Girish Nadkarni instigated the refounding of Switzerland-based industrial company ABB’s corporate venturing unit slightly more than three years ago.
Nadkarni, managing director of ABB Technology Ventures, said: “I proposed the creating of a corporate venture group to my chief executive about three years ago. We were sitting on a lot of cash and due to the financial crisis the VC community was sitting on its hands not doing a lot of investing.
“Like most large companies, we suffered from the not-invented-here problem and setting this up would address a whole bunch of issues. He had come from GE, so I knew he would understand. We have deployed close to $150m and we look at close to 1000 deals a year from all over the world. We now have a tremendous amount of acceptance internally. Leading start-ups as well as major VC firms invite us to lead or co-lead.”
He added: “My job is to make ABB more paranoid, like Andy Grove’s book titled ‘Only the Paranoid Survive’. Big companies like ABB, Siemens and Schneider have to be paranoid. Historically our competitors were the likes of Alstom, Schneider, and Honeywell. Our future competition is not just coming from traditional competition but certain companies like Cisco, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Procter & Gamble, not to mention thousands of start-ups all over the globe.”
Before setting up ABB Technology Ventures, Nadkarni was senior vice-president of ABB’s robotics division. He also worked at venture capital firm View Group, and as an entrepreneur at start-ups vSimplify and Uniprise.
Among other roles, he has worked at industrial conglomerate GE, financial group Prudential and law firm Shearman & Sterling. He has a master of business administration from Harvard Business School and studied law as well as economics and statistics at University of Mumbai.