Global Corporate Venturing Rising Stars Awards 2017: Vartan Minasyan

The marriage of entrepreneur and investor is a study of psychology and people’s motivations and a subject of enduring fascination for Vartan Minasyan, head of investment and innovation at Kaspersky Lab, a Russia-based cybersecurity company.

While being an electronics engineer out of Moscow Mining University, in information technology for 20 years, Minasyan said he had been a wedding photographer years ago and, “personally, my biggest interest in the people’s motivation, as it is not very predictable.

And in a financial world where most accelerators take 6% to 10% of a startup’s equity for the insights shared during the programme, Minasyan, perhaps predictably, went the other direction in its corporate venturing capital initiative when he became head in August 2014, seven years after joining Kaspersky.

He said: “CVCs should differentiate stronger from VCs, moving from financial to strategic goals, playing a more important role in open innovation activities.

“Also, CVCs should give back more to the ecosystem and engineering community, as corporations have generally longer strategies than VCs – creating free acceleration and pilot programs with every possible case and cause.

“For me, CVC is a matter how big corporation can give back to a technological community, resulting in new products and new business. Uniting energy of a startup and experience of a corporation is a very interesting professional task as sometimes you have to align forces that originally trying to fight or avoid each other.

“I am proud of two things that happened for the last year: First, we saw over 600 startups of our interest with some of them now building pilots with us or out partners and, second, our own Kaspersky Start acceleration program, which helps earliest-stage entrepreneurs build their first startup with help of a large company, had no charge or equity taken.”

But even with such apparent alignment with founders wanting to hold on to their stock, Minasyan said his biggest challenge – “always” – was to “align the pace of a corporation and startup without breaking both of them”.