Last month’s editorial on how economic downturns have a way of clarifying the order of priorities noted how “the natural change in personnel each year seems to be being heightened by a super-cycle effect as units rotate in the next generation”.
The latest – there are a few more to be announced over the next month or so – is Wendell Brooks, senior vice-president at US-listed semiconductor and data technology producer Intel and president of its corporate venturing unit, Intel Capital, who has resigned after six years.
However, whereas most of these senior moves are well-trailed and headhunters often involved in succession planning for these senior roles, Brooks’ decision seems to have been more of a surprise.
Anthony Lin, who has been leading mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and international investing for Intel Capital while making up part of its equity investing committee, will lead the organisation on an interim basis while a search is conducted for a permanent successor, Intel said in a statement.
An Intel spokesperson added: “Intel remains committed to strategic M&A, venture capital and our strong portfolio of Intel Capital-backed companies.”
Late last month, Intel announced it was delaying its next generation of chips. Its stock fell after the announcement as peers, such as AMD and privately-held Ampere, as well as SoftBank-owned ARM, were seen as likely to benefit from the potential opportunity.
Intel has effectively lost some of its way when it comes to its core business of making and selling chips in computers and servers as it moved towards becoming a more data-focused company.
As blog Digits to Dollars noted of one of Brooks’s first M&A deals, Intel’s purchase of Infineon’s mobile business Altera in late 2015: “In hindsight, the fact that [Intel] could never shift those [field programmable gate array integrated circuits] to internal production should have been viewed a major Defcon-1 Red Flag.”
Brooks has not been in the engineering team, but under CEO Robert Swan – who took over after the resignation of Brian Krzanich – the company has pushed into data-heavy applications such as in-vehicle systems and games in a diversification strategy.
Fortunately, Intel Capital has a strong team under Lin, as Brooks, winner of this year’s GCV Innovation Economy Leader award, delegated a large part of the operations and investments to the management, but has reduced its investors to focus on fewer, but bigger and more diverse deals.
The roll call of legendary investors trained at Intel Capital and since departed, such as Lisa Lambert, Marcos Battisti and dozens of others, has effectively seeded the venture ecosystem and spread its gospel of supporting portfolio companies and doing more together with other CVCs and VCs.
This could be Brooks’ ultimate legacy as he looks to stay in venture for the next stage of his career.
