The rest of the 100 (in alphabetical order): Emma Lloyd, Sky
Sky, an entertainment and communications business in 22 million homes across the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria and Italy, was under competing offers at around an enterprise value of £22bn ($28bn) from shareholder 21st Century Fox and rivals such as Disney and Comcast in the spring, but this has yet to stop Emma Lloyd, director of business development, strategic partnerships and investments, or her team.
The latest offers are more than 50% up on the £7 offer made in 2010 by Fox’s predecessor, News Corp, and reflected the growth of the company and ability to tap into future opportunities, including through venturing.
Sky’s Startup Investments & Partnerships unit started officially in 2013 after Sky made a few opportunistic investments. Lloyd then called in Marek Rubasinski as director of Sky Ventures in mid-2015. Rubasinski, director of UK-based media company Sky’s startup investments and partnerships team, has just left the company to pursue new opportunities at Polystream with James McClurg now as lead for its corporate venturing team and Mike Martin, senior investment manager at Sky Ventures.
Its early success over the past three to four years include at least five exits to date, including 1Mainstream, acquired in October 2015 by Cisco, and Elemental, acquired the same month for $269m by Amazon. Another successful deal was its investment in virtual reality (VR) startup Jaunt in 2013, which led Sky to set up its own VR studio, launch a VR app and strike a commercial deal with the startup. But its biggest financial win has been the flotation of Roku, which went public with a market cap of $1.33bn. On the first day of trading, share price went up by 70%, and within a few days, the group had managed to nearly double in value, hitting a $2.5bn market cap. According to an internal source, the IPO effectively returned all the money Sky Ventures had invested in all its portfolio companies and in running the operation even though it had only a relatively small share of Roku.
Other investments closed by Sky during the year 2017 included Circle Media Labs ($2m), Fubo TV ($55m led by Northzone and Scripps Network Interactive), Molotov TV and Drone Racing League (DRL).
Sky has investments in 19 startups in the US and Europe and in two boutique funds. Before her current role started in 2013, Lloyd had been director of emerging products and business development director since 2008, after joining from phone operator BT.
