Max Volokhoff, chief innovation officer of Mitgo, is one of our top 50 Emerging Leaders in corporate venturing for 2025.
Max Volokhoff was a teenager when he learned it was possible to make money online, and that’s more or less what he’s been doing ever since.
“I thought, God! It’s a computer and it generates money. Because I’m an introvert I thought it was cool I could just [work] with the PC,” he says. He co-founded the online affiliate marketing group Mitgo.
In 2015, he started a CVC unit in 2015 as a way to help Mitgo grow. In the years since, he has invested in dozens of publishing and adtech startups, both through the Mitgo CVC fund and through a separate startup studio.
Since the 2022 venture capital downturn, the key to making startup investing work has been focusing on what he calls “double economy”. This means identifying at least one additional revenue stream to get out of the investment beyond an exit or dividends. One route is Mitgo investing in publishing startups and then connecting them with clients to generate advertising revenue.
“The VC model is flawed: it works only for the top-tier VC firms. That is one of the reasons we switched to a double economy model”
“We can agree that the VC model is flawed: it works only for the top-tier VC firms [with enough capital]. For the majority, it won’t work,” he says. “That’s one of the reasons we switched to a double economy model. If we only pursued the exit strategy [to generate returns] it wouldn’t work.”
Mitgo invests from the balance sheet, with around $25m spent by 2022, when the double economy approach was launched. Since then, it has invested around $2m, deploying capital cautiously.
Volokhoff is frank that he believes competition in the Mitgo group is the best driver of innovation. When Volokhoff has an idea for how a revenue-generating portfolio company can grow internally, Mitgo will acquire it. He then allows the new business unit to cannibalise the existing ones.
“Almost everyone agrees that building something from scratch is faster and more efficient than rebuilding what already exists. And yet, most companies stick to endless transformations and try to rebuild the old house without making any truly critical changes.”
See the full list of Emerging Leaders 2025 here.
