CVC Unplugged

July 22, 2025

Advice from a CVC freelancer

What’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.

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July 10, 2025

Advice from a CVC contractor

What’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.

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July 03, 2025

Secondaries are breaking into the mainstream

The 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.

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June 26, 2025

Do we have enough energy to power the AI future?

The ugly truth behind the AI revolution is that it needs to be powered from somewhere. Every query you make into ChatGPT or DeepSeek or 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.

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June 12, 2025

Why invest in LatAm

Latin 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 years, 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, saying "International investors 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.

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