Gaule: Give a brief description of the purpose of your venture, when it was formed and how the process occurs in your organisation.
Brackeen: Citi Ventures is Citi’s global corporate venturing (CV) arm, reporting to chief innovation officer Debby Hopkins and with offices in Palo Alto, New York, Shanghai and Singapore. We have been in operation for about five years and are somewhat unique in that we have a broad innovation mandate that includes venture investing and incubation in addition to innovation for the entire firm – tools and processes that help the entire company be more innovative.
Gaule: How has the venture unit changed over the years, especially since the financial crisis?
Brackeen: The group has always done both venture investing as well as incubation. The early focus of the group was on emerging trends in the consumer segment such as mobility and transit, with a lot of activity in Asia. In 2008, the group’s focus was extended to all businesses globally and in 2010 the Citi Ventures HQ moved to California’s Silicon Valley, a fantastic move that dramatically increased our network and ability to stay on the leading edge.
Gaule: Outline the strategic and financial benefit you bring to your core business.
Brackeen: Citi Ventures’ mission is to drive growth through innovation. We do this through investing in start-ups relevant to Citi, as well as through incubating new businesses. On the investment side, we consider ourselves strategic investors in that our bias is to commercialise solutions with our portfolio companies. Not that financial return is unimportant – it is, of course. It just is not the primary reason we are investing in start-ups. Another key strategic benefit we provide for Citi is bringing the outside in – we meet with 600-plus start-ups and venture capitalists (VCs) every year, and this enables us to stay on the front edge of emerging trends and insights that we apply in our work and communicate back to the firm.
Gaule: On what strategic areas are you currently focused? Brackeen: All our work is driven by a set of strategic focus areas based on emerging and disruptive trends relevant to our businesses. Some of those are next-generation financial services, security and authentication, mobility and connectedness, and big data.
Gaule: Give a brief overview of the people in the team and the partners you work with.
Brackeen: We have deliberately built the group with a diverse team hailing from multiple industries, including technology, retail, e-commerce, financial services, marketing and design, and, of course, venture capital. We partner technology companies as well as innovation and design firms like Ideo and Fahrenheit 212.
Gaule: How is the CV and VC environment changing? Brackeen: There are a lot of new entrants in the corporate venturing (CV) space. There is a noticeable increase of CV teams and labs in Silicon Valley from multiple industries. I am encouraged by the increasingly broad and holistic per- spective being adopted by many CVs – that there are many tools in the innovation toolkit, from investment to incubation to partnership. In traditional VC, you see some of the larg- est VCs getting bigger and entering later-stage deals, and on the other end, an influx of incubators and accelerators catering to early-stage deals. It is great that some VC firms are offering their portfolio companies additional services and help beyond just investment capital.
Gaule: What has been your most interesting recent deal? Brackeen: All deals are interesting. We recently had a successful exit when EMC acquired SilverTail. We also recently invested in Square, which is a major innovator in the payments space.
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To contact Andrew Gaule and for future interview ideas email andrew.gaule@corven.com and tlewis@globalcor- porateventuring.com