Global Corporate Venturing Rising Stars Awards 2017: #12 Tamiko Hutchinson

Tamiko Hutchinson is Intel Capital president Wendell Brooks’s chief of staff and also managing director of the world’s biggest corporate venturing unit’s portfolio management group formed last year to help its portfolio companies accelerate their growth.

This is a big role as the annual Intel Capital Global Summit organised by Lee Sessions, managing director in Hutchinson’s new team, alone features more than 1,000 guests, including the CEOs of more than 300 portfolio companies.

With Brooks deciding to shrink Intel Capital’s corporate venture capital portfolio from 400-plus companies to between 250 to 300 over the next five to six years, more may be expected to be offered to those remaining.

Hutchinson said: “My goal is to help entrepreneurial companies accelerate their growth and route to market through tighter relationships with Intel’s business groups, our technology experts and our global network of business partners.

“Intel Capital president Wendell Brooks has reinvigorated our approach to strategic investing and adding value is an essential element. It is a great opportunity to take a blank piece of paper and draw up how we can help our startup companies. I am thrilled to be leading one of the most important changes at Intel Capital.”

She said she had joined Intel Capital in 1997 “when the group itself was a startup in venture capital”. She added: “I worked to help the organisation scale from a portfolio of only a few companies to hundreds of companies based in many different countries.

“I am proud to have created and led a team back in the days from 1997 as we were one of the first global venture capitalists, negotiating shareholder positions and exits in jurisdictions around the world. We negotiated positions in France, India, China, Japan, Canada, the UK, Australia, South America, and more.

“As Intel Capital made investments in these different geographies where a Sand Hill [Road, the epicentre of venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, California] standard deal was not the norm, my team had to solve many problems in new ways. Intel Capital has invested in 57 countries and helped more than 200 companies go public and more than 350 go through an acquisition.

“I am also proud to have set much of the infrastructure and policies years ago that helped Intel Capital scale broadly and in volume. As I see what other CVCs and VCs use, I am surprised that many do not have a better set of infrastructure tools.”

This insight has led Hutchinson to one of the ways her portfolio management group can help both her companies and the industry overall.

She said: “I am immensely passionate about helping companies grow. In order to achieve our objective, I want to radically enhance the way our corporation values, interacts and collaborates with our startup companies. I also want to change the way we [at Intel Capital] interact and collaborate with the external CVC community.

“Now is the perfect time for CVCs to come together across industries as digitisation and computers are offering transformational opportunities. I would love to sit down with CVCs in the biotech and pharmaceutical industry segments to collaborate on what we can do for investments in this space. I would love to collaborate with CVCs in the sports and entertainment areas as well. Industries are being disrupted and today’s technology capabilities create unlimited possibilities.”

Her mandate effectively to “practise the art of possibility thinking on a broad scale” is designed to help tackle what Hutchinson recognised as one of the biggest challenges in creating new things inside an organisation such as Intel Capital, that was highly successful before Brooks took it over last year from Arvind Sodhani.

Its possibility in turn has been aided by Hutchinson’s experience watching Intel Capital’s growth from its earliest days, then time away from the team to work in other departments at Intel.

She said: “Prior to CVC I worked at a bank [Smith Barney, now part of Morgan Stanley] analysing projects ranging from hospitals to real estate to stadiums, and helping structure debt for municipal projects and utilities. I have received benefit from my range of experiences, from being a complete Excel geek structuring financial deals to being in the pressure cooker of working with institutional traders live on the trading desk.

“One day, 20 years ago, I read an article in a chief financial officers’ magazine that described how John Doerr [a legendary venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers] was helping startup companies with amazing technology that would bring change in a remarkable way to business and every day life. I had grown up in the Silicon Valley environment full of inventions but this was the first time that I saw small companies aiming to make big changes.

“Intel was making investments in small tech companies too – I learned that Intel was taking an active role in helping companies advance their technologies and enabling adoption, and with Intel’s global mindset the new technologies could come from anywhere on the globe. I wrote to Les Vadász [one of the founding team and first president of Intel Capital] at Intel and asked for a job.

“I joined Intel Capital in 1997, and having worked in the group for 13 years, I decided to move outside the CVC group, but within Intel, to gain other experiences that would help me grow. I moved to England and led European offshore cash management, built relationships with our factory network in Ireland and Israel, worked in sales to understand design wins in mobile products, worked in human resources management, and served as the chief of staff for the president of M&A [Brooks before his move to take on Intel Capital]. I returned to Intel Capital in the final three months of 2015.

“In my spare time at work, I provide consulting for Intel’s America’s Greatest Makers’ contest which was produced by Mark Burnett [president of MGM Television and Digital Group] and aired in a series of TV episodes in 2016. I also provide help to the Intel Sports group as they showcase Intel computer capability in the form of a NBA 360 replay.

“In my spare time at home, I try to support my family of sports fanatics. Among several team sports volunteer roles, I am on the board of directors of a non-profit youth soccer league with more than 800 players.“

Given such experience and vision to develop the portfolio management group, few fans of entrepreneurs would bet against Hutchinson’s ability to improve their lot.