Joseph Vaillancourt, a near seven-year veteran of Waste Management’s corporate venturing unit, has led more than $1bn of equity and debt financings in his career and has also led $600m of mergers and acquisitions activity.
Vaillancourt, managing director, organic growth, said: “One of the achievements I feel most notable over any discrete investment gain is that I assisted in the strategic repositioning of Waste Management [WM].
“WM has been for a long time a traditional waste management company focused on the aggregation and disposal of waste using longstanding disposal options with landfilling being key. Our group helped provide needed perspective that we were entering a phase of significant disruption that would have long-term consequences.
“We helped recognise trends in corporate and individual sustainability behaviours driving alternative landfill disposal options and waste reduction. We performed a comprehensive deep dive on emerging waste-based conversion technologies and developed new economic supply chains that would allow WM to proactively reposition itself from waste management company to a resource management company that can leverage innovation to optimise the value in its waste streams.
“Our corporate venturing unit exists in a portion of the clean-tech sector experiencing significant headwinds due to capital scarcity. There are many causes for these headwinds but essentially it is proving too long and more expensive than expected to get to stable and growing profitability, which ultimately affects monetisation feasibility and timing. However, as we are in a disruptive sector transition, we need to find ways to maintain proactive involvement in this activity while mitigating financial risks and are therefore rationalising the tools we deploy for obtaining strategic leverage.”
Vaillancourt has worked in multiple entrepreneurial roles, often as founder and chief executive, since 1990. Other corporates he has been employed by include Corning, Graebel Van Lines and Foster Medical Supply. He also co-founded a turnround company working for private equity groups to help address challenges in those companies both financially and organisationally.
He said: “This was one of the direct linkages between by entrepreneurial and corporate tenures.”
Vaillancourt has a degree in accounting and finance and a master of business administration from University of Massachusetts.
Lessons from the top: Vaillancourt said: “Corporate venturing shares some characteristics with
commonly understood VC investing. However, we have run into the typical issues – market versus
internal compensation constraints, tensions between long-term investing and quarterly results,
resistance to internal change particularly when the new approaches could be cannibalistic to
current activity, and developing ways for financial investors to be comfortable with our involvement
as a strategic. All these issues have compelled us to spend a great deal of time and care
structuring deals where we can have win-win for all participants. This is not an easy thing to do.”