Gaining Independence as a CVC | Building a CVC From Scratch Highlights | Food & Ag-Tech Happy Hour & More
Upcoming online and in-person events around the Counter Club... anecdotes and tips on best practices of launching a CVC 💡
Many interesting new events taking place in the coming months! Login to your Counter Club account and register now: https://counterclub.vc.
Important reminder: download the Counter Club app from the app store (iPhone only) to use the community on mobile. Latest updates:
Our speakers for the Women in CVC Summit (May 9).
We’re co-hosting the Future of Food & Ag-Tech CVC Happy Hour with Rich Product Foods (March 21st in San Francisco).
A B2B SaaS Happy Hour bringing together investors and founders in at Counterpart’s office (Feb 27 in San Francisco).
Follow us on Linkedin to stay in the loop.
Next Online Event: Gaining Independence as a CVC
CVCs frequently ask the question: how can we gain independence from our sole corporate LP? Whether you are trying to carefully spin out the entire fund or take on external capital to support your ambitious motives, dial in to our upcoming online event to learn how other CVCs have successfully raised outside capital. We’ll first speak with Anish Srivastava, Venture Partner at Swisscom Ventures to learn how they were able to raise external capital while maintaining the support of the corporate mothership.
Before Swisscom Ventures, Anish was leading Citi Ventures' Global Accelerators & Innovation fund and a key leader in JP Morgan Chase's Digital Customer Experience & Innovation organization. Prior, Anish held various senior & executive positions at startups such as Egreetings, Geodesic, and Lexy pioneering new consumer-facing mobile services. He also led mobile innovation and business development at Orange, in Silicon Valley and London. Early in his career, he was part of the development team that built Bank of America’s first online banking website and first credit card website.
During this session, we will dive into the process of how Swisscom Ventures successfully gained its independence. We will ask questions about how they aligned incentives between the corporate parent, GPs of the fund and external capital source(s). While ths process may not serve as a complete blueprint for other CVCs, there are many lessons to be learned. An additional speaker for this panel will be announced soon.
How to Register
Thursday, February 15th
9:00-10:00 AM Pacific Time
Location: Zoom, register with the links below or login to your Counter Club account.
If you are a leader at your corporation and considering launching a fund, we welcome you to apply to join our Counter Club Community of 600+ Corporate Investors worldwide and head to the events page to RSVP.
Alternatively, you can register only for this Zoom webinar (requires approval):
Building a CVC From Scratch: Key Points and Takeaways
If you couldn’t make it to our first online event of the year, here are some insights from the leaders from Prisma Ventures (Ulta Beauty) and CRH Ventures on how and why they launched a CVC fund. We also asked for some expert commentary from Counter Club advisory member William O’Donnell and our very own, Patrick Eggen.
RULE #1 – You need an executive sponsor & justification for your existence
“We started understanding that we couldn't create everything as a Digital Innovation team. We understood that the startups were creating the future," said Augustina Sartori, Founding Managing Director of Prisma Ventures on the alignment between their VP of Innovation, Chief Digital Officer and SVP of Strategy to launch Prisma Ventures in August, 2022.
For Chris Fortunato, Vice President of CRH Ventures, one challenge early on was differentiating general investments and commercially viable opportunities that would benefit their customers.
"It’s important to draw a distinction between investing in companies that could be a commercial solution vs. a company that has technology that we would like to evangelize," recalled Fortunato. He gave the example of autonomous equipment, where he might invest even though they're not OEMs (original equipment manufacturers).
RULE #2 —Simplicity: Set up the fund and investment committee with the ability to make decisions fast
Similarly for William O’Donnell, Managing Director and Founder of Prologis Ventures, he realized early on that their venture unit required a separate venture investment committee since "investing in venture required a different mindset"—yes it does, hat tip to Ilya Strebulaev's presentation at Counter IV, “The Venture Mindset: How to Beat Competition.” While Prologis Ventures has a rigorous diligence process, approval from this separate committee is quick and nimble.
RULE #3 —Setting Expectations and Delivering Results
Patrick Eggen, Founding General Partner of Counterpart Ventures, shared a typical time horizon and ways to deliver on meaningful KPIs with the mothership depending on your stage and mandate.
For the first 1-3 years, show it is working. For Agustina and Prisma Ventures, this means looking at KPIs with a strategic lens like how many strategic collaborations involving technology creation they did and and the impact on Ulta Beauty.
Years 3-5 – scaling: rinse + repeat. During this time, Prologis Ventures really distilled their thesis process and the importance of it outlined above.
Year 5 & beyond: financial returns. As Patrick and William both preached, “If it is losing money, it isn’t strategic.”
Head to Counter Club for the full notes package, or read a longer version of these takeaways on LinkedIn.
Future of Food & Ag-Tech Happy Hour
We are teaming up with our friends at Rich Products Foods to bring together CVCs during the large annual food / ag-tech conference (Future Food Tech and World Agri-Tech).
Thursday, March 21st
5:30 PM-8:30 PM Pacific Time
Location: Revealed upon registration
Women in CVC Summit
We’re three months out from emerging and established female corporate investors coming together in wine country. Since our speaker drop last week, we have a limited amount of remaining spots. Register now for this exclusive event, log in to your Counter Club account for full details.
Thursday, May 9th
Francis Ford Coppola Winery
*See discounted rates for nearby hotels on the event page
Deal Parties
We’ve been bringing together investors in the Counter Club to share deals they are working on through our event Deal Party. During this short 30-minute event, up to 10 investors will share 3 deals they are working on in rapid format. These could be portfolio companies or startups that the investor has recently met. The idea and intention is to get investors in the community to share trends they are excited about.
You can register for the next upcoming events via the Counter Club:
Healthcare (Digital Healthcare + Therapeutics),
April 25th, 10:00-11:00 AM Pacific TimeResources (ClimateTech)
June 26th, 10:00-11:00 AM Pacific Time
That’s all for now folks,
The Counterpart Team