fund

William Taranto moved to US-based pharmaceutical group Merck more than three years ago as the group made a push into non-pharmaceutical healthcare and wanted a leader to be managing director of its new Global Health Innovation Fund.

The fund is off to a running start, having already deployed its initial $250m tranche, and being awarded a further $250m tranche last year.

Taranto, executive director at the office of innovation in Merck, said: “The biggest change in 2013 for the Global Health Innovation [GHI] Fund, is our movement into bigger deals through private equity as well as mergers and acquisitions. We are doing bigger deals with private equity and other strategic partners. In addition, the GHI Fund recently acquired Physician Interactive, and will be completing two additional acquisitions by year end. In addition, we have been expanding our investment focus to include new areas of health information technology – cloud, security and privacy – as well as expanding our investments in technology enabled care.”

He added: “Most pharmaceutical manufacturers rarely look beyond the pill and invest outside their core business. Merck was very interested in being the best healthcare company in the world and that entailed creating a venture firm that would allow Merck to look beyond the pill and give them optionality around the future. I came to Merck in April of 2010 and recruited a team of venture experts in the adjacency healthcare space that are very good at what they do.”

Taranto, who came to Merck from a similar role at Johnson & Johnson and after a degree from Saint Bonaventure University, said: “I spent 18 years at Johnson & Johnson with the last 10 years in a group called health care strategy and development, which was different from the Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation. The group looked at the future of healthcare, three to five years out, and developed strategies and investments to prepare for that eventual future.”

He added: “It was great to come into a company like Merck and start from scratch, creating not only our strategy but our investment thesis and placing 20 investments in a rapid period of time. We are shaping healthcare in what we are doing with these investments, and being part of Merck is an integral piece of what we do”.What is the future of your sector? Taranto said: “Healthcare continues to grow and provide endless opportunities, especially around big data. We have a belief that data will be the currency in healthcare, and that better use of this data will improve the quality of health care while lowering system costs. This thesis is the foundation for our investment strategy.

He added: “Merck GHI invests broadly in digital health with a specific focus in three main areas – personalised medicine (molecular diagnostics and point-of-care diagnostics); big data (informatics and integration); and technology enabled care (remote monitoring and flexible access to care). Better use of data to improve the quality of healthcare while lowering system costs typically has universal appeal.”

13



Brad Vale, Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation

Brad Vale has been with US-based healthcare company Johnson & Johnson’s corporate venturing unit Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation (JJDC) since 1992. In 1997 he moved to California to establish its Silicon Valley office.

He has invested in more than 30 companies, five of which were acquired by Johnson & Johnson (J&J) subsidiaries. In 2008, Vale was made head of venture investments and, in 2012, he took over as head of JJDC to continue the venture support to J&J’s operating units and expand its early stage activities in collaboration with J&J’s Innovation Centers in London, Boston, California, and Shanghai. He is based in Silicon Valley, California.

Before joining JJDC, he previously supported Johnson & Johnson’s medical device businesses in J&J’s Corporate Office of Science and Technology and from 1982 to 1989, and he was at Ethicon, a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary, working in research and development and product development in wound closure, vascular prostheses, adhesion prevention and lasers in surgery. Vale received a PhD in biomedical engineering from Iowa State University and is a Washington State University doctor of veterinary medicine

14



Harshul Sanghi, Amex Ventures

US-based credit card company American Express (Amex) made a big splash in corporate venturing when it hired Harshul Sanghi, who had formerly been head of Motorola Mobility’s corporate venturing unit.

Sanghi said he helped establish Motorola Ventures after the phone equipment provider’s purchase of his previous employer, Ucentric Systems, as the “go-to standard for corporate venturing”. That group was divided in half two years ago, into Motorola Mobility Ventures and Motorola Solutions Ventures, when its parent company Motorola was also split in two, with Sanghi becoming head of Motorola Mobility Ventures but leaving before search engine Google’s purchase of the parent business this year.

Sanghi’s role at Amex is an attempt to put the company at the forefront of the digital age. He said: “Amex was looking to set up an office in Silicon Valley to accelerate the transformation into digital commerce.

“The larger initiative, in addition to corporate venturing, is to plug American Express into all the innovation going on in the valley. They needed someone connected who understood both the entrepreneurial perspective and the venture capital ecosystem, as well as someone who had experience navigating large corporations.”

He added: “The story in mobile/wireless is that, five years ago, Silicon Valley was nowhere when it came to wireless and mobile. There was Nokia out of Europe and Sony Ericsson was the upcoming group. Really Silicon Valley was nowhere. You fast-forward five years and you have Apple with IOS and the Android platforms, and Silicon Valley is the centre of the universe as far as mobile is concerned.”

Under Sanghi, American Express Ventures has backed the following investments. In commerce it has backed Warby Parker, Wrapp, Rent the Runway, If Only and Shop Runner, in data and analytics, it has backed Ness, Radius and SkyTree, while in digital marketing it has backed Saving Star, Kiip and Capillary. It has also backed LearnVest in the digital wallet sector, as well as Stripe, iZettle, SumUp and EzeTap in payments.What is the future of your sector?Sanghi said: “I think the convergence of at-home, in-store and mobile commerce merging into one seamless experience is transforming the industry and opening up opportunity for us to enhance and impact how our customers, both merchants and consumers, continually engage. The transformation hasn’t been without its hurdles, but the future holds great promise and we are excited to be at the forefront.”

15



John Ball, Steamboat Ventures

John Ball founded Steamboat Ventures in 2000 after initially working at pioneering venture capital firm Burr Egan Deleage in the 1980s. He later moved on to head corporate development and mergers and acquisitions at US-listed media group Disney, after working for four years as director of mergers and acquisitions at civil engineering company URS Corporation, formerly Dames & Moore.

With Steamboat being set up as Disney’s corporate venturing affiliate in 2000 at the tail-end of the technology, media and telecoms bubble, Ball resisted making an investment for 18 months until prices had rationalised and a new wave of promising new media companies was beginning to emerge.

Ball added in a profile of Steamboat by Global Corporate Venturing: “We are highly selective and only do deals that meet both strategic – to Disney – and financial objectives. Steamboat facilitates interaction between its portfolio companies and the different business units at Disney. Two-thirds of our investments have gone on to develop a commercial relationship with one or more of Disney’s businesses, which exceeds our initial expectations.”

Under his leadership the corporate venturing unit has shifted focus from the US to Asia in the past year, and is looking to have outside investors besides Disney in its next fund. But Ball, a Tufts and Harvard Business School alumnus, remains a board member of US-based sports camera company GoPro even after shifting Steamboat’s investment team and himself from California to Hong Kong.

16



Tony Askew, Reed Elsevier Ventures

Tony Askew, is one of three founders of, and now runs, Reed Elsevier Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of the Anglo-Dutch publisher. He has recently become the first chairman of the corporate venturing group of UK trade body the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association, which is looking to broaden its approach to take account of the impact that corporates can have on venture capital in the UK and across Europe and under Askew’s aegis has one of the country’s most successful investors to provide guidance.

Askew and his co-partner Kevin Brown moved to Reed Elsevier Ventures at the end of 2000, along with his predecessor as head, Diane Noble, who is now chief executive of UK government-backed emerging markets investor Commonwealth Development Corporation.

Askew said: “We found a welcoming home here, as Reed Elsevier wanted us to create a successful, long-term corporate venturing capability. We designed the fund as a financial VC [venture capital firm] but with a meaningful strategic angle. The financial focus means we take board seats and our compensation includes carried interest [a share of investment profit], like traditional VCs, which aligns us well with entrepreneurs and other investors. Our strategic angle comes from bringing to bear Reed Elsevier’s superior access to domain knowledge and a highly relevant referral network”. Twelve years on there have been two changes of chief executive and three chairmen.

Askew first became a venture capitalist at Softbank, a Japan-based internet company, after working as a corporate and an entrepreneur. He said: “Back in the early days of the cauldron of the internet bubble I was persuaded it would be far more interesting to apply what I had learnt in building digital businesses by becoming a VC and so I joined Softbank.”

Askew said: “I graduated as a physicist, so I did what all physicists do in the UK and joined a management consultancy.” Other past activities included running electronic publishing for Random House, which included co-investing in a Los Angeles-based new media company alongside film maker Stephen Spielberg. Later at mobile operator Cellnet, now O2, he co-developed and launched the world’s first wireless internet service provider, Genie, which grew quickly to 4 million users across Europe.”

Reed Elsevier Ventures was an early investor in Palantir, a technology company which secured a $2.5bn valuation and $400m in annual revenues in 2011, according to news provider TechCrunch.

Askew is on the boards of Babylon, the translation tool, First Life Research, PartMiner, Spacecurve and Tolven.

17



Mark Read, WPP Digital

Mark Read, as chief executive of WPP Digital, part of UK-based communications services group WPP, is overseeing the entire group’s transition to the digital age, which it is pursuing through corporate venturing and other tools such as acquisition.

Read said: “I spend most of my time focused on our new media strategy. Digital is now 35% of revenue. What we are trying to do is digitise the group. What we intend to do digitally is prepare our so-called traditional businesses for the digital future as well as develop new digital services. The strategy goes back to my predecessor, Eric Salama. It is something we have been doing for a while.”

The company has netted some successes under Read. Recently two companies it has backed, Omniture and Buddy Media, secured big exits. He said: “On Omniture we made a $35m gain while on Buddy Media we made around $60m. Not everything is successful. At the moment we don’t have a separate dedicated fund but are tightly integrated into our operating companies.”

WPP hired Tom Bedecarré, founder of agency AKQA, to run WPP Ventures in Silicon Valley last year. The group secured another exit from its portfolio this year, when Jumptap was bought by Millenial Media. It also invested in Fullscreen, Globant and Mutual Mobile this year.

The company seeks to secure both financial and strategic returns. Read said: “Buddy Media clearly has been our biggest financial success. If you measure success by how we have connected a large company to a lot of the innovation that is going on, that is hard to measure.”

WPP seeks to plug its portfolio companies into important relationships. Read said: “We took Buddy Media into a meeting with Facebook, as our partner.”

Michael Lazerow, chief executive of Buddy Media, said: “Mark straddles the worlds of big advertising media, creativity and the creative agencies, and he is someone who understands all sides of the table. He helped us as a young company realise our dream. He can see things through young companies’ eyes and large agency networks. Business is not a zero-sum game. Everyone has to win to get value out of a partnership. With Mark, it was not just how can we benefit from the great relationship with Buddy Media, but how can we help Buddy Media?”

Read became chief executive of WPP Digital in March 2005. He has also been WPP’s director of strategy since 2002. He is a member of the supervisory board of HighCo and a director of CHI & Partners. He worked at WPP between 1989 and 1995. Prior to rejoining WPP in 2002, he was a principal at consultancy Booz-Allen & Hamilton and founded UK-based company WebRewards, which was sold to iPoints in 2002.What is the future of your sector?Read said: “Key priorities for us in our sector are mobile, e-commerce, content, data and analytics and social media. The persistent trend is that companies are founded and can grow even more quickly and cheaply, look at the explosion and growth of Snapchat inside two years into a company that can turn down a $3bm offer from Facebook while only having 28 employees. This is driven by the importance of mobile, the growth of the cloud and services like Amazon Web Services and the companies built on top of AWS that can accelerate growth.”

18



Dominique Mégret, Swisscom Ventures

Dominique Mégret started Swisscom Ventures in 2005 and has been pivotal in the creation of a global network of information and communication technology corporate venturers.

He joined Swisscom, the Switzerland-based telecommunications group, in 2002 as head of group strategy and led the creation of the Corporate Venturing Network Group.

Previously he was an entrepreneur in the UK, strategy consultant in the European Telecom industry and country manager for an IT company in Germany. He founded venture firm Kick-Start Ventures.

He currently serves on the boards of Transmedi, Glass 2 Energy, Mona Lisa VC Fund, Quantenna, where he is an observer, Assia, where he is an adviser, and the Swiss innovation organisation CTI Invest. Mégret has an MBA from Insead.

Kemal Anbarci, Chevron

Kemal Anbarci became the head of Chevron Technology Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of US-based oil major Chevron, this year.

Anbarci said Chevron Technology Ventures had developed a strong position in corporate venturing because it had “stayed the course”. He said: “What makes Chevron Technology Ventures function extremely well is the continuity of the venture executives, which is key, in my view. We got in people already in Chevron for 15-plus years, so they have credibility within the company, creating a stable venture investment culture.”

Anbarci replaced Trond Unneland, who had led the unit for nearly six years. Anbarci said: “Trond told me he had the best job in the company. When the opportunity came, I enquired about it. It fitted the companies’ needs to have someone from upstream.”

Anbarci has been at Chevron for more than 22 years across many parts of the business. He has a master’s degree in operations research and a PhD in petroleum and natural gas engineering from Pennsylvania State University, and an MBA from University of California, Irvine. He also has a degree in petroleum engineering from Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey.

19

20



Issam Dairanieh, BP Ventures

Issam Dairanieh is attempting to use his role at the head of BP’s corporate venturing unit to develop a new style of doing business. He said: “BP is leading what I consider to be the next generation of corporate venturing – deep collaborative relationships and alliances.”

He added: “We are thinking about new collaboration models and what people could work with us in our value chain. We have reached out to over 25 strategic investors, including other oil majors, such as ConocoPhillips, Chevron, Shell, Saudi Aramco, Statoil, Total and others such as GE, ABB, BASF, Dow and IBM, to see how we can forge stronger and more strategic collaborations to pool our capabilities to bring capital-intensive technologies to market in shorter times.

“One example is automating drilling technologies. Development of such systems may cost over $30m at a time. And while an individual company may not be able to do it, several companies working within a new funding mechanism may not only make this happen but would structure the development in a way where adoption and deployment of such technologies would take place sooner.”

In 2012 he became head of corporate venturing at UK-based oil major BP. Between 2010 and 2011 he led BP’s US corporate venturing operations and he joined the venture team in 2007. He is a director or observer on the boards of 12 companies, namely Brightsource Energy, GMZ Energy, GMZ Solar, OptoAtmospherics, Liquid Light, Solidia Technologies, Caelux Solar, Skyoni, UpWind Services, Xtreme Power and Oxane. He previously worked at Amoco’s new business development division. He gained a PhD in chemical engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.What is the future of your sector? Dairanieh said: “Investment in all energy, both clean-tech and conventional, is gaining more and more momentum. Energy investment has gone through difficult times in the past two years, but with more strategics stepping in, commercialisation of emerging technologies will be more probable. The window for initial public offering is still limited but trade sales are more likely options.”

Amy Banse, Comcast Ventures

Amy Banse has headed Comcast Ventures, where she is a managing director and head of funds, since mid-2011, leading strategy. This dates back to Comcast’s corporate venturing unit merger with NBC’s Peacock Fund, creating a $750m fund.

Banse previously founded Comcast Interactive Media in 2005 and led the company’s online strategy over the next six years, overseeing various acquisitions and in-house projects, including Comcast.net, Xfinity.com, Fancast and Swirl.

Banse joined Comcast in 1991 as an in-house attorney for programming acquisition. She worked on the development of Comcast’s cable network portfolio, including the company’s investments in E! Entertainment Television and the Golf Channel. She has a degree from Harvard University and studied at Temple University’s James E Beasley School of Law.

21

22



Beth Comstock, GE Ventures

Beth Comstock leads GE Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of General Electric, alongside her role as chief marketing officer. Previously, she was president of Integrated Media at NBC Universal. She also held roles at CBS and Turner Broadcasting. Comstock is a member of Nike’s board and trustee president of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.What is the future of your sector?Comstock said: “The future of our sector will be driven by the convergence of hardware – complex physical technologies – with software, where data, people and brilliant machines are all connected with each other. We call this the industrial internet, and it is already here. It is leading a new wave of innovation, as well as opportunity for collaboration between start-ups and big companies. Not only that, but the industrial internet will also create new jobs and make businesses more efficient. It is a rising category, one that is already changing the venture capital landscape, particularly in Silicon Valley, where software has ruled. But the age of physical and digital is here, and it will create a big opportunity for new startups and investors.

“We are also seeing change driven by the advanced manufacturing sector. Digital technology has transformed manufacturing, making it smarter, leaner and more efficient. The new manufacturing techniques will improve how products are created and scaled, pushing the pace of innovation faster. We are already seeing creativity in this space, and it is exciting to think about which start-ups now will become the successful manufacturing companies of tomorrow.”

George Coyle, ConocoPhillips

George Coyle has for three years managed US-based oil and gas company ConocoPhillips’ corporate venturing deals, including its investments in multi-corporate fund Energy Technology Ventures.

Between 2007 and 2009, Coyle was chief executive of DeepFlex, which raised more than $35m in venture capital. He previously worked for 18 years at oil and gas company Chevron until the end of 2007, where he rose to a ventures role and served on the boards as either director or observer with eight portfolio companies.

He received an MBA from Tulane University, a geology master’s degree from University of Kansas and a degree in earth sciences from University of New Orleans.

23

24



Kay Enjoji, TEL Venture Capital

TEL Venture Capital, the corporate venturing unit of Japan-based semiconductor equipment maker Tokyo Electron, appointed Keiichi ”Kay” Enjoji, as its president in July 2011. His most recent role was as director of Tokyo Electron’s MEMS division, and he has worked across the Japanese corporation for at least about 20 years. Enjoji received an economics degree from Keio University.

25New entrants to watch David Lawee, Google CapitalThis time last year it emerged Lawee had taken charge of late-stage venture unit Google Capital. Since then the group has made some big splashes, backing US-based provide of questionnaires SurveyMonkey at a $444m at a valuation of $1.35bn, and personal loans provider Lending Club as part of a $125m secondaries deal. Lawee joined Google in 2005, having been a co-founder of Xfire. He was also a founder and managing director of venture firm Mosaic Venture Partners, and worked as an engagement manager at McKinsey and Company. He has an MBA from University of Chicago and a law degree from McGill University.

Mark Toon, KPMG CapitalMark Toon became chief executive of KPMG Capital this year. Toon joined KPMG in 2011 having previously been founder and chief executive of EquaTerra, a sourcing advisory business KPMG acquired in 2011. He was previously chairman of private community World 50. He was also a managing partner at BPO, a chief executive of finance and procurement at outsource business Sourcnet and a consultant at Andersen Consulting. He studied management and took an MBA at Baylor University.

John Hamer, MonsantoJohn Hamer took charge of agriculture business Monsanto’s corporate venturing unit Monsanto Growth Ventures at the end of last year. He was a managing director at Burrill & Co for nine years and was chief executive of Arete Therapeutics and Paradigm Genetics. He was a professor of biological sciences at Purdue University and a visiting scientist at DuPont. He has a PhD in microbiology from University of California, Davis, and studied biology and biological sciences at the University of Windsor.

Roy Bahat, Bloomberg BetaRoy Bahat became head of media business Bloomberg’s new corporate venturing unit this year. He is chairman of gaming console company Ouya. He was previously president of IGN Entertainment and a vice-president at media group News Corporation. He was also director of strategy for NYC2012, the bid by New York to run the Olympic games. He worked as a senior policy director at the office of the mayor in New York between February 2002 and November 2013, when Bloomberg’s founder Michael Bloomberg began office as mayor. He was previously an associate at consulting firm McKinsey & Co. He has an MPhil in economics from Oxford University and read social studies at Harvard University.

Declan Denehan, BNY MellonDeclan Denehan and his colleague Douglas Magnolia have been tasked with starting Bank of New York Mellon’s venture capital initiatives. The pair decided to do on-balance-sheet strategic investing and are looking to ramp up the group’s investments. Before moving to become a managing director of strategic group initiatives, Denehan was head of strategy and innovation of the bank. Before the merger of Mellon and Bank of New York, Denehan was chief operating officer of Mellon Securities.


Executive search

Interim executives

Non-exec directors

Investing directors

Get in touch to find out more about how we can help you:

T: +44 (0) 20 7520 9290 E: [email protected] W: www.intramezzo.co.uk

Achieving greatness

Intramezzo has demonstrated new and innovative ideas to accelerate the launch and/or growth of ambitious businesses.

Exceptional talent is the key to developing a truly

successful business. For over a decade, Intramezzo

has been matching highly-skilled entrepreneurs

with pioneering ventures, helping each to achieve

their own definition of greatness.

“


No new venture is conceived without a vision. An idea of what a business must achieve is integral to its forward momentum. The driving force behind its growth. That being said, knowing where the company could go is one thing. Defining how it will get there is a different matter. Indeed, “how?” can often be the toughest question posed to a formative team keen to forge the right path.

Although the answer is almost always the same: Who? This is why Intramezzo is sponsoring the Powerlist 100 for a second year running, because it provides a unique insight into the power players in the increasingly important field of corporate venturing.

Bringing on board world-class talent can have an inestimable impact on an early-stage business. By way of example, Intramezzo worked with a European company that had developed the next generation of flat screen technology – a spin-out from a global consumer electronics organisation. The business was strong in its intellectual property but needed a chief executive with the expertise and contacts to lead the venture through A and B funding rounds, building a global enterprise. In response, a “serial entrepreneur” with a formidable track record in the displays and optics market was appointed. This blend of knowledge and experience meant that the new chief executive far surpassed the company’s fundraising objectives, expanding internationally in doing so. This laid the foundations for the business to achieve an exit in excess of £60m ($100m).

So how does a venture go about finding the “right person”? In the past, business leaders would seldom look further than their own network, typically bringing in someone known to them who loosely filled the brief. However, today’s entrepreneurs are moving away from this approach, recognising that the most effective leadership teams are assembled using a more scientific methodology.

The first step in this process is defining precisely who is needed. Having a clear notion of what will be required of this person makes it possible to work back and draw up a profile of the ideal candidate – skills, attributes and achievements.

Once this is agreed, the question of how is revisited. How will this person be brought in and in what

capacity? Taking into consideration the immediacy of the requirement, the budget available for remuneration and the longer-term aims of the business will help inform whether an appointment should be made on a permanent, interim or non-executive basis.

Here, a flexible approach can – quite literally – pay dividends.

Take, for instance, the European venture capital arm of a major, multinational consumer goods company. The organisation had an urgent requirement for someone who could undertake a process of due diligence on a launch plan for one of their portfolio ventures, a developer of

green catalyst solutions for industrial markets. The role demanded a domain expert and, therefore, a candidate was found with an extensive track record in both the chemicals industry and in growing early-stage companies. Initially appointed on an interim contract, this individual

closely examined both the business and its existing plan before developing his own, much more lucrative, growth strategy. As a result, he was made permanent chief executive and put the new business plan into motion – eventually leading a £35m exit and 10x return to shareholders.

For ventures like this one, there are three cornerstones to success. The first is strong intellectual property, the third is good investment. The second cornerstone, and the principle that bridges these two elements, is executive talent. Having the right leadership team in place is essential for any business to achieve its vision. It is simply not enough to ask “how will we get there?”, especially when the real question is “who will take us?” n

Dermot Hill, chief executive, Intramezzo

The end in mindSponsored comment

Having the right leadership team in place is essential for any business to achieve its vision



Sakae Asanuma, Astellas Venture ManagementSakae Asanuma, chief executive of Astellas Venture Management, joined the corporate venturing unit of the Japan-based pharmaceutical company in 2011.

He was previously a director at Yasuda Enterprise Development America, a venture firm backed by Japan-based insurers Sompo Japan Insurance and Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance. He worked at Yasuda Enterprise Development America from 2000 to 2011 and originated its biotech investment activities in the US.

Asanuma has invested in more than 20 US biotech companies. His portfolio companies have achieved five flotations and eight mergers. He previously worked for Meiji Yasuda Life for 11 years as a buyside analyst. He has an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University.

François Badoual, Total Energy VenturesFrançois Badoual became chief executive of Total Energy Ventures, the France-based oil major’s corporate venturing unit, in August.

The team at Total Energy Ventures has a broad mandate. Badoual said: “We are chasing all kinds of energy innovation opportunities. This is not just the clean-tech space but also our classical focus of oil and gas. It is all sectors, which could be pertinent to Total as an energy company, encompassing all business units and branches of the group from upstream, to downstream, to new energy. The sectors include energy efficiency, C0

2 reduction and water- treatment. It also looks

for new businesses for Total’s retail operations. This is a large spectrum and we are scouting as business intelligence for these sectors.”

He was previously managing director of Total’s exploration and production in Algeria between 2009 and 2012, and deputy managing director in Angola from 2006 to 2009. He has 24 years of experience in the oil and gas industry. Among many different roles at Total, he has also previously worked in the new ventures identification group. He graduated as a civil engineer.

Michael Blaustein, Dupont VenturesMichael Blaustein is managing director of DuPont Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of the chemical company. He looks for access to technology through start-ups, universities and other openinnovation third parties. He was director of the University Intellectual Property Programme at DuPont from 2004 to 2008. He previously worked at DuPont in research and development portfolio management from 2000 to 2004 and as a business director for non-wovens in Europe from 1997 to 1999. He has a PhD in chemistry from Yale University and also studied chemistry at Columbia University.

Fred Brothers, FISFred Brothers, chief innovation officer of US-based payments company FIS, has said he would like the company to be one of the biggest investors in fin-tech. This could see him make a big impact in corporate venturing, after he took on the chief innovation officer role in 2012 last year.

At FIS, Brothers has taken boardroom roles at Cardlytics, a financial payments analytics company, and Everlink, a secure payments company, both of which have been backed by the financial payments company.

Brothers was founder and managing partner of strategy and consulting firm eCom Advisors from

Rest of the 100



2005 to April 2010, when the business was acquired by FIS. He was an executive at CheckFree, a business which was acquired by Fiserv in December 2007 for $4.2bn. He joined CheckFree when it had $2m in revenue. He was a business student at Ohio University. What is the future of your sector?Brothers said: “The very nature of money has been utterly transformed. People like to talk about these new, alternative virtual currencies, but in reality most traditional currencies are now digital, virtual and cloud-based. Think about the percentage of your household’s income and outflow that still occurs in paper currency and paper cheques versus electronic deposits, money movement and payments.”

He added: “I believe financial services providers, and their vendors, must focus more on where the puck is going, and where innovation and disruption are occurring within their traditional competitor base, in nontraditional substitutes and in other industries. They must focus on earlier-stage innovation companies, must invest for the future – even if it does not have a directly measurable economic benefit as soon as next quarter – and must have a strong executive commitment to remaining successful as the competitive landscape of financial services evolves.”

Adam Brotman, Starbucks As chief digital officer of US-headquartered coffee chain Starbucks, Adam Brotman hit the headlines in 2012 for brokering a big corporate venturing deal to invest in and partner fast-growing mobile payments company Square. Brotman implemented a fast roll-out of the mobile payments system using Square across Starbucks, which he defended to news provider Fast Company, which had reported some early problems.

Brotman said: “We do not want to wait on innovation. Because if we waited until we could make it perfect across every single experience of every single store, we would have to move much more slowly for the vast majority of our customers. So we have taken an approach that is not always perfect, but we think it’s the best thing for our brand and customers.”

Before Brotman joined Starbucks in 2009, he was chief executive of e-commerce company Barefoot Yoga. He also worked at Bill Gates-owned Corbis, a digital image licensing company. He joined Corbis having been founding chief executive of in-store entertainment company PlayNetwork, which he led from 1996 to 2006. He was previously an attorney at US-based law firm Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe. He studied at the University of Washington School of Law and the University of California, Los Angeles.

Soren Carlsen, Novo VenturesSoren Carlsen is managing partner of Novo Ventures and Novo Seeds, corporate venturing units of Denmark-based drugs company Novo. In 2000, he establish Novo’s venture activities. Carlsen is on the board of PTC Therapeutics and Santaris Pharma, and was previously a board member at 7TM Pharma and Arpida.

In 1994, he was made head of Novo Nordisk’s enzyme business as corporate vice-president and chief science officer, responsible for 400 scientists in Denmark, US, Japan and China. In 1991, he established Novozymes Biotech, a research-based company focusing on the development of enzymes and other bioindustrial products. He was awarded the Danish chemistry prize in 1988.

He was appointed vice-president of biotechnology at Novo Nordisk in 1986. Carlsen joined Novo Nordisk as a research scientist in 1979.



Johan Carlsson, Volvo Group Venture CapitalJohan Carlsson took over Sweden-based vehicle manufacturer Volvo’s corporate venturing activities as president three years ago.

He recently unveiled a new strategy for Volvo Group Venture Capital, saying: “Major items for us are the 2013 investments in DriveCam/Lytx and Ridepal – two companies poised to disrupt business models for fleets. DriveCam has already proven how its driver risk management service benefits fleet owners as well as society, and Ridepal is on the way to letting corporates offer competitive commuting solutions to their employees.”

He added: “For 2014 we are sharpening our focus even more on connected services, as such services will have disruptive impact on our business – the two above items are part of the strategy – and I am convinced the benefit from corporate venturers is even stronger when they are an integral part of strategy execution in the way we organise it within Volvo, where I am also part of the corporate strategy team.”

Carlsson, in an interview for last year’s Powerlist, said: “In hindsight, it became clear to us we are good investing when we can combine the capabilities of the group with a company which has a new product that is ready for market and ready to be scaled up. This makes for a good investment for ourselves and other investors. That is where our venture model works best.”

He added: “I had an education in civil engineering and business finance. Using these two legs I started my career at a company backed by corporate venture capital, WireLessCar. This was financed in 1998 by Volvo, Ericsson and TeliaSonera, so I was immediately exposed to corporate venturing.

“I was working in the environment between start-ups and corporate capital, where I have stayed in some sense. We were fully acquired by Volvo and I came over to the investment arm. I was four years in the organisation working as an investment director and with a number of corporate strategy roles in Volvo.”

Darren Carroll, Lilly Ventures Darren Carroll has had a varied and two-part career at Lilly Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of US-based drugs company Eli Lilly, in which he has worked across multiple aspects of its business. In his present role as vice-president of corporate business development at Eli Lilly, he oversees acquisitions, private equity deals, partnering and corporate venturing. He came to the role after five years at Lilly Ventures.

Carroll said he sought to make Lilly Ventures, which manages about $500m, more like the outside venture industry in terms of incentives and structure. He said: “If corporate venture capital groups are good at what they do they can get cherrypicked for talent by institutional venture capital firms (VCs). I did not think it was appropriate for Lllly shareholders to be financing a feeder school for the VC industry. We would know if our investments generated good financial returns, and also if our investment professionals were attractive to institutional VCs. We have to provide a strategic return and have to be financially successful. We were prepared to take appropriate steps to attract and retain the people managing results, such as carried interest [a share of profit].”

He added: “We created a new fund, Lilly Asia Ventures, which is the only corporate life sciences VC in China. For four years, until late 2011, I spent a week of every month in China. The rest of the time was in my role as vice-president of ventures. I helped to create a new fund type, known internally as the mirror fund, working with external fund managers TVM and Healthcare Ventures. These mirror funds use strategic and institutional capital to develop potential medicines to proof-of-concept stage, using very lean methods of development under the direction of the external VCs.”

In the early 2000s, Carroll developed new businesses for Lilly. He said: “One of the businesses I created and founded was Innocentive, which was the first open-innovation company in the physical sciences.”

Carroll’s background is as a lawyer, having previously worked at law firm Bond Schoeneck and



King, and at Eli Lilly in the 1990s his brief included depression drug Prozac. He said: “Starting a career as a drug lawyer as the attorney for Prozac is like starting your education at the post-doctoral stage. It exposed me to nearly every critical aspect of regulation, sales and marketing in medicine.”

Ignaas Caryn, KLMIgnaas Caryn is director of innovation and venturing at Netherlands-based airline KLM and its representative at Mainport Innovation Fund, which is a partnership involving the Dutch airline, Delft University of Technology, Schiphol and Rabobank. He helped set up the joint venture four years ago.

Caryn said: “Next year our fund will be fully invested. We are quite satisfied with where we are today although our real success needs to come with exits.” He said promising portfolio companies on this growth path included Netherlands-based simulator company Multi-Pilot Simulations and Netherlands-based radar company Robin Radar.

Caryn has worked in business innovation and venturing since 2007, while from 2003 to 2007 he was head of customer relationship management development and venturing. Before that he was a business manager at KLM. He studied business economics at University of Ghent.What is the future of your sector?Caryn said: “The aviation sector is expected to double in size by 2030. However, this growth can only be realised if the carbon footprint is reduced drastically, energy independence is secured and safety is guaranteed. Our sector is increasingly influenced by other industries ,such as IT, telecommunications and even the chemical and bioenergy industries. Finding excellent ways for collaboration with these industries will be crucial to sustained success.”

Urs Cete, Bertelsmann Digital Media InvestmentsUrs Cete rose through the ranks of Germany-based publisher Bertelsmann and its corporate venturing unit after he joined his “first real employer” nine years ago.

Cete said: “I have a German business degree, so education-wise it looks like pure business. Yet part-time I am pure geek, using a soldering iron in my spare time. With this background I ended up in venturing.

“In addition to my day-to-day job I worked as chief of staff or executive assistant to the chief executive, preparing his presentations and things like that. For three years I worked across all different media businesses and travelled a lot with the chief executive. When Bertelsmann set up its venturing fund, BDMI, they wanted to staff it with people who know the group well, know different people and know who to call internally with a start-up you want to connect with the group.”

Before his time in the chief executive’s office, Cete worked in control and strategy. He added: “At the beginning of 2007 I started here as principal and chief financial officer. As I had been in the corporate control and strategy department, people assume you know how to do financials and accounting. I have now been one and a half years running the whole fund, which is run out of New York. Bertelsmann also has funds or people on the ground in China, Brazil and India.”

BDMI aims to have a similar incentive framework to a more traditional venture capital firm. Cete said: “Some investors and entrepreneurs can be a little afraid of corporate venturers. With us that is not the case as we behave like a financial venture capital firm. If Bertelsmann is bidding for the company, I will still be ringing round trying to get the best price. Yet to get strategic mileage out of the endeavour, for every investment we have to convince an operating unit to act as a mentor or sponsor.”

Cete sits on the boards of YouTube channel network StyleHaul, wireless industry company Mojiva, affiliate marketing company Skimlinks and social gaming and entertainment company Blue Lion Mobile.



Dan Cherian, NikeDan Cherian became general manager and lead for strategic partnerships at shoe and clothing company Nike in late 2010. Cherian worked as general manager for sustainable business and innovation at Nike, which he joined in 2008. He previously worked in strategic planning at pharmaceutical company Pfizer and at consultancy firm Boston Consulting Group. He was a graduate in city planning from US-based university Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Cherian told Ernst & Young in a recent interview that Nike was happy to partner without any commercial relationship with entrepreneurs.

Iain Cooper, SchlumbergerIain Cooper, manager of technology investments, moved to head oil services company Schlumberger’s corporate venturing deals in 2007. In this role he looks after early-stage technology scouting and corporate venturing for Schlumberger Worldwide. He also looks after relationships with Intel, Boeing and General Motors.

Before this he worked as a product development manager between 2004 and 2007 and as a research director for drilling, measurements, well completions and productivity from 2001 to 2004.

He gained a PhD in meteorology from Reading University between 1988 to 1992, before which he studied mathematics and physics at Bristol University.What is the future of your sector? Cooper said: “Given the number of new players in upstream oil and gas, with Statoil moving into the US, Aramco Ventures, the consolidation of BP Ventures from cleantech to upstream, I think it is quite rosy. This is particularly as we have syndicated with some major Silicon Valley corporate venturers in our recent deals.”

Peter Cowley, MartletA self-described maverick corporate venturing investor, Peter Cowley takes a unique approach to investing on behalf of Martlet, a corporate angel fund sponsored by Marshall, a UK-based engineering group.

The group is the dream of Robert Marshall, of Marshall’s founding family, who came to know Cowley through his personal angel investing. He said: “We [Martlet] usually invest £50,000 ($80,000) to £100,000 alongside angels, where we are commonly the biggest involved. One of our metrics is to match or better the internal rate of return [a measure of profit] within the group.”

As the group is largely designed simply to support UK start-ups it is less integrated with its parent corporate than other venture units.

Cowley said: “Our sectors are still mostly business-business defensible tech, although we, both Martlet and I, have invested in a couple of deals where the team is really great but the product or market sector is off our general focus – one is Syndicate Room, facilitating building an investment round with a business angel as the core investor, very different from the normal crowd investing model, and in our view much better protected from Financial Conduct Authority regulation than all others. Plus we invested in an accelerator programme specialising in the internet of things, in which Cambridge University and corporates have more experience than in any other UK cluster.”

Cowley is a long-term Cambridge resident, and was originally an engineering and computing science graduate of the university. He is a board member of Cambridge Angels, runs the Computing Laboratory Ring mentoring scheme and chairs the IdeaSpace supporter group.

He has angel investments in sectors including biotech, med-tech, aerospace, printing and instrumentation. He is a non-executive director or board observer with six companies.

Over the past 12 years, he has been treasurer and chairman of several charities in the advice, healthcare and education sectors. He also works in property development and construction.What is the future of angel investing?Cowley said: “I am seeing more and more start-ups migrating from the former eastern European



companies to base themselves in the UK, because the language of start-ups is English, because the UK has a good market, and is a springboard to the USA, because voluntary mentors are plentiful and because early-stage capital is readily available.”

Barbara Dalton, Pfizer VenturesBarbara Dalton has worked at Pfizer’s corporate venturing unit for the past six years as vice-president.

She joined Pfizer from EuclidSR Partners, a venture firm backed by UK-based pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, where she worked from 2000 to 2007. Before this she was at GlaxoSmithKline’s corporate venturing unit SR One for seven years. Dalton has a PhD in microbiology and immunology from Medical College of Pennsylvania.

She said: “We use a fund-of-funds strategy to expand our reach in developing geographies in Africa, Brazil and China. In addition to traditional venture capital investments we are exploring and supporting other investment models – consortium, product development deals, corporate spin-outs.”

Bruce Dines, Liberty Global VenturesBruce Dines has led US-based cable operator Liberty Global’s corporate venturing unit for more than five years.

Dines says on his LinkedIn profile that he has led investments in 11 companies over the past four years, making follow-on investments in five of those, and has seen three exits with a combined internal rate of return of 200% and a cash-on-cash return of 3.5 times.

Before this Dines worked at Northstar Exchange as chief operating officer, which was sold to Construction Software Technologies in 2006. He had previously worked at Sweden-based telecoms equipment company Ericsson and as chief service officer at Jato Communications, which raised $130m during three years. Dines was educated at Stanford University and at Louisiana State University.

Jens Eckstein, SR OneJens Eckstein took over as president of GlaxoSmithKline’s corporate venturing unit, SR One, in 2012. He joined having worked at venture firm TVM Capital as a general partner since 2007.

Eckstein joined TVM as a principal in 2004. At TVM he became chief executive of SelectX Pharmaceuticals, as he also worked as an entrepreneur-in-residence at the company.

He gained a PhD in biological chemistry from University of Konstanz and Harvard University and went on to be a post-doctoral fellow at University of California, San Francisco. Between 1993 and 1999 Eckstein worked at healthcare start-up Mitotix, which was acquired in 2000 by German biotech company GPC. He then worked at Enanta Pharmaceuticals as director of lead discovery and research from 1999 to 2003, before founding Akikoa Pharmaceuticals, where he worked from 2003 to 2005.

He is an adviser to the Alzheimer Research Forum, a founding member of the Cure Dystonia Initiative Advisory Council and a Kauffman fellow.

Albert Fischer, Yellow & BlueAlbert Fischer was brought in by Netherlands-based power company Nuon to set up its corporate venturing unit, Yellow & Blue, in 2008.

Fischer, managing director of Yellow & Blue, said: “On the basis of Aim-listed Plant Health Care, where I was non-executive chairman [for nine years to 2010], Nuon invited me to start Yellow & Blue in 2008.”

Fischer previously worked as managing partner of venture capital firm Planet Capital between 2004 and 2008 and as managing director of venture firm Pymwymic (Put Your Money Where Your



Mouth Is Community) from 1997 to 2002. Before this he was head of development from 1988 to 1997 at Anglo-Dutch publisher Reed Elsevier. Fischer was a physicist by training.What is the future of your sector? Fischer said: “The energy sector is going to experience extreme situations, which will serve as a fertile ground for new investments in innovative ventures and increased merger and acquisition activity.”

Fischer added: “The most important trends are the following. Firstly, the cost-curve of renewable electricity is pushed down further below the price of fossil fuels. Secondly, new business models for deploying renewables are being adopted, such as the ‘no-money-down’ solar power installation for home owners. At the same time, utilities are faced with decreasing margins, overcapacity and lack of investment capital for new generation capacity. Conversely, divestments from traditional generation assets are taking place by utilities, but also financial investors who start to recognise that the climate crisis is creating a systemic change in the energy industry.”

Ron Fisher, Softbank HoldingsRon Fisher joined SoftBank in 1995 to oversee its activities outside Asia, including the US. As well as founding venture firm SoftBank Capital, he is a director and president of SoftBank Holdings and on the board of the parent company SoftBank Corporation.

He has worked for more than 30 years with technology and high-growth companies. He was previously chief executive of Phoenix Technologies, a software company for personal computers, from 1990 to 1995, and worked at Interactive Systems Corporation, a software company bought by Eastman Kodak Company in 1988, rising to chief executive from his position as chief operating officer. He has also held senior positions at other companies, such as Visicorp, TRW and ICL.

He is on the boards of Cloud Engines (Pogoplug), Desktone, ETrade Group, LiteScape Technologies, MocoSpace, and Nellymoser. GSI Commerce, where he was a board member, was sold to eBay in 2011 for $2.4bn. He received his MBA from Columbia University and a bachelor of commerce from University of Witwatersrand in South Africa.

Stefan Gabriel, 3M New VenturesStefan Gabriel was a 23-year veteran of Germany-based automaker BMW before he joined 3M to set up its corporate venturing unit 3M New Ventures in 2008. He added: “Our mandate is to identify and invest in disruptive early-stage technologies and business models to expand 3M`s global innovation leadership.”

He was most proud of creating a global corporate venture operation at 3M, with a strategic mandate and offices in Munich, Singapore, Boston and Sao Paolo. He added he was pleased it had “independent validation” when 3M received the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology’s Best Innovator 2011-12 award for innovation management and corporate venturing.

He said: “An outstanding example for best practice corporate venturing is the collaboration between one of our portfolio companies and a 3M division. The roll-out of the 3M solution based on the start-up’s technology started in April, leading to triple-digit millions of dollars in sales.”

The company has conducted 18 investments, which are strategic for 3M at mostly early stage, investing approximately $3m to $5m as lead or co-investor. Gabriel said: “3M’s business groups are increasingly taking advantage of collaboration opportunities with our portfolio companies, thus maximising the strategic synergies.”

Gabriel is on the board of the Association for Innovation in German Industry and is an advisory board member of Tech2b.

John Gardner, Nokia Growth PartnersJohn Gardner has worked for Finland-based mobile handset company Nokia for more than 20 years. He worked at a Nokia corporate venturing unit spun off from the company as BlueRun



Ventures between 1998 and 2007 before becoming managing partner at Nokia Growth Partners, which looked at later-stage deals. He previously worked as a business development manager.

Gardner is a board observer for Cloudmark and Verve Wireless. He has an MBA from University of Chicago and a law degree from University of Cincinnati – College of Law.

Olivier Garel, Unilever Corporate VenturesOlivier Garel, vice-president of mergers and acquisitions (M&A), replaced Martin Grieve as head of fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) company Unilever’s corporate venturing unit last year. Garel, a long-term Unilever executive, takes over after Unilever committed a further $450m to its corporate venturing unit for its third fund to help it expand in Asia and North America from Europe. He was a student at Université Paris Dauphine and Université Paris Nord.

Matteo Gatta, BelgacomMatteo Gatta took over as vice-president of group strategy at Belgium-based telecoms company Belgacom in 2012, leaving him overseeing the group’s corporate venturing investments. He came to the role after heading Scarlet, an acquisition of Belgacom, as chief executive from 2008 to 2010.

He previously worked in strategy and planning and as head of marketing at the telecoms company. Gatta has also worked for GTS Telecom and Telecom Italia. He studied electronic engineering at the Università degli Studi di Pavia.

He said: “Very recently we had positive news for one of our assets. [Gesture recognition company] SoftKinetic is involved in the PS4 roll-out.”

He added: “We have done some investments but our focus remains innovation and partnership.What is the future of your sector?Gatta talked about how Belgacom was investing in areas including wearable technology, perceptual computing and mobile payments, as large macro trends, which will affect the telecoms industry.

He said: “Mobile payments is a growth area. It has engagement at the highest levels, with an agreement from respective chief executives. This is not a small investment and we are putting more capital at stake, knowing it could bring some nice upside at the end.”

Anthony Grosso, HartfordAnthony Grosso, a veteran of US-based insurer Hartford Financial Services Group, moved to its venture unit in 2012 as director of partnerships.

Before joining Hartford Ventures, Grosso helped Hartford launch innovative internal projects, and before that he was an entrepreneur responsible for founding two companies – CIS Services and Verify Systems. He said in an interview for last year’s Powerlist: “I was doing that for a good part of five or six years. I launched a bunch of products and businesses without having to take personal risk, while supporting my family, which was a nice balance.”

He said his entrepreneurial background taught him much, adding: “I have an MBA, yet I learned more doing a start-up than I learned in three years of business school. Hartford was one of the companies I consulted for in the 1990s. When I decided to go into the corporate world I chose to go to Hartford.”

He added: “Many people in the industry know more about structuring deals than I do. Where I do have unique expertise is in helping entrepreneurs take advantage of the insurance market and helping them build a business around these markets. We have massive distribution channels and customer markets.”

Simon Haslam, MoonraySimon Haslam has worked for nearly six years as president of Moonray Investors, mutual fund manager Fidelity’s corporate venturing unit. Moonray looks at both healthcare and clean-tech deals, having hired Peter Magowan in 2012 to manage the latter sector. Moonray also complements the



regional venturing units in Europe, India and Asia managed by specific groups after the US team spun out to form Volition Capital in 2010. Haslam is also a director of Fidelity Worldwide Investment and a non-executive director of Colt Group and KVH. Before joining Fidelity in 1995, he was an audit and consulting partner at Deloitte & Touche, specialising in fund management and securities. Haslam studied mathematics at Oxford University.

Adrien Henry, Blue OrangeAdrien Henry was tasked with setting up France-based water and waste management company Suez Environnement’s corporate venturing fund Blue Orange three years ago.

Henry, managing director of Blue Orange, said in an interview for last year’s Powerlist: “We are a dedicated entity and subsidiary of Suez Environnement, which also makes us small, flexible and quick, allowing us to be a bridge between the corporate world and entrepreneurs.”

Henry previously worked as an assistant to the group’s managing director and has worked for Suez Environnement for seven years. He said: “I studied management and economics of natural resources in France 10 years ago and at the time was one of the few guys interested in the environment as a business challenge. I started working at Ernst & Young sustainability services here in Paris with French and European scale jobs. In the usual way I thought I could change from analysing and advising and thought I could try to enforce what I was writing.”

Matt Hermann, Ascension Health VenturesMatt Hermann is a 12-year veteran of Ascension Health Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of US-based healthcare group Ascension Health, which was founded the year he joined. As senior managing director, Hermann said: “We are one set of eyes that Ascension Health and our other limited partners [investors] use to look over the horizon for solutions to make the transformative changes required. I have one of the most fun jobs in Ascension Health and there are more than 120,000 employees.

“We invest in three segments – devices and diagnostics, healthcare services and healthcare IT. Traditionally, half of our investments have been in devices and diagnostics and the other 50% in IT and services. Given healthcare reform, I would envision this will change in the future to an even third split.”

Portfolio companies at which Hermann is a board member or observer include BioImagene, BodyMedia, Millennium Pharmacy Systems and Zonare. Before joining Ascension Health Ventures in 2001, he was a vice-president at venture capital firm Atlantic Medical Management. Hermann previously worked in financial management at US-based healthcare companies Nutrition 21 and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, as well as US-based bank JPMorgan Chase and UK-based accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers in New York. He studied engineering at Tufts and has an MBA in finance from New York University’s Leonard N Stern School of Business.

Tracy Isacke, Telefonica DigitalTracy Isacke has been spearheading Spain-based telecoms company Telefónica’s big push into corporate venturing as director of its Silicon Valley office. Isacke has helped web-based telephony company Jajah integrate with Telefónica, after she led the acquisition of that business in 2010 for $207m. As well as business development, Isacke has worked in sales for O2, a UK-based mobile operator acquired by Telefónica. She worked at Portrait Software between 2001 and 2005 and at US-based photocopying corporation Xerox between 1984 and 2000.



Carleigh Jaques, VisaCarleigh Jaques joined Visa in 2008 as head of corporate development, having previously worked as an investment banker at Germany-based Deutsche Bank for 12 years. Visa has ebbed and flowed with its corporate venturing strategy but, along with credit card providers American Express and Mastercard, has been more active recently, including backing mobile payments provider Square. Jaques gained an MBA from Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor of arts from University of Michigan.

Rimas Kapeskas, UPS Strategic Enterprise FundRimas Kapeskas joined postal delivery company UPS’s corporate venturing unit as managing director in 2012.

Kapeskas said in an interview for last year’s Powerlist: “I have been with UPS for a number of years. I came out of the product research and development group, where we develop products in-house. It has been an interesting transition moving over to the corporate venturing side. You go through the same steps trying to launch a new product internally as start-ups go through. You need to go shopping for internal support and funding. There are a lot of parallels.”

He added: “The biggest shift is, before my taking over, all investments were in the US. When I took over the mandate, we decided to look more broadly globally. The dynamics of business mean distances are shrinking with improved telecommunications. There is also a growing consumer class globally, so we want to learn about the dynamics of changes globally, not just the US.”

Last month, UPS backed a $3.2m round for European logistics company Shutl to help it expand in the US.

Kapeskas gained his MBA from Emory University and also studied at University of Connecticut.

Dan Keoppel, Verizon VenturesDaniel Keoppel, a 14-year veteran of the US-based telecommunications company, has led its corporate venturing for the last 10 years.

Keoppel was previously at rival US-based telecoms company AT&T’s mergers and acquisitions department, where he also controlled its then corporate venturing unit AT&T Ventures Corporation. He also held various finance positions with Lucent (then AT&T) Consumer Products.

He is a graduate of Rutgers University and has an MBA from Fairleigh Dickinson University. He serves as a board observer at various Verizon Ventures’ portfolio companies – ethernet

company Cenx, Skyfire, a cloud computing company which was sold to search engine company Opera Software, internet-of-things company Bug Labs, network virtualisation company ConteXtream, electronic coupons company Cellfire, mobile marketing company Zoove, mobile internet company Flash Networks, location-based service company Loopt and mobile predictive analytics company Medio Systems.

Kenichi Kimura, Mitsui Global InvestmentKenichi Kimura has been the head of Japan-based conglomerate Mitsui’s corporate venturing unit for more than three years. He is chief executive of Mitsui Global Investment from his Silicon Valley base. The 21-year veteran of Mitsui has long been involved with venture investments. He worked as an investment partner for IT and new domain business from 2003 to 2009, and also worked as a general manager of the investment business department and in Mitsui’s IT solution division before that. Kimura is a mechanical engineering graduate from University of Tokyo. He started his career at Mitsui in its information business group, where he was responsible for satellite communication,broadcasting and content business.



Davorin Kuchan, Texas InstrumentsDavorin Kuchan, as director of corporate venturing and innovation at US-based chipmaker Texas Instruments, led a comprehensive strategy review of its corporate venturing activities.

Following this comprehensive review, Kuchan is attempting to stir debate about how best corporate venturing units can work with the wider venture industry. Kuchan said: “There is a growing opportunity for emergence of multi-tenant corporate venture funds like Capbridge [set up by Brad McManus, who previously headed Panasonic’s corporate venturing operations]. Such funds would be oriented around a vertical topic like Autotech or Consumer Tech, and would provided non-competitive corporate limited partners [LPs – investors] with focused venture investment strategy. Entrepreneurs and VC [venture capital] syndicates would get traditional VC fund behaviour and speed. Corporates would extract both financial and strategic value from entrepreneurs focused on their area of interest as well as strategic discussion among fellow corporate LPs.”

Kuchan has worked at TI for nearly 12 years. Before this, he worked at US-based software company Telogy Networks, which was acquired by TI for $435m in 1999. He previously worked at technology companies Neuron Data and Centerline Software. Kuchan speaks Croatian, French and English, and gained an MBA from Berkeley, and studied computer information systems and business administration at Menlo College. He is also a pilot and winemaker.What is the future of your sectorKuchan said: “I can envision closer collaboration among semiconductor companies around innovation relevant to core technologies or process technologies. Currently, lack of VC interest has slowed down entrepreneurial efforts in core semiconductor tech. Also, I can see closer collaboration with universities, where there is an opportunity to adopt material science and core tech research and apply corporate resources to incubate new companies. Global University Venturing [Global Corporate Venturing’s sister title] has an opportunity to bridge idea and licensing gap and bring university research closer to implementation, funding and adoption by corporates.”

Toshihiko Kusakabe, Presidio VenturesToshihiko Kusakabe became the chief executive of the corporate venturing unit of Japan-based conglomerate Sumitomo and its subsidiaries, including Sumisho Computer Systems, nearly four years ago. He has spent more than 25 years employed by Sumitomo.

Kusakabe first joined Presidio Ventures’ Silicon Valley office in 2003, five years after its launch. He is one of 10 investment professionals across offices in Silicon Valley, Boston and New York. Since its inception, Presidio Ventures has invested in more than 100 US start-ups at their early stage for a total investment of $200m. As a strategic investor, Presidio works with its portfolio companies to expand their business in the Japan and Asia markets.

Rachel Lam, Time Warner InvestmentsRachel Lam has been group managing director of US-based media company Time Warner’s strategic investment unit for 10 years Her unit has been investing in early to mid-stage companies that generate strategic value for Time Warner.

Lam has also worked for venture capital firms connected to banks, including Quetzal/Chase Capital Partners and at CSFB Equity Partners, the private equity captive unit of Switzerland-based bank Credit Suisse. She has also worked in banking at Credit Suisse and at Morgan Stanley.

She has a degree in industrial engineering and operations research from Berkeley and an MBA from Harvard Business School.What is the future of your sector?Lam said: “The future of the digital media sector looks strong given the rapid change and technical and product innovation in the space.”



Ron Laufer, MedImmune VenturesRon Laufer joined MedImmune Ventures, a $300m corporate venturing unit of Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, in April 2010 as senior managing director.

Laufer was a co-founder of Lilly Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of drugs peer Eli Lilly, and later a managing director at Visium Asset Management, a healthcare-focused investment firm.

His arrival was part of a shake-up at MedImmune Ventures, with the managed departure of Frank Top, senior vice-president, and its two managing directors, Eva Jack and Maggie Flanagan LeFlore. The managing directors were replaced after Laufer was joined by Samuel Wu on the west coast of the US and Michael Gutch, another Lilly Ventures alumnus.

Laufer studied at the Hebrew University, and gained an MBA at Harvard Business School. He is an adjunct professor of business administration at Kelley Business School.

Crispin Leick, Innogy Venture CapitalAs managing director, Crispin Leick set up Innogy Venture Capital inside Germany-based energy company RWE four years ago, subsequently spinning it out. The firm, which looks to drive disruptive solutions for energy transformation, secured another investor, alongside RWE’s Innogy unit, in Conetwork Erneuerbare Energien, an investment company of one of the last private banks in Germany Bankhaus Lampe Group specialising in renewable energy, in November 2012.

Leick said in the past year two portfolio companies – torrefaction company Topell and water disinfection company CeramHyd – had reported breakthroughs of their respective technologies and the unit had achieved two trade sales. Leick said the markets in which RWE was operating were changing rapidly, which made corporate venturing activity highly important. He said: “Utilities are thinking: ‘How do I ensure I still exist?’ This is not because they want to be nice. This is sheer survival. When we started, people were saying energy is different from telecoms. Today all these managers would say it is changing fast. In Germany, renewables are changing the face of all markets.”

Leick has now spent eight years working for RWE, including his time at Innogy Venture Capital. He joined RWE from Repower, a company he became part of when it was a 200 to 250-person operation. He planned its flotation. He said: “I was lucky to be part of that. I helped drive the company to be the European leader.” He added his work there included helping seal the first wind turbine delivery contract in the UK.

Leick has also worked for US-based energy giant Enron. He said: “I worked three years for Enron, which was looking at the time for people with an engineering background. I met very interesting people there, and ex-Enron managers are now everywhere in the energy business. There I witnessed how a 40,000-people entity can come down in eight weeks. Enron had supported my MBA so I stayed until the last day closing down the books. A key lesson for me was always to listen to the customers, never to think that you are smarter than they are, and to manage liquidity very conservatively.”

He added: “I studied at the technical university of Karlsruhe, an elite university in Germany. Why did I go there? Because chemical engineering was invented there. The same was true of my MBA. I did not go to Germany or Switzerland. I went to Chicago. I wanted to learn from the guys who invented it.”What is the future of your sector? Leick said: “The energy market is in transformation, European utilities are threatened massively, Eon and RWE posted net losses last quarter. The leveraged integrated utility business model will not survive, and decentralised and innovative customer centric solutions will be the future, new co-operation and new partnerships will emerge between utilities, IT and telecoms giants, but also start-ups are marking their footprints. This is a massive opportunity for entrepreneurs.”



Loic Lietar, STNewVenturesLoic Lietar founded the corporate venturing unit of STMicroelectronics in 2011 alongside Guy Lauvergeon. The two executives are both long-term veterans of the Switzerland-based semiconductor company.

Lietar, managing director, said in an interview for last year’s Powerlist: “Why corporate venturing in ST? This was not the first time the company has thought about a corporate venture initiative – it is the fourth attempt. Guy and I also tried to start it a few years before.”

The unit has made two undisclosed investments, according to STNewVentures’ website.He added: “We have $50m until 2015. We built the fund to maintain our strategy. We operate as

much as possible like a pure corporate venture capital fund but make arm’s-length investments and do not want to see formal business relationships related to the fact we are shareholder in the company. We have walked away from deals because other investors expected a relationship with ST.

“The only requirement we have is silicon or semiconductors have to play a key role in the company. How much can we learn of the role of semiconductor in the value chain?”

Lietar’s entire private sector career has been with ST. He said: “I have always been in the same company, yet I have had different jobs in all places in the world. They hired me as a PhD student, yet I never passed my PhD, because the company offered me things to do that were more exciting.”

Lietar studied at the Ecole Polytechnique in France and gained a master’s degree in science from Orsay University and an MBA from Columbia University.

Jim Lussier, Dell VenturesJim Lussier has led US-based computer maker Dell’s corporate venturing unit for more than two years. This year Dell has been taken private by its founder Michael Dell in partnership with buyout firm Silver Lake for $24.9bn.

Lussier joined the unit from venture firm Norwest Venture Partners, where he was a general partner, and worked for more than 11 years.

From 1998 to 2000, Lussier was a vice president and general manager at Beyond.com, a publicly traded e-commerce company. Between 1992 and 1998 Lussier managed the high-tech strategy practice at consulting firm Accenture as an associate partner, while he was also a long-term employee of consulting firm Booz, Allen & Hamilton. Lussier has an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a degree from University of Pennsylvania – the Wharton School.

Lussier said: “Dell Ventures was created with the goal of investing in and supporting new businesses that align with Dell’s expertise and strategic direction. We are looking to collaborate with cutting-edge entrepreneurs and investors who share our vision in emerging technology areas, including cloud, next-generation data centre, big data, storage, security and mobile.”

He added: “We invest in early to growth-stage companies in our targeted areas and function as strategic investors and board advisers. We can invest from $2m to $15m into a round, with the normal investment averaging $3m to $5m. We prefer to co-invest with other venture capital firms, and can lead investment rounds when appropriate. As a strategic investor, Dell provides deep technical expertise and business counsel as well as access to Dell’s brand scale, channel, original equipment manufacturing and go-to-market relationshipsWhat is the future of your sector?Lussier said: “The IT industry is changing as a result of multiple disruptive trends. Data centre infrastructure is becoming increasingly virtualised, converged and automated. The rise of cloud computing is transforming where and how processing occurs and how businesses manage their infrastructure and applications. The explosive growth in data and the need to make sense of it is creating a rapidly rising demand for storage and analytics. And the proliferation of mobile devices is creating new opportunities to transform our business and personal lives and at the same time creating new security challenges. From an investment perspective, the enterprise IT sector has become hot again and is attracting great entrepreneurial talent with compelling ideas.”



He added: “We expect these trends to continue for the next several years giving rise to some great products and companies. In some areas the incumbents will be challenged. The incumbents that will survive and prosper will be those who do the best job of innovating, both through their own internal research and development efforts as well as through partnering these innovative start-ups. As a newly private company, Dell is the world’s largest start-up, and as a result is better positioned to shape these key forces in our industry just as we did when we helped revolutionise the power of the personal computer almost 30 years ago. Dell Ventures will invest in and partner the most promising start-ups in these disruptive areas, contributing to entrepreneurial success and enabling Dell to bring the best solutions to our customers.”

Nino Marakovic, SAP VenturesNino Marakovic became chief executive of SAP Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of the Germany-based technology company, seven years ago. Before this he worked at venture capital firms IVF Ventures and MeVC Capital. He has also worked for US-based investment banks Robertson Stephens, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.

At SAP Ventures, Marakovic has overseen the growth of the corporate venturing unit with the launch of a dedicated $350m fund last year. SAP Ventures has funded and helped build more than 100 companies since 1997 – about a third are still in its portfolio – with goals to create financial returns and facilitate interaction among innovative companies, SAP and its broader ecosystem.

SAP Ventures has also been building a fund of venture funds to look at earlier-stage deals and in July hired Elizabeth Clarkson as a managing director and chief operating officer from a similar role at VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson managing its DFJ Global Network.

Graeme Martin, Takeda VenturesGraeme Martin has worked as chief executive of Japan-based pharmaceutical company Takeda’s corporate venturing unit, which he joined when it was in development, for nearly 10 years.

Takeda Ventures has invested $50m in 18 companies, four of which have been acquired while 13 are strategically active. Martin said: “The strategic value for Takeda is pretty significant. Although the rate of investment has been pretty pedestrian, everything is carefully selected to take minority positions enabling the building of a strategic relationship with Takeda.”

He added: “Measuring strategic value is a tough thing. Yet with the $50m we have put in, we have leveraged $900m of other money. This is pretty impressive financial leverage. It was surprising to me to analyse our annual dealflow. About 30% of it is under the radar, with no public information available. This access to information is through our venture network, so we are seeing a lot of things that, frankly, the company would not see.”

Martin came to Takeda after he found out they were setting up the venturing unit in the early part of this decade. He was a consultant, having left Switzerland-based drugs peer F Hoffmann La Roche in 2001. He was a senior research scientist at Wellcome Research Laboratories, now part of GlaxoSmithKline.What is the future of your sector?Martin said: “I think now would be a great time to talk about two topics in pharma. Why will the pharma-academia relationship for innovation work this time around? Also the IT-dians are coming. What has pharma and the IT sector got to do to ensure they mesh, rather than rush past one another in opposite directions, and continue to emphasise the smarter strategic aspect of the corporate venturing relationship in early-stage companies? Doing so could help build companies that fill in the spaces, maybe leveraging pharma’s own internal assets as a starting point.”



John McIntyre, Citrix Startup AcceleratorJohn McIntyre, managing director of Citrix Startup Accelerator for the US-based computer group, has seen some early success in the first three years of the seed fund.

In March, Symantec agreed to buy Citrix portfolio company Nukona just six months after its funding round last year, while Drumbi effectively exited the accelerator with a $2m series A round. As McIntyre said last year: “Having the first two companies coming out successfully is a fantastic result.”

The accelerator last year helped stretch the technologies to which Citrix’s software can be applied and makes a change for McIntyre after his previous role – three years working for Enterprise Ireland, the Irish government’s export organisation for innovative technologies and services created by emerging and high-growth companies.

Amit Mehta, Tata CapitalAmit Mehta, senior vice-president at Tata Capital, the corporate venturing unit of the India-based industrial conglomerate, heads the operations in Europe. He joined Tata in February 2008 to assist with the Jaguar Land Rover acquisition and advises on India entry strategies for European portfolio companies.

Graduating from Bombay University, Mehta has been in the UK since 1987 and trained as an accountant. He is also an associate member of the Association of Corporate Treasurers and the Institute of Bankers in Scotland.

Before joining the Tata Group, he worked for a number of years in the London as a banker with Royal Bank of Scotland and latterly with National Australia Group, where his focus was on servicing the funding and risk management needs of UK and multinational corporations.

Patrick Meisberger, T-VenturePatrick Meisberger, chief operating officer of T-Venture, has been at Germany-based telecoms company Deutsche Telekom’s corporate venturing unit for the past nine years. Before this he worked at Allianz Venture Partners, a venture unit of the Germany-based insurer. He was previously an executive at Germany-based bank Deutsche Bank, UK-based accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. He studied business administration and management at Cologne University and also secured an MBA at US-based Eastern Illinois University.

Gwen Melincoff, ShireGwen Melincoff has been senior vice-president of business development at Ireland-based drugs company Shire for more than nine years. Before this she worked at pharmaceutical companies Adolor Corporation, Elan Pharmaceuticals, Eastman Pharmaceuticals and Centocor. She studied management at Pennsylvania State University and biology at George Washington University.

Melincoff said: “First, know your syndicate members – do they really have the reserves to step up to the plate? Second, it always takes twice as long and costs three times as much or three times as long and twice as much. Third, regarding other corporates in a deal, we can all play together – two is better than one, three is a chief executive’s dream come true.”What is the future of your sector? Melincoff said: “Our corporate venturing continues to be strong. We continue to get a lot of high-quality proposals – no lack of creative people out there. It is still too early to judge what success looks like for the corporates that are strategic investors. We have had two companies out of 12 complete their initial public offering with a third – UltraGenyx – just filed. Not too bad.”



Bernhard Mohr, Evonik Corporate VenturingAs managing director, Bernhard Mohr was tasked with setting up Germany-based chemicals company Evonik’s corporate venturing unit last year. He joined the company having spent five and a half years working at Germany-based chemicals company BASF’s corporate venturing unit.

Before moving to BASF Venture Capital, Mohr held multiple roles across BASF. Between 1985 and 1996 he studied chemistry at a number of universities.

Mohr said: “For a corporate venturer, it is essential to precisely define the objective of the venture capital activities and establish a close link to the parent’s open innovation programmes and business interests. The goal of our innovation activities is to maintain and expand our high technological competence over the long run.”

Mohr added: “Venture capital supplements Evonik’s existing innovation processes and structures by creating excellent opportunities for accelerating the development of new businesses and opening up future growth fields. Working closely with our business divisions and technology and market experts, we want to be an active and reliable partner for our venture investments and support their successful growth not only financially, but also with technical expertise and strategic insight.” What is the future of your sector? Mohr said: “I see excellent perspectives for top corporate venturers ahead although we operate in a challenging environment. It was absolutely the right time for Evonik to engage in venture capital despite the general decline in fundraising and investment activities over the past two years. We observe that many institutional funds have serious issues in raising new capital, partly due to performance problems, longer exit periods and higher-than-expected capital needs. Starting and funding a venture or a fund in such an environment is difficult but provides excellent growth opportunities. In such a challenging environment corporate venturing firms can not only provide capital but can help to accelerate the growth and development of a start-up company by leveraging on technical expertise, international market access and strategic support.“

Martin Murphy, Syncona PartnersAfter nine years as a partner at a top-tier venture capital firm (VC), it is difficult to imagine the attraction of moving to another firm. But for Martin Murphy, chief executive of Syncona Partners, Wellcome Trust’s £200m ($300m) direct investment vehicle for healthcare and life sciences, having the opportunity to build on the work of Europe’s largest charity formed out of shares in what is now drugs company GlaxoSmithKline is a powerful attraction. Murphy joined Syncona last year after nine years at MVM LifeScience Partners and promptly hired Chris Hollowood from VC peer Apposite Capital, James Peach from charity Cancer Research UK and Iraj Ali from management consultancy McKinsey & Co. His deals at MVM included highly-regarded technologies being developed by Heptares Therapeutics.

Dirk Nachtigal, BASF Venture CapitalDirk Nachtigal has been chief financial officer and managing director of BASF Venture Capital, the Germany-based chemicals company’s €150m ($200m) corporate venturing unit, since September 2001. During the past decade he has expanded the corporate venturing team to 14 in offices in the US, China, Japan and Germany. Most of the team rotate into and out of BASF’s business units. In the latest move, Hiroki Saitho joined BASF Venture Capital as an investment manager for east Asia last year, replacing Oliver Guthmann who returned to the parent. Nachtigal has worked for the BASF Group since 1987. He was previously head of finance, accounting and control at BASF Schwarzheide. He studied economics at the universities of Göttingen and Hamburg.



Girish Nadkarni, ABB Technology VenturesGirish Nadkarni instigated the refounding of Switzerland-based industrial company ABB’s corporate venturing unit slightly more than four years ago.

Nadkarni, managing director of ABB Technology Ventures, said “We were sitting on a lot of cash and due to the financial crisis the venture capital community was sitting on its hands not doing a lot of investing. Like most large companies, we too suffered from the not-invented-here problem and setting this up would address a whole bunch of issues. We now have a tremendous amount of acceptance internally. Leading start-ups as well as major venture capital firms invite us to lead or co-lead.”

He added: “My job is to make ABB more paranoid, like Andy Grove’s book titled Only the Paranoid Survive. Big companies like ABB, Siemens and Schneider have to be paranoid. Historically our competitors were the likes of Alstom, Schneider and Honeywell. Our future competition is not just coming from traditional competition but certain companies like Cisco, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Procter & Gamble, not to mention thousands of start-ups all over the globe.”

Before setting up ABB Technology Ventures, Nadkarni was senior vice-president of ABB’s robotics division. He also worked at venture capital firm View Group, and as an entrepreneur at start-ups vSimplify and Uniprise. Among other roles, he has worked at industrial conglomerate GE, financial group Prudential and law firm Shearman & Sterling. He has an MBA from Harvard Business School and studied law as well as economics and statistics at University of Mumbai.

Nadkarni added: “One trend worth discussing is that many companies with technologies which have industrial applications are preferring to first tap the consumer market, often selling their technology as games and toys or to gaming companies. We see a lot of this in robotics and its related technologies in particular.”What is the future of your sectors? Nadkarni said: “Given ABB’s vast interests, we pursue many sectors. For renewables, that sector is clearly hurting as development has taken longer and much more capital than expected. While financial venture capital firms cannot be expected to do the development on their own, corporates like us either have realised that it is too difficult for us without substantial government help, or have stayed on the sidelines. The lack of support for the marine industry from major UK companies is a case in point. As a consequence, we are seeing more start-ups focusing on increasing efficiency of wind and solar farms, rather than developing new technologies. In other industrial sectors, we find that market risk is a bigger problem than technology risk.”

Shin Nagakura, Transcosmos InvestmentsShin Nagakura, managing director of Transcosmos Investments, was a founding member of the Japan-based industrial group’s corporate venturing office in California’s Silicon Valley. He has more than 15 years of experience in investments, business development, and sales and marketing in the US and Japan and said his brief was to “identify, analyse, recommend and execute possible investments and alliance deals which would have a strategic fit with Transcosmos Japan and its portfolio companies”.

Nagakura said: “2013 has been a great year for me and Transcosmos. There are the great deals which my team did in 2013. Our investment and business development focus right now is on the e-commerce sector in the US, Europe, China and the Association of South East Asian Nations.”

His hundreds of investments and joint ventures include Junglee (sold to Amazon), Multiply (acquired by Naspers), RealNetworks, mySimon (sold to Cnet), AskJeeves and Coremetrics (bought by IBM). He is currently on the board of Merlin Information Systems in the UK, Become and Pheedo.

Prior to Transcosmos, Nagakura served with Recruit Company. He graduated from Sophia University, Tokyo, with a bachelor’s degree in international studies in 1986.



Nagakura said Transcosmos’s deals in 2013 include PFSweb, an e-commerce end-to-end service company. a Nasdaq-listed company (PFSW). Nagakura said: “This is a very strategic deal for us, which could potentially be a gamechanger for Transcosmos.”

Its other deals included FineEX, a Shanghai-based e-commerce logistics company, and another due to be announced as we went to press. What is the future of your sector?Nagakura said: “E-commerce as a sector is growing fast and will do so over the next 10 or so years.”

Fredrik NordhIn Fredrik Nordh’s second stint at Sweden-based industrial group Saab he has taken over the company’s Saab Ventures corporate venturing unit at a good time following the successful sale of C3 mapping technology to Apple in the past year. He now sits on boards at ISD, Cold Cut Systems and Wrap International.

Saab Ventures is a platform for adding growth to Saab by investing in small and fast-moving entrepreneurial companies that have the potential to become a future core business, developing non-core business ideas into successful enterprises spun out of Saab, incubating internal innovative ideas, and investing in venture capital funds.

Nordh rejoined Saab in 2008 after three years as an investment director at BAE Systems in South Africa. In his first eight years at Saab from 1997, he became chief financial officer of its aerostructures unit.

Carole Nuechterlein, Roche Venture FundCarole Nuechterlein has headed the Roche Venture Fund since 2001, but even after a decade at the top of the Switzerland-based drugs company’s corporate venturing unit, she said her challenges remained “exits and finding the diamonds in the rough”.

Prior to her current position managing Roche’s Sfr500m ($530m) venture fund and its 30 portfolio companies spread across 10 countries, she worked in Roche as an attorney for 10 years. She joined Roche from SangStat in Fremont, California, where she was general counsel. She began her career working at law firm Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom in its mergers and acquisitions (M&A) group. From there, she worked at Syntex/Roche in Palo Alto, California, focusing on M&A, research collaborations and licensing deals.

Due to her background in M&A, Nuechterlein led the negotiation team for Roche’s acquisitions of GlycArt and Therapeutic Human Polyclonals. She currently serves as a board observer at Aileron, Alios, Ambit, Ambrx, Conatus, Envoy, Idaho Technology and Nereus. She has a bachelor of arts from Valparaiso University and a JD (juris doctor) from University of Michigan.

Daniel Piette, LVMH Investment FundsDaniel Piette, chairman of LVMH Investment Funds, joined the France-based luxury goods maker in 1990 as executive vice-president before heading its L Capital corporate venturing unit for western markets and L Capital Asia for the east.

In March, L Capital raised €400m ($600m) for its latest fund, beating the original €350m target for this third fund as the majority of money came from outside investors. The firm has offices in Paris, Milan and Madrid.

Piette said: “Working in partnership with management teams and drawing on the worldwide resources and expertise of the LVMH Group and L Capital Asia – a sister fund focused on Asia, with offices in Singapore, Mumbai and Shanghai – L Capital Management’s goal is to develop worldclass brands and retail businesses benefiting from growing global consumption trends.”

He is a member of the LVMH executive committee. Born in France in 1945, Piette graduated from Essec Business School 1969 and with an MBA from Columbia Business School. He is a chevalier in the French Legion of Honour.



Jay Reinemann, BBVA New VenturesJay Reinemann joined Spain-based bank BBVA in April 2011 to help set up its corporate venturing unit as executive director of strategy and corporate development. He had previously worked in corporate venturing at credit card provider Visa from 2000 to 2008.

San Francisco-based Reinemann is hopeful his role will significantly modernise the bank.Reinemann said: “We bring unique market intelligence to our executives, helping them

understand relevant trends forming outside the bank. I have seen how the organisational structure is already changing and how it is shaping some of the products.”

Reinemann joined Visa in 1996 from Andersen Consulting. He also worked at Old Kent Financial Corporation. He studied at University of San Francisco and University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Hilton Romanski, Cisco Hilton Romanski, a 13-year veteran of Cisco, took control of corporate business development at the technology company after Charles Carmel left. Romanski previously worked at US-based bank JPMorgan. He took an MBA at Stanford Graduate School of Business and was previously educated at Columbia University.

Reese Schroeder, Motorola Solutions Venture CapitalReese Schroeder spent five years working with Motorola Solutions Venture Capital, the corporate venturing group of the US-based telecommunications company, before joining it formally in 2004 as managing director.

He said: “In 1999, when the venture group was formed, I was one of the first people who started to work with them. I attended their first investment board meeting and worked with them in setting up the process. I was doing a lot of minority investing. It was natural for that group to seek me out and find a way we could work together. I did not think about working for the group, but how I could help them and how they could help us.

“Our group has been very stable. In a group of basically five people doing active investments, it is a privilege to be the leader when, at 23 years with Motorola, I am only the third most senior person on the team. We have a ton of experience here, which is our secret sauce as we know how to connect companies to the right places in the business.”

Schroeder said one of the things of which he is most proud is orchestrating the split of Motorola Solutions Venture Capital from Motorola Mobility’s unit, when the two companies that made up Motorola were split in two. He said: “Two years after the separation we have sharpened our focus and the entrepreneur community really understands what Motorola Solutions is about. It gets better all the time and we were very active in 2011 and 2012.”

He studied law at John Marshall Law School and political science at North Central College.

Daniel Sheehan, Covidien VenturesDan Sheehan has managed the activities of Covidien Ventures since the corporate venturing unit of the US-based healthcare provider was founded in 2008. The corporate venturing programme invests up to $5m per round and followed Covidien’s spin-out from conglomerate Tyco International in June 2007 to expand into medical devices.

Sheehan’s background includes both venture capital investing and management roles in the healthcare sector, including general partner with Affinity Capital Management, a healthcare-oriented venture capital firm in Minneapolis. He has also managed the business development and strategic marketing efforts for Steris Corporation, a provider of infection prevention and surgical support products for the healthcare and life sciences sectors.

He has been a director of many portfolio companies and is a graduate of Fordham University and Columbia Business School.



Talal Shamoon, InterTrustTalal Shamoon has been chief executive of InterTrust for more than 10 years. He was previously a researcher at the NEC Research Institute Princeton from 1994 to 1997. He has a doctorate of philosophy, electrical and electronic engineering from Cornell University in the US.

Ashley Smith, British GasAshley Smith co-founded British Gas Venture Capital two years ago. She was formerly an associate at UK-based venture firm CT Investment Partners. She also worked as a high-yield credit analyst at asset manager Franklin Templeton Investments and the Environmental Protection Agency. She was a student of international studies at University of Pennsylvania – the Lauder Institute, and she secured a clean technology management MBA and studied science, chemistry and German at McGill University.

Rahul Sood, MicrosoftRahul Sood became general manager and partner of Microsoft Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of the US-based software company, this year. Sood said: “In a nutshell, we are a platform for building successful businesses. That is what keeps us going.”

Sood joined Microsoft in 2010 as a general manager in its entertainment business. He moved to venturing, launching Microsoft’s Bing fund, which Microsoft said would “evolve” into a wider seed programme to support start-ups, when Microsoft Ventures was launched this year.

Sood spent more than four years at US-based computer company Hewlett-Packard, after they acquired Voodoo PC, a high-end personal computer business Sood founded in 1991.

He is an adviser to the board of Razer, a gaming hardware and software company, which he views “as the spiritual successor to our previous work at Voodoo PC”.What is the future of your sector?Sood said: “Innovation is everywhere and can come from anywhere. Almost every month we see a new billion-dollar company emerge from a different corner of the world. At the same time, access to early-stage funding is becoming easier and technologies like the cloud are helping young companies scale quickly. That is why we focus on business propositions for start-ups instead of investing only for a financial return.

“We are in a period of change. We reached a massive build-up where new technologies can be applied to advance industries, create new markets and make the world a better place. Start-ups are on the front lines of leading this revolution. We are seeing huge opportunities for start-ups that are creating a foundation for the future growth of cloud-based enterprise services, sensor technologies, and machine learning to advance almost every industry. We are thrilled to work with the next generation of billion-dollar companies, starting with innovative seed-stage start-ups.”

Alex Steel, Syngenta VenturesAlex Steel took over leadership of Switzerland-based agricultural company Syngenta’s corporate venturing unit at the beginning of last year. He moved to the role having been a mergers and acquisitions (M&A) project leader at Syngenta, where he has worked since 2009.

Before this Steel was at UK-based accountancy firm Grant Thornton from the beginning of 2000.He said in an interview for last year’s Powerlist: “At Grant Thornton I was either buying or selling

mid-market family-owned companies or entrepreneurial businesses. The logic behind my branching out into the corporate world was rather than getting transactions done and moving, I wanted to see how in the long term M&A can drive and develop the business.”

He added: “I am a chartered accountant by background and a finance guy by heart.” He has previously worked at accountancy firm Rawlinsons. He studied economics and geography at University of Portsmouth.



What is the future of your sector? Steel said: “Agriculture is attracting global attention as the impact of food insecurity is felt around the world. The need to accelerate the rate of innovation in agriculture has never been stronger. Venture capital is playing an increasingly prominent role in supporting this and some of the recent high-profile exits have demonstrated that attractive financial returns can be achieved. Expect to see increasing venture capital activity in this sector.”

Markus Thill, Robert Bosch Venture CapitalMarkus Thill co-founded Germany-based industrial group Bosch’s corporate venturing unit in 2008.

Thill, managing director, said: “I joined the corporate strategy unit in 2005. The old topic of venture capital came up during this time, which led to the creation of the corporate venturing group. I quickly found out, talking to people in the industry, there is a lot of innovation we should know about. Our analysis showed we should be present in the market as a high double-digit percentage of deals are relevant and could potentially affect Bosch.”

Snce 2012, Thill has been a member of the venture capital platform council and chairman of the corporate venturing roundtable at trade body the European Private Equity and Venture Capital Association.

Robert Bosch Venture Capital is also looking to expand its reach. Thill said: “At present, we continue to invest roughly €50m ($68m) a year. The key framework is what makes sense. No one forces us to invest €50m a year, and I am very confident if we have relevant dealflow we could invest more. So far we have only invested in Europe, Israel, and North America, but are now also investigating other world regions.”

He added: “We have both a strategic and financial mandate. If you are not among the best on the financial side, no one wants to co-invest with you, so we would not see the most interesting deals from a strategic point of view if we did not aspire to be among the financially top-performing funds. I care for the commercial side, Claus [Schmidt, another managing director] for the technical side. As we are co-heading the unit we are equally responsible for our target achievement.”

Thill holds degrees in mathematics and physics, in particular a doctorate in physics from the University of Paris. He said because of this academic background “technology and innovation are close to my heart”.

Joseph Vaillancourt, Waste ManagementJoseph Vaillancourt, a near seven-year veteran of Waste Management’s corporate venturing unit, has led more than $1bn of equity and debt financings in his career and has also led $600m of merger and acquisition activity.

Vaillancourt, managing director, organic growth, said: “One of the achievements I feel most notable over any discrete investment gain is that I assisted in the strategic repositioning of Waste Management [WM].

“WM has been for a long time a traditional waste management company focused on the aggregation and disposal of waste using longstanding disposal options with landfilling being key. Our group helped provide needed perspective that we were entering a phase of significant disruption that would have long-term consequences. We helped recognise trends in corporate and individual sustainability behaviours driving alternative landfill disposal options and waste reduction.

“We performed a comprehensive deep dive on emerging waste-based conversion technologies and developed new economic supply chains that would allow WM to proactively reposition itself from waste management company to a resource management company that can leverage innovation to optimise the value in its waste streams.

“Our corporate venturing unit exists in a portion of the clean-tech sector experiencing significant headwinds due to capital scarcity. There are many causes for these headwinds but essentially it is proving too long and more expensive than expected to get to stable and growing profitability, which



ultimately affects monetisation feasibility and timing. However, as we are in a disruptive sector transition, we need to find ways to maintain proactive involvement in this activity while mitigating financial risks and are therefore rationalising the tools we deploy for obtaining strategic leverage.”

Vaillancourt has worked in multiple entrepreneurial roles, often as founder and chief executive, since 1990. Other corporates he has been employed by include Corning, Graebel Van Lines and Foster Medical Supply. He also co-founded a turnround company working for private equity groups to help address challenges in those companies both financially and organisationally. He said: “This was one of the direct linkages between my entrepreneurial and corporate tenures.”

Vaillancourt has a degree in accounting and finance and an MBA from University of Massachusetts.

Deryck van Rensburg, Coca-Cola Venturing and Emerging BrandsAs president and general manager of venturing and emerging brands, Deryck van Rensburg has been in his corporate venturing role at US-based soft drinks company Coca-Cola North America for six years. He has worked in the consumer product goods (CPG) industry for 26 years, first at Anglo-Dutch group Unilever and now at Coca-Cola. His role before his corporate venturing position was as president of the company’s Germany and Nordic division based in Berlin. He has an MBA from University of Bath.What is the future of your sector?Van Rensburg said: “Corporate venturing within technology-intensive industries has been around for some time. However, venturing with intangible assets such as brands is a relatively recent and exciting phenomenon. Although internal brand development and acquisition have been the predominant growth strategies adopted by CPGs, accessing innovative entrepreneurial brands through a venturing strategy provides interesting options and learning for incumbent corporations seeking to strengthen their brand portfolio.”

David Wallerstein, TencentAs senior executive vice-president at China-based internet portal Tencent, David Wallerstein said he aspired to “create China’s leading internet company”. Outlining his method, he said: “We seek to identify the best technologies, applications, content, ideas and practices from around the world – in addition to China – to ensure we never fail to exceed user expectations.”

Wallerstein moved to China and joined Tencent in 2001 after working in business development at the media company’s largest shareholder, Naspers’ corporate venturing unit Myriad International Holdings (MIH). He oversees Tencent’s international business initiatives through identifying co-operation with multinational partners and he is responsible for Tencent’s operations outside mainland China and its $1.5bn corporate venturing fund.

Before his time at MIH, Wallerstein was a management consultant in China’s telecommunications and IT industries. He gained his master’s degree from University of California, Berkeley, and a bachelor’s degree from Washington. The current portfolio has seven companies.

Jim Weaver, Alticor Corporate EnterprisesAs managing director of US-based Alticor’s corporate enterprises holding company, part of the Amway group of companies, Jim Weaver has for the past six and a half years managed a portfolio of companies focusing on consumer health, wellness and beauty.

He is responsible for managing the current portfolio of seven companies as well as directing all acquisition and corporate development activities for the corporation. His board seats include Metagenics and Gurwitch Products, both divisions within Alticor Corporate Enterprises focusing on medicinal foods and cosmetics respectively, as well as Amneon Furniture and Interleukin Genetics.

He gained a bachelor’s degree from University of Michigan before working at Steelcase and Bissell and running his own company, Bold Furniture. Weaver joined Alticor in 2007 from X-Rite.



Gunnar Weikert, InventagesGunnar Weikert is the founder and executive chairman of Switzerland-based consumer goods company Nestlé’s corporate venturing unit, Inventages, which has $1.5bn under management. He was previously global head for life sciences deals at Germany-based healthcare company Bayer.

At Bayer, he oversaw venture investments and collaborations “representing some of the biggest deals between big pharma and biotechnology in the late 1990s”, according to his biography on Inventages’ website. These deals included partnerships with companies such as Millennium and Lion Bioscience. Weikert has a PhD in metabolism from University of Düsseldorf, and an MBA.

Kent Wilkinson, Natural Gas VenturesKent Wilkinson, vice-president of Natural Gas Ventures, the $1bn corporate venturing unit of power producer Chesapeake Energy, is responsible for finding, championing, funding and implementing strategies and infrastructure that increase demand for natural gas in the US.

He is also accountable for Peake Fuel Solutions and manages the company’s corporate venturing investments in Nasdaq-listed Clean Energy Fuels and Sundrop Fuels. He joined Chesapeake in 2006, serving as manager, midstream system development, and director, business strategy and development.

Before joining Chesapeake, Wilkinson worked in a variety of roles in the midstream segment of the natural gas industry at OGE Energy and as an engineering consultant. He graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from University of Oklahoma, where he went on to receive an MBA. He currently serves on the boards of Wireless Seismic and several nonprofit entities.

Pieter Wolters, DSM VenturingPieter Wolters joined DSM Venturing as its head last year, replacing Marcel Lubben, after a career as an entrepreneur.

Wolters said: “I have been a start-up executive for the past 15 years. I have spent the last eight of that in the US. Right now it is business as usual at DSM after 10 years. In this time €100m ($125m) has been invested, with a lot of value creation and collaboration. Currently we have more than 20 active portfolio companies. It has made money, although its main purpose is to create strategic value.”

Geert Van der Wouw, ShellGeert Van der Wouw became managing director of Shell Technology Ventures in April last year. He has previously worked across Shell since joining it in 2003. He led Shell’s supply chain response to economic turmoil in Europe during the winter of 2011-12 and the spring of 2013.What is the future of your sector?Van der Wouw said: “Bright. The timing for corporate venturing groups is almost perfect, as entrepreneurs and venture capital firms (VCs) increasingly recognise the strategic value we can bring to the table – pilots and demos, lab tests, acting as launching customer, client and supplier network, technical expertise, global reach and money. However, the corporates therefore need to meet these requirements and deliver on their value promise, and make quick decisions through a mean and lean investment process.”

However, Van der Wouw added: “Unfortunately, we see fewer VCs spending money in the energy sector, as their funds have reached the end of their investment window and they struggle to raise new funds. Others are moving to later stage or are retreating to safer investment areas that generally require less capital and have shorter time horizons to commercial deployment, like software, big data and cyber security. Shell Technology Ventures and Shell Gamechanger, our seed capital fund, can fill part of that gap, as we are stage agnostic and quite experienced in doing early-stage investments, but we still need a vibrant VC community to co-invest with us and provide investment and VC expertise within the syndicate.”



Michael Zeisser, AlibabaMichael Zeisser became chairman of Alibaba’s US investments this year. He is a senior vice-president at US-based media company Liberty Media where he has worked since 2003. Before this he was a partner at consultancy firm McKinsey & Co between 1991 and 2003. He sits on many company boards, including travel guide Trip Advisor. He is also mentor for the TechStars accelerator.

Multi-sector fundsJean-Marc Bally, Aster CapitalJean-Marc Bally has worked in corporate venturing as managing director at Aster Capital and the corporate venturing unit from which it spun out, Schneider Electric Ventures, since 2000.

Aster became independent of France-based industrial group Schneider Electric in 2010, and is backed by two other corporate backers, equipment provider Alstom and chemicals company Solvay, Rhodia.

Bally, whose deals include SolaireDirect, Tronics, ConnectBlue, Jet Metal Technologies, Optiréno and Lucibel, said: “Why did we go for a multi-corporate fund? It was a reaction against the difficulties some venture capital firms and some start-ups were perceiving with a mono-corporate venture fund. The idea was not to do things differently from before but to do it better. We have a close relationship with each of the corporates in the fund.”

Paul Brown, Sandbox IndustriesPaul Brown, managing director, originally conceived the idea for corporate venturing-backed venture firm Sandbox Industries when he was deputy general counsel at the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, an organisation for US health insurance schemes.

Brown said: “While serving as the deputy general counsel, I had this idea we could do a strategic corporate venture fund, with the individual Blue Cross and Blue Shield health plans as investors.

“We could go out and not only pursue a good return for them financially, but also provide significant strategic value by helping the Blues be more innovative and get more exposure into what healthcare entrepreneurs were doing, ultimately allowing the Blues to bring lower-cost solutions and better outcomes to their customers.

“We closed the first Blue Venture Fund in July 2008. We selected Sandbox Industries as manager. For a couple of years I continued as deputy general counsel at Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, also working very closely with Sandbox running the Blue Venture Fund. After two years doing both jobs, I transitioned to a hybrid role, joining Sandbox as a managing director and shifting to vice-president of venturing at the association.”

Brown is pleased with how the fund is progressing. He said: “I think it has proven to be a wonderful model. We raised our first fund in July 2008 and had 11 separate Blue Cross and Blue Shield health plans with a fund of $116m. That fund is fully invested and reserved. It has 12 companies in the portfolio and two really nice exits have returned nearly 40% of the fund.”

The corporate venturing unit expanded its funding base for a second fund in 2012. Brown said: “In March 2011, for our second fund we went up to $179m in capital commitments. So far this second fund has five portfolio companies and we are actively investing it. We will probably end up with 15 to 20 companies in the portfolio. We have had no writedowns or write-offs in either fund, which is pretty good.”



The unit represents 25 Blue Cross and Blue Shield units. The firm also co-manages the Sandbox Cultivian Food & Agriculture Fund for a number of food and agriculture-related corporations.

Brown was a lawyer for 10 years at US-based law firm Kirkland & Ellis, before leaving in 2002 to join the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, which had been one of his clients at Kirkland & Ellis. He is a graduate of University of Utah and the Northwestern University School of Law.

The unit’s “very popular” Healthbox accelerator has run seven programmes in the US and London. Brown added: “We also connect corporates with innovative emerging companies via a budding matchmaking and consulting practice.”

Pierre de Fouquet, Iris CapitalIn 1986, Pierre de Fouquet, managing partner at Iris Capital, a France-based venture capital firm managing strategic investments for Saudi Telecom, France Télécom and Publicis Groupe, helped launch the venture and growth capital arm of the French Caisse des Dépôts, where he was in charge of investments in cinema and television businesses, and then more widely in the media sector.

He currently holds board positions at Editions Montparnasse, Flach Film and Rue des Ecoles. He has also chaired L’Association Française des Investisseurs pour la Croissance (the French venture capital and private equity association) and headed its venture commission. He is a graduate of Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris and holds a PhD in economics from University of Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne).

Fabienne Herlaut, Ecomobilité VenturesFabienne Herlaut created multi-corporate fund Ecomobilité Ventures in 2012 as a spin-off from French national railway SNCF. As president of Ecomobilité, Herlaut said: “I have about 30 years’ business experience, which is a combination of consulting and family office work. I worked in consulting for five years and created the Paris office of [investment consultant] Bain & Co. I then worked 10 years in a family business as deputy general manager and as one of the shareholders as well. I then spent 10 years in large industrial companies.

“Finally, at the end of 2007 I was recruited by SNCF to become head of strategy and sustainable development. I was asked by the chief executive to create SNCF’s corporate venture fund, Ecomobilité Partenaires. SNCF committed €15m ($22m) to the project. Then, with the support of SNCF, I created the second fund, Ecomobilité Ventures, with corporate partners to focus on the mobility market.”

Ecomobilité Ventures is also backed by local oil major Total and France Télécom’s mobile phone operator, Orange.

Herlaut said one investment in her track record stands out for having made a 100-times return. She said: “At our family business we had a fantastic success in 1998 when we sold an online trading business. It was very new that you could buy stock exchange shares online. We invested €1m and sold it for €100m. That was absolutely outstanding and something I have never been able to do again.

“We had one or two other significant successes. Making a five-times or 10-times return for an industrial, mature business is pretty significant. It is too soon to talk about exit success with regard to companies in my portfolio. Yet I really view our active shareholder role to support entrepreneurs as relatively new, and a driver of future mutual success.”

Herlaut said the company has made some investments in 2013, although these are not public yet.What is the future of your sector? Herlaut said: “The future of transport is hot, illustrated by mega-deals such as Google and Uber. We see the number of attractive projects increasing, the need for financing always higher, success stories appearing. All that we anticipated would happen is indeed happening.”



Richard Nourse, GreencoatRichard Nourse leads venture capital fund manager Greencoat, the exclusive investment adviser to €200m ($272m) clean-tech fund,ESB Novusmodus, which is funded by Ireland-based utility ESB, and investment manager to Greencoat UK Wind, a sector-focused infrastructure fund invested in UK wind generation assets and listed on the LSE’s main market. as managing partner.

A year after leaving Merrill Lynch in 2007, and after a brief spell working for the UK government selling British Energy to EDF, Nourse hooked up with ESB during the financial crisis.

He said: “ESB had been thinking about how it would meet the challenges involved in transforming itself from a largely fossil-based integrated electricity company to one that would deliver in a low-carbon world. It realised that in a short space of time it would need to adopt new technologies and new business structures, many of which it would be unfamiliar with. This would be challenging within a utility framework and hence ESB was happy to pursue a fund structure. It is clear ESB was ahead of other utilities in its thinking on this.”

Corporates have become more important in backing clean technology in recent years. Nourse said: “If you go to a European clean-tech conference there is a huge change. Now I think 60% of the people in the room are corporate venturing teams. The clean agenda is maturing. Now people are thinking about the interaction between clean and affordability.”

The company has made about 10 deals and invested about €100m. Greencoat has also listed Greencoat UK Wind this year. Nourse said this allowed utilities to release capital by selling their wind farms, or part of them, and recycling the money into more development.

René Savelsberg, Chrysalix Set René Savelsberg seven years ago helped set up Chrysalix Set as the management company for Set Fund I with €40m ($55m) backed by Netherlands-based utilities Delta and Essent. Currently Chrysalix Set also actively manages Set Fund II with commitments from the same and new investors.

Savelsberg, chief executive of Chrysalix Set, said: “Delta and Essent were both mandated by the Dutch government to set up this fund. They looked for management to run the fund and for people who had a history in corporate venturing, speaking the language of corporates in the venturing world.

“Through their relationship with Vancouver-based Chrysalix EVC and Robeco, they came to know us – Wouter Jonk [Chrysalix Set’s managing director] and myself. They asked us to consider doing this and we jumped on it. We were at Philips corporate venturing.”

Savelsberg joined the Philips corporate venturing unit in Palo Alto, California, in 1998. Between then and 2007, he worked in various roles across Philips both in the US and Europe. His work at Philips goes back to 1985. Before that, he spent two and a half years at start-up company INAD Computer Group in Eindhoven, Netherlands. He studied technology management at Eindhoven University of Technology.

Hervé Schricke, Xange CapitalTen years ago Hervé Schricke was sponsored by La Poste, France’s national post office, to launch Xange Capital as chairman.

Xange’s second fund raised €60m ($78m) in its first close last year from multi-corporate backers including Post Bank as well as La Poste. Schricke helped create Xange Private Equity through the acquisition of the venture activities of bank ABN Amro France.

Schricke said: “I was chief executive of Natixis Private Equity until 1999, and the business was a pan-European sponsor of firms like Duke Street and Quadriga, managing €1.2bn.”

He added: “I left Natixis to start a business, Meilleurtaux, which is a mortgage broker on the web. I joined the founder when he had the initial idea. It was backed by one of the funds Natixis



introduced the founder to in 1999 and first in the market. I became a managing director in operations. It remained the leader in the market – from having 15 competitors within six months, now there are two or three players. It is known as one of the best venture capital exits in France.”

After his work at Meilleurtaux, Schricke said French Post contacted him to help them launch Xange Capital.

Schricke has also previously worked at Natixis Group and Crédit National, in roles including head of corporate banking and managing director of the bank subsidiary. He was also head of capital markets for another banking group. Schricke was chairman of France’s venture capital and private equity trade body L’Association Française des Investisseurs pour la Croissance from 2010 to 2012.

State-owned fundsRichard Erskine, Statoil Technology InvestRichard Erskine, head of Norway state-owned Statoil’s corporate venturing unit, moved to the oil major last year from venture capital firm Energy Capital Management (ECM).

ECM had managed Statoil’s portfolio companies but the oil major brought new and some existing deals back in-house under Statoil Technology Invest as the venture firm picked up a mandate from Saudi Arabia’s oil group, Aramco. Erskine at the time said: “The reason for this is that we need a close and good collaboration with the technology users in Statoil.”

In April last year, and as part of Erskine’s move, Statoil extended the advisory agreement with ECM whereby ECM manages a number of investments made by Statoil in oil and gas and renewable energy technology companies. The extension was granted as a result of the positive progress made by ECM in developing Statoil’s investment portfolio since the agreement was first entered into in 2008.

Daniel Heaf, BBC WorldwideDaniel Heaf was made executive vice-president and managing director of consumer digital at UK state-owned broadcaster BBC in March, after two years as BBC Worldwide’s digital director.

Heaf oversees all BBC Worldwide’s global consumer-facing digital businesses and is responsible for driving a unified global digital strategy and consumer vision, in addition to his existing strategic responsibilities for the company’s digital growth strategy and setting up its corporate venturing unit.

He began his digital career founding and running a successful start-up. Since then he has worked for Time Out, AOL and BBC Radio. Before joining BBC Worldwide, Heaf worked for broadcasting peer Channel 4’s corporate venture fund, 4IP, from 2008 to 2010.

Bruce Niven, Aramco Energy VenturesBruce Niven became chief investment officer at Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures this year but has worked at the unit for more than two years. He was previously director of clean-tech venturing and corporate development at Japan-based trading and investment company Itochu. Before that he was founder and managing director of mass interactive events application company Telepathix and a project manager at Omega Partners Strategy Consultants. Niven studied engineering and management at Oxford University in the UK. He is a chartered financial analyst.

He said: “The aim is to develop [Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures] into a large-scale, world-class corporate venturing programme. Key challenges as I see it are scaling the venture capital model



effectively across a global team, optimising corporate interactions to make better decisions and add value to both investees and the parent company, and leveraging advanced information systems to enhance the corporate venturing operation.”

He added: “We have closed 10 deals to date. These were three fund investments plus Sekal, a software company for real-time decision support and automation in drilling operations, Zilift, a downhole pumps company using permanent magnet motors and transmissions, Rive Technologies, a mesoporous zeolite catalysts company, Antech, a directional coiled tubing drilling systems company, and Inflow Control, an autonomous downhole valves for fluid flow control company.”

Niven said the unit had two further deals set to be announced by year-end.

Global Corporate Venturing’s

Need to know what deals your competitors or potential customers have done?Want to look at trends in a particular sector or geography for a presentation?Would you like to know who is co‑investing with whom?

Corporate Global Venturing

New search functionality on the Global Corporate Venturing website enables subscribers to search more than 2,500 deals since May 2010, by company name, sector, location and date. Right now the data search function is free to paid subscribers, but next year there will be an additional fee for access.

www.globalcorporateventuring.com/deals.php

Deal Database


http://www.globalcorporateventuring.com/deals.php

Subscribe to Corporate Global Venturing

CorporateGlobal Venturing

Take out a corporate subscription licence so you and your team can receive access for 12 months

you’ll get:

• The monthly magazine sent as a pdf. Articles by leadingjournalists, practitioners and experts - everything you needto know about who is doing what, why and how in corporateventuring.

• Full access to the website with breaking news stories everyday, data on over 3,000 deals, and much more.

• A weekly news ezine round up of the previous week’snews plus an insightful editorial comment piece by

one of our senior editors

• Invitations and discounts to events exclusive to subscribers

Plusfree corporate venturing 101An Introductory Guide to Corporate Venturing.

free corporate venturing 201How to take your CVC unit to the next level after the fi rst two years.

free gcv Powerlist 100a listing of the 100 most infl uential people in

Corporate Venturing

For more information and pricing visit: globalcorporateventuring.com/pages/licences.html or email Tim Lafferty at:[email protected]

Corporate Global

VenturingIssue 036 May 2013

Three years old

Deal activity

analysedInnovative

region: MunichThe inside track

on Iain Cooper

Birthday issue

Deal activity

analysed

8p_A4_Agenda.indd 8 14/5/13 22:37:19

Sponsored by powerlist 100 - Venture Capital › asset › docs › GCV2013Powerlist100.pdfSponsored...

Documents

Transcript of Sponsored by powerlist 100 - Venture Capital › asset › docs › GCV2013Powerlist100.pdfSponsored...