Global Corporate Venturing Rising Stars Awards 2017: Jason Smith

Most corporations planning to expand their corporate venturing practice outside their home state seem to choose California and Silicon Valley as their destination. Sinclair Broadcast Group, a Baltimore, Maryland-based media company, instead chose Seattle in Washington state when they wanted Jason Smith, director of Sinclair Digital Ventures (SDV), to head west and leave his brother and their fine-dining restaurants in Baltimore.

Scott Shapiro, vice-president of corporate development at Sinclair Broadcast Group, said: “Jason started under me about five years ago doing traditional M&A and was instrumental in helping us organise our corporate VC about two years ago.

“At that point we sent him to Seattle to immerse him with our tech team and give us a bicoastal presence.

“In the past two years Jason has spearheaded our research in emerging technology like virtual and augmented reality and drones, and he is also focused on next-generation news content.

“He is an invaluable part of the screening process and has developed a keen eye for things that make sense for Sinclair – which is half the battle. At this point he functions fairly autonomously – as a manager, this is really what I am striving for.”

Seattle might have less of the cache and vibrancy of Silicon Valley but as the home for software provider Microsoft and Amazon, which carried out its first drone delivery in the UK last month, is an important tech hub.

And being a city surrounded by water, Seattle is also a short distance from Smith’s pastime catching fish – even if he prefers to go to the mountains of Montana fly fishing at the Dome Mountain Ranch in Paradise Valley. “To me it is the most peaceful stress releasing activity in the world. Nothing beats you with mother nature trying to land the whale.”

But his day job keeps him active. Smith said: “I represent the west coast operations for the venture group and sole goal is to help our product engineers and sales folks by investing in companies that can help expedite opportunities that are focused on our core. We all know that entrepreneurs can move much faster than traditional companies especially one with 10,000 employees. We put faith in these entrepreneurs to help prove out business models or in some cases disprove use cases at a much lower loss profile.”

However, only his investments in Pioneer Square Labs, ZypMedia and ScoreStream are on the west coast, with NewsOn, a local news streaming platform in New York, Burst.It in the Boston region and Chideo in Texas.

Smith said: “We believe in a two to three-year horizon on successes, so we are at our inflexion point now. We believe there will be some nice wins for us, we measure our return beyond a traditional return-on-investment metric. My personal favorite would be Sorenson Media. It is the future of TV ads for the connected TV.”

Smith was hired by the Sinclair family’s private equity group, Keyser Capital, worked there for a year and then got pulled into the Shapiro’s corporate development unit of Sinclair to help with the $5bn in acquisitions over more than five years until he joined SDV.

He said what attracted him to CVC was the “opportunity to be at the tip of the spear in innovation but work with corp. dev. folks to push boundaries on what our company can become.

“Innovation in our industry is key, failure to continue to innovate will lead to what happened with radio and newspapers, death by 100 cuts.”

But, similar to other CVCs, Smith said “getting buy-in by department leaders to help flex the strategic investment into the current work process of that division” was his major challenge. He added: “Without buy-in from the top, the investments become lost sheep. Sheep herding is half the job, making sure all key stakeholders are up to date on all issues both positive and negative to ensure we course correct to drive best value for our investments and our core operations.”

Longer-term, Smith said: “I am an entrepreneur at heart, have invested in all sorts of things on personal level (property, real estate, seed rounds), at some point I would like to scratch the itch for my own startup that can make an impactful difference in the industry I love the most – media and broadcast.”

And, like many good entrepreneurs, Smiths knows success often involves “giving up some of the upside”.

At SDV, Smith said in a round he would try to “pull in a strategic that is not competitive – helping drive real value.”

After all, a fisherman rarely catches much with an empty hook.