Neal Hansch is handing over the leadership of Silicon Foundry to Mark Menell at a time when many corporate venture units are seeing an underlying re-set in priorities.
Silicon Foundry, the San Francisco-based innovation advisory acquired by Kearney in 2023, is undergoing a leadership handover that neatly mirrors a broader shift in corporate venturing: away from pure financial plays and back towards strategic impact and venture clienting.
After a decade “helping lead the charge at Silicon Foundry”, chief executive Neal Hansch is stepping aside to join a Fortune 50 conglomerate in a global strategic role. Leadership passes to Mark Menell, a long-time colleague with whom Hansch has “worked at multiple firms together in venture and advisory” over some 20 years. Menell has been a senior executive at Silicon Foundry for five years.
He describes his first weeks in charge as “a little bit of a listening tour”, focused on clients and staff. The firm, he argues, is benefitting from powerful structural tailwinds.
“We are, dare I say, beneficiaries of the AI tailwind,” he says. “Most of what we’re seeing and touching is involved in AI in one way, shape, or form,” whether through corporate venture, digital transformation, or what the firm brands corporate development as a service (CDaS) – applying its “same sourcing and scouting muscle” to M&A and partnerships as to traditional CVC.
Crucially, Menell and Hansch see their work as aligned with an underlying re-set in corporate venturing itself. Venture clienting – where commercial relationships precede or even replace investment – is becoming “really palpable”. As Menell puts it, “we’re not in the stock picking business, we’re in the solution identification business”, whether that leads to “pure venture clienting or venture clienting with an investment.”
Hansch says a number of corporates learned lessons in the last CVC cycle: while financial returns are important, the fundamental purpose of a CVC unit is to bring strategic impact back to the mothership. Financial returns alone, even if “incredible”, are “still a rounding error in the grand scheme of things of this massive company,” he says.
That perspective reflects a maturing ecosystem. Today, the focus is shifting back to what Hansch calls “injecting innovation into the larger [organisation]” through venture clienting, partnerships and, where justified, investment.
Silicon Foundry’s own strategy is to double down on that connective role, including “one-to-many programmes” such as multi-corporate treks and new “innovation circles” that emphasise peer-to-peer learning among innovation leaders. As corporates reassess the purpose of their venturing units, Silicon Foundry is betting that this more grounded, operationally focused model is not just a passing fashion, but the new centre of gravity.
Maija Palmer
Maija Palmer is editor of Global Venturing and puts together the weekly email newsletter (sign up here for free).
