The Top 20: #8 Larry Illg, CEO, Naspers Ventures
There seems something slightly ironic that one of the world’s most successful venture investors for nearly 20 years only last year formally set up a unit using the word “ventures”.
Then again, South Africa-listed media and commerce group Naspers has always been iconic following its initial standout success in backing China-based media group Tencent, with its near-$250bn market capitalisation, and then following up with a host of other landmark deals in emerging markets around the world.
But its approach to investing in developed markets changed in late 2015 from avoidance – after some middling deals in Europe in the 1990s – to active investments in the US.
Bloomberg reported Naspers investing $100m in Letgo, a US-based mobile-only classified advertising application, in September 2015.
Bob van Dijk, Naspers CEO, said at the time: “We will probably have more focus on the San Francisco Bay area than we have had previously. If we see the right opportunities we could see ourselves put a good amount of capital there.”
This led to the opening of Naspers Ventures in San Francisco in May last year under Larry Illg, a former Ebay online auction company executive. Illg joined Naspers in 2013 from real estate listings platform Trulia, where he served as general manager of new ventures. He was chief operating officer of Naspers’ e-commerce assets prior to taking the reins at Naspers Ventures.
Naturally, with these moves attention was whether Naspers would focus on expanding the e-commerce activities that had helped fuel its rise.
But apart from reinvesting in Movile in Brazil, the initial deals under Illg and Russell Dreisenstock, head of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and international investments at Naspers Ventures, who moved from Singapore to the US last summer, indicate instead the unit is to help Naspers develop into an education division through venturing and M&A in the way Germany-based publisher Bertelsmann has also tried in the past few years.
Illg is board director at Codecademy, which is “teaching the world to code”, Udemy, a learning and teaching marketplace, and Brainly, the world’s largest social learning network with 70 million-plus users.
Van Dijk said in a press release announcing Brainly’s round: “Naspers is consistently looking to invest in the leaders in markets that have global scale and the potential to be transformed by technology. The sizeable education market is a perfect fit.
“Improving education delivery is a huge focus in every region around the globe, and Brainly has identified a way that technology can help drive educational impact beyond the traditional classroom model. What is more, they have already proven their business works across geographies and we aim to accelerate their growth and impact worldwide.”
Outside the US, Naspers Ventures has expanded by opening offices in Singapore and India. Ashutosh Sharma has been recruited from venture capital firm Norwest Venture Partners to head the new office and will lead Naspers’ VC and M&A deals in India. Sharma was a vice-president for Norwest in India, having previously been an investment manager at Qualcomm Ventures, the corporate venturing arm of mobile chipmaker Qualcomm, between 2010 and 2012.
Naspers Ventures is already exploring deals in India, and is seeking deals where it will invest between $10m and $50m in companies developing consumer internet, e-commerce, healthcare, education and logistics technologies in return for a minority stake.
Naspers had previously invested roughly $1.5bn in India-based companies, which include e-commerce firm Flipkart and Ibibo, the online travel booking platform acquired by competitor MakeMyTrip last year.
