Alphabet’s Other Bets portfolio is sharpening its focus on healthcare and energy as the company seeks new avenues for innovation and growth beyond its core business.
Alphabet executive Steven Kan says the company’s Other Bets portfolio is increasingly focused on human health and sustainable energy — areas where the world faces huge, global problems and there is a need for structural change.
“For me, human health is a big investment theme, and then sustainability, especially energy – finding sustainable and secure sources of energy is really important,” Kan told the audience at the GCV Symposium, an event for the corporate venture industry, in London.
Kan says these are areas where Alphabet — the parent company of Google — had a valuable ability to provide patient capital over a long time horizon, enabled by Google’s core profitability.
“It helps to be attached to one of the most successful and profitable businesses of all time which enabled patience,” said Kan. “There is a commitment to long-term bets, long-term investments.”
Waymo, the self-driving car startup that is one of the projects under the Other Bets division is an example of that patience, said Kan. Waymo cars have recently started to be trialled on the streets of London, but the company was established back in 2009 and has only really started to take off as a business in the past two years. As Kan puts it, Waymo “took 15 years to become an overnight success”.
Established in 2015, the Other Bets division was set up to hold Alphabet’s ambitious, longer-horizon “moonshot” ventures outside of its core search, advertising and cloud businesses. Designed as an incubator for disruptive innovation, it houses experimental projects such as healthcare data research organisation Verily, as well as Google’s secretive X Moonshot Factory, and investment funds GV and CapitalG.
Kan described the Other Bets division had been designed as a series “innovation substrates” on which new ventures could grow, a bottom-up innovation culture that is in contrast to the more top down model adopted by Apple. Kan argues that while “there is a very clear way to fail at innovation, there is not one, clear success mode”.
Alphabet’s answer has been to build a variety of different innovation environments from the X Moonshot Factory, which draws both internal talent and external “moonshot explorers”, to independent entities with their own boards.
Two of the Other Bets, GV and CapitalG, operate as conventional venture and growth funds, focused on financial returns with Alphabet as the sole LP but not an investment committee participant. Elsewhere, companies such as drug discovery venture Isomorphic Labs run with their own boards and governance, while X reports more directly into Alphabet’s leadership.
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Maija Palmer
Maija Palmer is editor of Global Venturing and puts together the weekly email newsletter (sign up here for free).
