All the best parties have after-parties. And while not quite a 24-hour party people in one way, the GCV Digital Forum has 600 attendees from across the time zones creating a unique network and sharing of insights on 3-4 June.
To take one sample: “Great session, Linda – hope there was good follow-on chat in your booth [after her Buy, Build, Partner and Invest panel] and nice to see Ira [Ehrenpreis, early investor and board member of Tesla, SpaceX,] join, too!”
Mach49 CEO Linda Yates: June 03, 9:45 pm
“Actually, it was crazy as all these people wanted to continue so we did a spontaneous zoom meeting with about 15 people and then people who joined late asked if we would do it again so they could ask questions. Pretty cool and a good lesson for either next digital one, we will automatically set up a zoom and post it for folks to go to if they want to continue the dialogue. And even at the live events, say, we can take a meeting room and say ‘hey, if people want to continue the dialogue come to this room’.”
Not all the conversations were so public, as a series of private NDA (non-disclosure agreement) sessions run by David Stevenson at Merck and Michael Celiceo at Clarity unpicked the strategic direction corporate venturing can take and how to engage with a wider set of stakeholders.
The core message to “evangelize the idea that CVC is here to stay”.
Scott Lenet, president, and Beth Kearns, partner, at Touchdown Ventures ran a short poll during their session, Shifting Gears: Commercial Deals, that found while some corporations were slowing down their new investments, others were keeping to the same pace (something our news editor will testify too after the second-biggest news week ever last week).
And corporations are becoming increasingly aware of their power to support portfolio companies and entrepreneurs more broadly through being a customer or supplier. The second question in Touchdown’s poll surprised, in a positive way, Lenet as nearly half the respondents said their corporate parent had strategic or commercial relationships with about three-quarters of portfolio companies. But that is probably to be expected from such a smart group.
Andrew Fisher, senior director at US restaurant group Chick Fil-A’s Red Wagon innovation unit, won Touchdown’s ‘Who’s the Smartest CVC’ game over quarantinis at the (formal) end of the first day and promptly donated the prize to the CDC. (David Horowitz runs these quizzes each Sunday to raise $20,000 for the CDC so happy for more to sign up.)
And the spirit of generosity and consideration ran through the entire forum as Samsung NEXT shared its playbook and survey for thinking through more diversity and inclusion among portfolio companies. Speakers pointed to the need to use innovation for positive impact on society and to join up across governments, universities, including from the powerful SETsquared ecosystem, and corporations as well as other venture investors.
Jim Wilkinson, interim CEO of Oxford Sciences Innovation, celebrated its fifth anniversary since starting a £600m fund to primarily support University of Oxford spinout and said “such a lot has happened. The next five years should be really exciting as our portfolio companies begin to show results!”
Some of these spinouts are already producing vaccines to treat Covid-19.
Governments are also stepping up and leaning in. Shiva Dustdar, head of division Innovation Finance Advisory at European Investment Bank, joining Wilkinson, Elizabeth Boggs Davidsen, director of SDG Impact at United Nations Development Programme, Gwennael Joliff-Botrel from the European Commission, and Jon Lauckner, president of GM Ventures, General Motors’ corporate venturing unit, in talking about how governments are providing the billions and looking to corporations to bring the trillions of dollars on their balance sheets to tackle the sustainable development goals laid out by the UN.
Lauckner has been doing exactly this crowding in building a stellar portfolio (not all public) to help GM prepare over the past decade for the triple wave of disruption of electrification, ride sharing and autonomous. He leaves behind this summer a company after 41 years with a powerful CVC unit and team, similar to how David Gilmour, head of BP Ventures, has achieved for the oil major. Fortunately, both will stay involved in innovation and venture and the GCV ecosystem to pass on their wisdom and, as Gilmour said in his opening discussion, what I wished I knew about CVC when I started to effect change faster.
The time is now more broadly for innovation to meet capital (the theme for our GCVI Summit in California on 27-28 January).
One of the attendees at the Digital Forum, SoftBank, announced a $100m Opportunity Growth Fund to invest in companies founded by people of colour and will waive a management fee or carry.
As Inga Müller, senior operations manager at EnBW New Ventures, posted on social media: “My favourite quotes of the day came from Jacqueline LeSage Krause [head of Munich Re Ventures] on positive change that can come out of the Corona crisis: ‘The status quo is a decision.’”
BLCK VC is hosting a virtual event, We Won’t Wait, after the Digital Forum after 12 PST. It is time some practices came to an end – that is the true opportunity through innovation.
