There are few people who have made as big an impact on the world of corporate venturing as Arvind Sodhani.
The president of US-listed semiconductor company Intel’s corporate venturing unit, Intel Capital, recounted how Intel Capital started at the Global Corporate Venturing Symposium this year in London. He said: “We got started in the mid 1980s, and during that time personal computers (PCs) had just come out, there was not enough software, there were not enough devices attached to the PC and we also had a lot of people leaving Intel to start up their own companies.
“We were coming to the realisation that we could not fund all the research and development (R&D) needed to grow the PC ecosystem and so I went to Andy Grove, the CEO at that time, and suggested to him that instead of fighting the trend, why don’t we take a minority investment in those companies. Grove, to his credit, agreed to the idea. It was a novel idea – most corporations typically don’t take a minority investment in other corporations.”
Sodhani has helped cement the organisation as part of Intel having been at the head of the group since 2005, and having been closely involved since Intel started investing in start-ups.
He became an executive vice-president of Intel Corporation in 2007. He has served as director for several other companies, including Nasdaq, Clearwire, Smart Technologies, among others.
The group has been a big beneficiary of an early internationalisation strategy. Sodhani said: “We started investing in China in the late 1990s, in India a similar timeframe, Latin America in the early part of 2000 and so now we are a global brand and we built our brands in those countries much sooner than anybody else. We probably have a stronger brand in places like China, India, Brazil, Russia, and central and eastern Europe simply because we got there before any other VC with our brand.”
Sodhani received an MBA from Michigan University in 1978.
With a portfolio of more than $11bn invested in the past 20 years, Intel Capital is perhaps the largest technology venture investor globally and one of the most successful.
What technological investing trends are you most excited about and why?
Sodhani said: “We are investing in the continuum from wearables and the internet of things on the one hand and data analytics on the other and everything in between. It is an interconnected continuum, or an ecosystem. For example, the internet of things involves sensors generating tons of data – your wearables are taking your heartbeat, taking your pulse, taking your blood pressure and that data gets transmitted through the networks, through your smartphone, your laptop, your Ultrabook, your tablet and we are active in all of those through some kind of app. It goes through the networks – we are very active in the networks and the infrastructure – and then it is transmitted to base stations.”
Sodhani said the sector Intel Capital was probably most excited about was the cloud.
He said: “Until recently, a large corporation had an IT organisation. They bought their servers, they bought their storage, they bought their networks, they bought their application suites, they hired a whole bunch of people like IT specialists and programmers and so on, systems analysts, and they wrote their own applications. Then subsequently they started buying applications and adapting them. What is happening is that that IT infrastructure is moving into the cloud and that transition from the corporate IT to the cloud is a trillion dollar opportunity in my view. After all is said and done, most large corporations with very few exceptions will have their IT in the cloud.”
The rest of the list and Global Corporate Venturing’s write-up will be sent out shortly.