How to Drive Your Business Forward: The Power and Opportunity of Leveraging Corporate Venture Capital: Otter Voice Meeting Notes

How to Drive Your Business Forward: The Power and Opportunity of Leveraging Corporate Venture Capital

Yashad Kulkarni40min

Connie Loizos

00:00

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us this morning, Arvin. So great to see you. Thank you for making time for this. We really appreciate it.

Unknown Speaker

00:14

Thank you for having me and good to see you as well funny.

Connie Loizos

00:18

So some of you will know and others are meeting Arvind today, but he is a longtime VC who actually started his career at Intel as a circuit designer, which is interesting. before spending nearly a decade with Menlo ventures, then Arvin in 2011, you helped found corporates, I'm sorry, city's corporate venture group. And Arvin remains the Global Head of venture investing and sets the group's overall strategy. You've partnered with all kinds of companies since creating this unit, square DocuSign honey Plaid betterment jet comm data robot tanium digit good work Arvin, I guess maybe you can start by telling us a little bit about how the operation works. And of course, how you persuaded these companies to work with you.

Speaker 1

01:07

Yeah, absolutely. Pleasure to be here. And thanks to TC for, for having me, welcome to all the attendees. As you, as you mentioned, Connie, I think, have been doing this for about 10 years. And what's been very interesting to see is the change in attitudes about taking capital from corporates, from from the startup standpoint, but also the traditional VC investor standpoint. But also more importantly, how startup corporates have changed their view and change their mindset about working with startups. I think, in the in the decade that I've been doing it the doing, the corporate venture capital ecosystem has mature tremendously. And by in general, not I'm just not talking about city, but I'm talking about corporates in general are much more open to partnering with startups, they're, you know, if more flexible in how they they operate with startups, you know, there's a certain way in which big companies operate and a certain way in which startups operate the speed, there is a big speed mismatch. And, and we sort of jokingly think about it as sort of this impedance mismatch, which we which we bridge right, which we, you know, bridge that gap. And so, I think all of those, you know, all of those things have have substantially improved over the decade that I've been, I've been doing this. I mean, I think this session is about how, you know, founders, and especially especially early stage companies move their business forward. And I think, you know, we're making the case here that, that having a corporate VC around the table, is actually a really good idea. You know, it's the, the corporate VCs bring a different set of skills, a different value proposition to the the startup cap table to the board to the, you know, the set of people that are working with a startup and, and I think it could be very helpful to actually have a corporate as a part of your syndicate.

Connie Loizos

03:06

Can I can I interrupt you real quickly? You know, I am wondering, in this market, you mentioned speed. I mean, I've never seen things move this fast in my career. I'm just wondering, how have you had to kind of I mean, how have you, how have you adapted and I guess how city reacted to you're asked to write checks a lot faster, perhaps you have in the past?

Speaker 1

03:32

It's a great question. Connie, when I first came to city ventures, one of the first things that I worked on is really what does the process look like? Right, and I had to work with sort of internal risk teams, compliance teams, etc, since we're a regulated entity, you know, a big financial institution. And so, having been in the venture world, for a decade, before I came to city, I was able to design a process, and we were able to design a process really, that that met the needs of the program. First of all, we had very supportive senior management within city and supportive control functions, you know, people within risk people within compliance that are very supportive individuals. So we were able to design something that had sort of a fairly predictable timeframes to it could work reasonably fast. And, you know, if I think about the investments we have made over the last 10 years, in a lot of those cases, we have, we have closed those investments along with sort of the main investors and the financial investors. We have not had to wait for a second close or we've not had to request the company to do a second close. We've been able to close along with the rest of the the syndicate. Occasionally we'll have to ask for additional time. But I think it comes down to designing this process that actually takes into account how fast these things move and how you know, startups and VCs operate and then matching that to whatever needs to happen. From a process standpoint, internally. To give you an example, this year, has been our busiest year yet, you know, we've closed 25 investments, and the first half of 14 of them are new investments. 11 of them are follow on, but each one of them we have to follow a process. And, you know, so the team, you know, suffice to say, has been extremely busy. But it's worked, because we've set up that process, and we've had very supportive control functions.

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