Claudia Fan Munce, chairman of GCV Leadership Society and head of IBM Venture Capital until January this year, told the conference how much more mainstream corporate venturing has become in the past 15 years.
Demand for top talent is reaching an all-time high thanks to growing recognition of the importance of corporate venture capital (CVC), said Claudia Fan Munce, former head of IBM Venture Capital, in her keynote speech at the Global Corporate Venturing Symposium today.
“It is an incredible time for CVCs,” said Fan Munce, chairman of GCV Leadership Society, who in January this year became the first female venture adviser to noted venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA).
“There is a tremendous recognition of how powerful the venture army is to overall corporate innovation strategy, recognition that [CVC] is a powerful tool for a large corporation.”
Fan Munce began her career in corporate venturing in around 2000 and recently left IBM after 30 years, but said leading the firm’s venture fund has been one of the best jobs she has ever had.
“If you like tech, it is like being a kid in a candy store – every day there is a new entrepreneur, a new technology, new disruptions, new paradigms, new business models,” said Fan Munce, adding that the biggest industry transformation she has seen over the past 15 years is the mainstreaming of CVC in the corporate world.
“From the days of having to explain ourselves to having people calling on you, asking: ‘Can you help us innovate?’ – that is the biggest change,” Fan Munce said.
Fan Munce’s advice for CVC industry professionals who are just starting out? Now that CVCs have increasingly high profile roles in corporations, it is all the more important to “find champions who can really back you to do what you’re doing…make sure the CEOs, the line manager, the P&L owner sees the value…understand what gaps they are seeing, what is keeping them awake at night.”
Fan Munce was interviewed on stage by George Ugras, managing director at IBM Ventures, who said in the past there was a traditional three-to-five year VC cycle as defined by the financial investor community, but now, “unless you are institutionalised, you get squeezed in the middle.”
Ugras’s current focus is on crafting a new CVC playbook, he explained. Fan Munce agreed, revealing that at NEA she will be working on helping to design a new best practice model that represents a collaboration between financial VCs and corporate VCs.
– Photo of Claudia Fan Munce courtest of IBM
