Deidre Paknad, cofounder and chief executive of WorkBoard, is a serial entrepreneur on her third company, with a track record of building venture-backed businesses alongside both corporate and traditional investors. 

The following points summarise the key themes for corporate investors that emerged from her interview.

  • Corporate investors should be selected with clear strategic intent, not as a fallback source of capital. Paknad described building her cap table to influence customer credibility, ecosystem positioning and market access. 
  • The strongest CVC value lies in “sell to, sell with, innovate with”: 
    • acting as customers, 
    • enabling co-selling into enterprise accounts, 
    • and supporting joint product development and roadmaps. 
  • Signalling effects matter. Having corporates such as Workday or Intel as investors helped clarify market positioning, reduce perceived competition and accelerate customer trust. 
  • “What great looks like” for founders: 
    • set realistic, deliverable expectations, 
    • provide structured support (playbooks, programmes, clear interfaces), 
    • and offer hands-on guidance through enterprise sales and partnerships.
  • CVC teams need operational “machinery” (people, processes, defined routes) to execute on promises; ad hoc support is insufficient for scaling value. 
  • Compared with traditional VCs, CVCs can lack sensitivity to startup stages. Founders face low success odds (around 18%) and must continually “debug” the business; investors must understand shifting priorities across seed to growth stages. 
  • Empathy and proximity matter. The best investors are those founders would contact in both success and crisis, reflecting deep engagement with the journey. 
  • In the AI era, all pre-2022 startups should be treated as “reset to series A”: revalidating product, market, pricing and operating models. 
  • Corporates should learn not just from new AI-native firms, but from mid-stage portfolio companies that have transformed themselves while operating at scale. 
  • Key investment areas highlighted: AI, defence and “physical AI”, with strong deal flow but increasing pressure towards profitability. 

This summary was generated by AI and lightly edited by GCV staff.