Perhaps the most telling fact about Mark Heesen, who is retiring, having been head of the US trade body National Venture Capital Association [NVCA] for about 14 years, is that he has clocked up nearly two million frequent flyer miles.
The praise Heesen has received from people in the venture and corporate venturing industry appears beyond the typical plaudits reserved for outgoing lobbyists, which makes him the ideal candidate to kick off our new Man in the news section, which will occasionally alternate with our popular Big Deal section. Josh Green, NVCA chairman-elect and partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, went as far as to say in the official press release on Heesen’s retirement, that he would “never be truly replaced”.
In the corporate venturing community, Heesen is regarded as one of the key people who helped bring corporate venturing towards the mainstream of the venture industry. Heesen, who is stepping down after working 22 years at the NVCA, said: “[Corporate venturing] is the one area of growth in venture industry. As you see the number of VC [venture capital] firms shrinking, the corporate side of things is growing. What is interesting to me, and in 22 years I did not see this very often, financial VCs are moving over to the corporate side. It used to be that corporates would become financial VCs.” He added corporates now number roughly 70 of the members of the NVCA. The NVCA recently said corporates are its fastest growing sub-group.
Heesen added: “Large corporates are not doing research and development [R&D] like they did in the past. They want to see the future through portfolio companies. Because they do not have the internal R&D like they had in the past. Instead we are bringing corporates into the venture ecosystem early on. This is not a passing fad as some may think. It is not cyclical. Corporates are much more professionalised, strategic groups. Financial VCs need to wake up a little and understand they are part and parcel of the venture ecosystem going forward and their interests are aligned with the financial VCs.”
Heesen’s departure comes at an interesting inflection point for the venture industry, and how the trade body deals with the rise of corporate venturing is likely to be an area of key focus for the next head of the trade body.
Claudia Fan Munce, managing director of IBM Venture Capital Group and the first ever corporate venturing board member of the NVCA, said: “From the very early days of my participation with the NVCA Corporate Venture subgroup in 2004, one of the key indicators that the NVCA was committed to include the corporate venture community was the presence of Mark Heesen at all our gatherings, and back then those were often very small gatherings. Mark has always made the special trip to be part of those conversations and consistently articulated the NVCA’s support of corporate venture as an important part of the innovation ecosystem of venture capital and the start-ups it represents.”
Fan Munce added: “Mark’s leadership at NVCA and the tremendous team that he built over his tenure is the reason why NVCA is so highly regarded around the world as a key organisation that drives the continued success of venture capital and entrepreneurial innovation in the US.”
In the spirit of the surprising number of air-miles Heesen clocked up, Stephen Socolof, chair of the National Venture Capital Association’s (NVCA) Corporate Venture Group (CVG) Advisory Board, said his residing memory of Heesen was his willingness to “jump on a plane”. He added: “I have always been impressed by his intimate knowledge and understanding of Washington players and politics and his ability to opine on and prognosticate on things going on in Washington.”
Heidi Mason, managing partner of consultancy Bell Mason Group, said under Heesen’s leadership, the NVCA had underwritten what was probably the first event to bridge the divide between corporates and the venture community a decade ago, the Building Bridges event at Stanford.
Mason, who is also co-founder of the recently formed Corporate Venture and Innovation Initiative, of which Global Corporate Venturing is also a member, said: “The Corporate Venture Group of NVCA was created as direct result within the following year: Linda [Yates Holland] and I created the first business plan, which Mark and Janice [Mawson, vice president of membership at the National Venture Capital Association], in particular, drove into reality. This was visionary for all of us involved.”
Mason added: “Mark H. and Janice M. (with their board with them) were willing to put the stake in the ground on corporate venturing and innovation in order to do this, and address through NVCA what was, even then, a clearly apparent corporate segment, of growing importance to the global venturing and innovation ecosystem, with great opportunities for collaboration with VCs and start-ups.”
It is likely the NVCA begins to welcome more corporate venturing executives on to its board. Heesen said: “We don’t carve out seats for every sub-set of the industry. Yet as corporates become a larger part of the venture ecosystem they will have more representation there.”
Heesen believes he had numerous wins as a lobbyist for the venture industry. He said successes of the NVCA during his tenure includes litigation reform in the 1990s, which has protected start-up companies from being “sued into oblivion”,and he was also proud of the work it had done to encourage reform to the Food and Drug Administration approval process, which he described as a “work-in-progress”.
He said the Jobs Act reforms were likely to see more venture-backed companies go public. He said: “The IPO markets are so moribund now. Yet there are a stable of very good companies which want to go public, which will do so when the window opens.”
He added he was pleased to secure a definition of the venture industry during the Dodd-Frank Act. He said: “This was a victory more for the venture capital community itself. We like to work on issues which are important for entrepreneurs. Our view is if the entrepreneur is happy and doing well than we are doing our job. Occasionally an issue which narrowly focuses on the VC industry crops up and we were pleased to successfully get a definition of what VC is into the law.”
No doubt Heesen will be missed at the helm of the venture industry’s most high profile trade association. For now the process of transition is kicking off with headhunter Russell Reynolds searching for his replacement. That person will have big shoes to fill.
