AAA Editorial: New leaders need deft support

Editorial: New leaders need deft support

The past few months have seen a number of important changes at the top of the corporate venturing industry.

Wendell Brooks replaced Arvind Sodhani at Intel Capital; Nagraj Kashyap shifted from Qualcomm Ventures to join Microsoft Ventures, to be succeeded by GCV Rising Star Quinn Li; and Frederic Rombaut has left Cisco after the promotion of Rob Salvagno to head of Cisco corporate development and investments. But the retirement of industry doyenne Claudia Fan Munce from IBM in January has created an opportunity for a new star to emerge with expectations of taking the industry to new heights.

As the new head of IBM Ventures, George Ugras, therefore, brings many expectations but also a canvas for change at Big Blue, which has looked for growth to transition to the fourth wave of computer technology after earlier transitions from mainframes, PCs and services.

Ugras will share more of his plans at our Symposium in May but has already shown himself able to rethink the venture industry after a career at Apax, Adams Capital Management and latterly Frost Data Capital.

Looking again at the model for how corporations can work with entrepreneurs and VCs as part of a broader search for impact on the parent is the right goal. However, while venture is a long-term business, the pressures on the modern corporation are intense given the unprecedented speed and range of disruption facing all industries.

How much time Ugras as well as the other new leaders will have to execute on their visions will be a signal to whether corporate venturing can deliver on its promise to help corporations deal with their most important strategic challenge – understanding the wave of disruption and helping the parent sail through increasingly choppy seas.

Given the success of Sue Siegel, another former VC leading a storied firm, General Electric’s, ventures unit, the decision to bring in a corporate venturing outsider to IBM was a logical one, as this column wrote in February.

However, logic is only a starting point. As I said then: “But tapping outside VCs for the top corporate venturing role requires deft handling by senior management for a message that change in the organisation could be coming. The corporate CEO and their executives need also to show strong support for building a team able to challenge accepted wisdom and build a brand able to encourage the best entrepreneurs and investors to want to work with them.”

Communicating is vital both for IBM Ventures and to position the team to find the right partners, entrepreneurs and others in the ecosystem. 

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