Global Corporate Venturing Rising Stars Awards 2016: Courtney Robinson

Courtney Robinson, a principal and founding member at Advance Vixeid Partners (AVP), an independent investment firm established in partnership with US-based media group Advance Publications, is a successful serial entrepreneur – focused on helping create top tier corporate venturing units.

She joined as a founding member of AVP in October 2014, having previously held the same role as a founder at Amex Ventures, the strategic investment group of credit card company American Express, in 2011 “to help launch the venture efforts there and open the Palo Alto office”.

While the parent companies’ core businesses at both institutions are in different fields, Robinson has brought his own insights into helping set up AVP.

“I am proud of having been a founding member of both Amex Ventures and AVP, creating the infrastructure and processes to lay the foundation for a successful and efficient team.

“Many of the biggest challenges in corporate venturing are related to the sponsorship model. There is a fundamental disconnect between business units, who are focused on delivering results for this quarter or year, and corporate venture units that are thinking about how the world will look in five to 10 years.

“There are several examples of this structure preventing investments in companies that will go on to produce outsized returns.

“Part of what attracted me to the opportunity at AVP is that we made the decision, along with Advance, to operate outside of this structure and make decisions autonomous among our small team.”

But there are other examples where good deals were completed. Robinson said: “I am also proud of the continued success of several of the investments I championed at Amex, specifically: RetailNext, Bill.com, Learnvest and Instacart.”

As AVP starts investing, Robinson is looking to tap into Advance’s existing media portfolio, which includes Condé Nast, Bright House Networks, Reddit, Advance Local, Discovery Communications, American City Business Journals and 1010data.

She said: “AVP seeks to profit by applying the expertise possessed by Advance as an established owner and operator of a broad set of technology, media and marketing businesses.

“The firm uniquely benefits from its association with Advance and its businesses. It enables us to develop significant market insights and gain access to proprietary or advantageously originated investment opportunities. It also enables us to enhance portfolio company value by using the strategic and operating resources of Advance.

“AVP’s strategy is to unlock the intellectual capital existing within Advance as the legacy of operating world-class media and marketing businesses over the course of almost 100 years and to apply this intellectual capital to generate attractive financial returns.”

Robinson then hopes to share these insights as a way to help the industry and encourage “collaboration around industry-standard benchmarks related to measurement of strategic success, in addition to financial success”.

Before joining Amex Ventures, Robinson worked at Plum District, a local commerce company targeting the ‘mom and family vertical’, for less than a year in 2011. She started her career in investment banking at GCA Savvian after going to Columbia University to study economics, “where I played varsity field hockey”.