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CVC Unplugged
The CVC Unplugged podcast is a weekly show that brings you fascinating and wide-ranging conversations with leading corporate venture capital investors, subject matter experts, startup founders, journalists and other market participants to keep you informed of the most important trends affecting early-stage investing. Hosted by Global Corporate Venturing’s Fernando Moncada Rivera, guests dive into strategy, market movements and drivers, best practices, macro trends and much more. New episodes are available every Thursday on your favourite audio platforms, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts.
July 10, 2025
Advice from a CVC freelancer
Global Venturing ReviewWhat’s it like to come into corporate VCs from the outside as a contractor?
My guest is Bruno Meireles de Sousa, who is an operating parter at Bidra Innovation Ventures, the CVC of phosphate mining company OCPGroup. And he joined me to talk about what he’s seen going from unit to unit across a number of sectors.
He tells me about his experience going from a very big corporate in Cargill – where he did both venture investing and venture building – to a smaller parent company when joining Bidra Ventures, and what corporates should keep in mind when doing both investing and venture building.
We talk about what indicators he sees that a venture unit is healthy when he parachutes into it, how to effectively bring attention to things that senior leadership might find uncomfortable, and how to gain trust internally when coming in from the outside, and more.The post Advice from a CVC freelancer appeared first on CVC Unplugged.
DownloadJuly 03, 2025
Secondaries are breaking into the mainstream
Global Venturing ReviewThe whole point of investing is to hopefully get your money back at some point. But what if, as we’ve seen, the usual routes to doing that are effectively blocked off? Ideally, a VC might want to their startup to go public, welcoming in hundreds of thousands of new investors via an IPO and make their money back, at many multiples, that way. Or they might want a bigger fish to come along and acquire the startup outright at a higher value, providing their returns that way.
But IPO’s have been all but dead for a few years now, and despite previous predicitons that this might finally be the year they come back in earnest, that has not been the case. But people still want their money back, so they’re turning to the secondaries markets, where they can sell their shares in startups outside the context of a larger liquidity event that is out of their control. Secondaries markets have grown rapidly and continue to do so. Their visibility, and the attitudes towards using them, have also changed such that investors are much more comfortable imbedding them as part of their portfolio management strategies.
My guest today is Laurence Levi, partner at VO2 partners, a boutique advisory firm that acts as a broker-dealer for secondaries transactions, as well as a turnkey portfolio management service provider, focusing strongly on corporate VCs.We talk about how the use of secondaries markets have been on an explosive trajectory, and hav been largely destigmatised, whereas it used to be something many might have considered as an outlet for which things are going badly.
We touch on how the nature of the markets themselves have changed, whether the power balance between buyers and sellers have shifted amid the increase in activity, and where the trajectory is set to go even if other exit routes come back.
We also talk about how startup founders may be feeling about having new shareholders who they never previously envisioned as a result of them buying up shares on the secondaries, how valuations or discounting practices have changed in recent years, and much more.But first, I talk to GCV’s Kim Moore about how CVCs are opting to sell off parts of their portfolio’s via secondary transactions in order to pivot to AI.
The post Secondaries are breaking into the mainstream appeared first on CVC Unplugged.
DownloadJune 26, 2025
Do we have enough energy to power the AI future?
Global Venturing ReviewThe ugly truth behind the AI revolution is that it needs to be powered from somewhere. Every query you make into ChatGPT or DeepSeek of Claude takes energy. Energy that has to be generated at a power plant, transmitted through the grid, and then used at a data centre to process and then send you the answer you seek.
The demand for power from data centres is set to triple globally over the next 10 years. And our grids are not ready. So what’s being done to solve it? How are going to make more power? How are we going to improve our ability send it? How can we reduce demand for it?
GCV recently released a report about this very topic, and I’m joined today by my colleague, GCV deputy editor Kim Moore, to talk about it.
You can read the full report here: https://globalventuring.com/report/global-energy-council-q2-2025/
The post Do we have enough energy to power the AI future? appeared first on CVC Unplugged.
DownloadJune 12, 2025
Why invest in LatAm
Global Venturing ReviewLatin America is one of the fastest growing regions in the world, with a growing number of unicorns, an increasing array of international investors looking to get a foothold, and ever more savvy entrepreneurs. Ahead of next week’s GCV Symposium in London, I wanted to catch up with Bernardita Araya, manager of CMPC Ventures, the corporate VC unit of Chilean pulp and paper company CMPC, who will be speaking at the event about international investment in the region.
Araya talks about how the VC scene has been growing rapidly in recent year, especially in Chile where many new faces are entering the space, as well as how Latin American entrepreneurs, without the same kind of access to grants and other funding as founders in North America or Europe, tend to be incredibly cash efficient. International investors, she says, have been keen to enter the region but mostly with local co-investors.
We also talk about the challenges facing LatAm founders, including the prospects of expanding to other continents, as well as the natural advantages the region has, and about the growing willingness of it’s corporates to innovate and adapt, and much more.The post Why invest in LatAm appeared first on CVC Unplugged.
DownloadMay 22, 2025
Getting rid of bias in the investment process
Global Venturing ReviewHuman decision-making – even when a lot of money is at stake, is not always rational.
A lot of the time it’s based on intangible factors that influence people in ways that can’t be explained or justified by data or analysis – this is after all, the entire basis for the field of behavioural economics, and it’s not new information. So why, in an industry like venture capital, are people still led oftentimes more by their gut than their head? The answer, of course, is human nature. But in an industry that looks for outliers, that tries to go against the grain, why is it not more of a priority to minimise the amount of returns left on the table by counteracting well-known flaws in our thinking?
My guest today is Sharon Vosmek, CEO and managing partner of VC firm Astia, which has, at the core of its thesis, diversity. Not just diversity for its own sake, though Vosmek argues that that would be good enough – but rather as a tangible, strategic way to cast the net as widely as possible, and to eliminate the biases that ultimately end up hurting your return profile.
Astia recently released a white paper on what it calls the Sift – its method of sourcing and screening companies for investment, in a way that tries to filter out the pitfalls that people fall into because of their biases or hunches. Things like not starting the process with introductions, but rather an in-depth assessment of the business before face-to-face meetings, or drawing on the experience of a large diverse group of external advisors to assess each company – thereby also spreading the biases across a wider set of experiences.
At a time when diversity and inclusion initiatives are coming under attack, Vosmek defends this not as some gimmick, but as a way to demonstrably bring in more money – indeed, Astia’s data has shown a far lower failure rate for startups that have made it through the Sift, than the average, and a higher rate not just of survival, but of successful exits, than failures.
We also talk about the biases that still exist and how they may manifest themselves, the potential impact that the perception of being an “inclusive” fund may have on fundraising, and the wider impact of a current climate that is hostile to inclusion initiatives.
But first, I speak to GCV’s Kim Moore about how investors can take advantage of innovation in universities.The post Getting rid of bias in the investment process appeared first on CVC Unplugged.
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GCV provides the global corporate venturing community and their ecosystem partners with the information, insights and access needed to drive impactful open innovation. Across our three services - News & Analysis, Community & Events, and the GCV Institute - we create a network-rich environment for global innovation and capital to meet and thrive. At the heart of our community sits the GCV Leadership Society, providing privileged access to all our services and resources.
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