The old poker saying is "if you sit down at a table and cannot see the mark to be fleeced then its you" is a useful reminder to corporations invited to invest in portfolio companies backed by the best venture capital (VC) firms.
VCs have long regarded corporate venturing units with understandable suspicion due to the latter’s often-short-term investing histories and flip-flopping over whether to invest for financial or strategic reasons.
That relatively nascent groups from emerging markets outside Silicon Valley are able to join interesting deal consortia involving the top tier of VCs is potentially great news. It shows a potential sea-change in perspectives. But history shows European companies that bought their way into similar consortia in the late 1990s ended up buying the rump of the VCs’ portfolios and making few tricks themselves.
The argument that it will be different this time depends on the sophistication of the partners at the corporate venturing units, which is much better than in previous generations, and the VCs are looking for newer sources of contiguous capital as traditional limited partners struggle to commit and there are few other longer-term investors around.
Its fair to say that the VCs are still playing with their set of cards and are the dealers currently so the odds remain long for the corporations round the table to only play with money they are prepared to lose.