What links senior executives at Google, Alibaba and Giant Interactive?
Their personal investment vehicles have been recently taking minority stakes in companies likely to be of interest to their employer.
The Merrill Lynch Cap Gemini wealth report shows about three-quarters of high net worth individuals (HNWIs*) have made their money from their entrepreneurial endeavours rather than inherited wealth.
That there are now 10.9 million HNWIs is impressive, but the pace of wealth creation seems to be increasing.
Rather than it taking a lifetime the flood of software and internet-related founders that are still involved in their business but with enough money to set up a family office making venture capital deals has increased round the world. There are now 17% of HNWIs aged 45 or under, compared to 13% in 2009, according to the wealth report 2011.
In Asia-Pacific excluding Japan, fast economic growth has created a whole new breed of entrepreneurs, with 41% of HNWIs aged 45 or younger (in Japan it is 8%).
The question of how related these venture deals are to the corporate business they founded and the minority investments made by the corporate venturing team is one of increasing concern to merger and competition authorities. But, if handled ethically, these new ties can be a source of competitive advantage to the corporate.
Last week’s $50m agreed investment by China-based Giant Interactive’s investment in Alibaba through the two groups’ chairmen’s joint e-commerce investment vehicle, Yunhan, is just the latest case of how the hidden wiring connecting senior executives allows business to be done.
Giant’s investment by the end of December will be made through an investment in Yunfeng E-Commerce Funds, which is managed by Yunfeng Capital, a China-based venture capital firm co-founded by Alibaba chief executive Jack Ma and Shi Yuzhu, president of New York-listed Giant Interactive.
Yunfeng E-Commerce Funds was set up to buy Alibaba shares as part of the latter’s employee liquidity programme designed to provide an alternative to a stock market flotation. (NB one cynic described the choice of secondary market liquidity rather than public listing as a way to put pressure on Yahoo, which owns 43% of Alibaba but has had a public spat with Ma, to sell up.)
The Yunfeng fund follows a similar gathering of China’s internet elite as backers of Kai-Fu Lee’s Innovation Works early-stage investment fund.
But for a sign of the direction of travel these deals could take, China has been following the US’s lead. Earlier in the month, Google chairman Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors venture capital firm and Webb Investment Network, a venture capital firm started by the chairman of data centre management company LiveOps, were part of a consortium investing $3.8m in the series A round for Quixey, a US-based search engine for applications.
There are no conflicts of interest between Google, LiveOps and Quixey but that two chairmen of successful firms in similar fields would take a stake is a significant sign of confidence in the start-up and could lead to future collaboration or an exit route to an established businesses.
Innovation Endeavors had previously invested $400,000 in Quixey and also been active in the $1m seed funding for Nearbuy Systems, which helps locate people inside buildings, alongside Motorola Solutions Venture Capital in July.
One of Innovation Endeavors’ exits has been the sale of Zappedy to discount coupon provider Groupon, whose co-founders, Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell, had earlier gone on to set up their own venture capital firm, Lightbank.
Entrepreneurs wanting to leverage their network and abilities through a venture capital or angel/super-angel fund rather than directly setting up another company makes sense. But with a wave of corporate venturing units also being set up the two fastest-growing areas of venture funding could start to increasingly meet in deals.
In Europe, the co-founders of online phone operator Skype set up venture firm Atomico while Skype was a corporate venturing backer of one of their other start-ups, Joost. In India, Wipro chairman Azim Premji set up his Azim Premji Invest $1bn fund and in May became a limited partner in VC firm Khosla Ventures, while the technology corporation has its Wipro Securities and Capital Markets division.
It is relatively common for senior executives to become LPs in independent VC funds. In a great comment by Fortune earlier this month, Dan Primack pointed out the conflicts of interest that could come from C-suite executives agreeing to buy portfolio companies from VC firms that have a pecuniary interest in.
Whenever a trade sale of a executive’s direct or indirect portfolio company occurs for a modest win then venture insiders gossip that it was set up to avoid a potential loss for the fund to keep its batting average up.
There is no question that US corporations with close ties to VC firms that often funded them in the first place are some of the world’s biggest acquirers of entrepreneurial businesses in a feedback loop that helps the overall venture capital industry thrive.
In Google, Facebook, Zynga and Apple, four of the top-five most active acquirers of venture capital-backed companies (doing in aggregate 27 deals last year), have in turn been corporate venturing and/or VC-backed, according to data provider Dow Jones VentureSource.
But there are not that many cross-pollinated deals so far – outside of Stanford University and C-suite executives at Cisco and Amazon, Google’s VC backers were Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers but just one (AdMob for $750m) of the 10 acquisitions by the search engine in 2010 had been backed by its own VC backer (in AdMob’s case Sequoia).
Still, corporate venturing executives are wary of the potential for conflicts of interest or the mergers and competition authorities to pay close attention to the ties between their company founders and themselves.
One, talking on background, said all of the co-founders of its parent had gone on to set up family offices doing venture investing but the corporate venturing firm had co-invested with them just once.
He said in that sole case, the merger authorities took a close look at such a related-party transaction to see if the combined shareholding would affect competition or affected the running of the portfolio company. These links could affect syndicates of corporate venturing investors under anti-trust or competition requirements. The European Commission passed Germany-based group Bertelsmann’s corporate venturing investment in Blue Lion alongside the French post office’s Xange.
However, the insights gleaned by founders in early stage businesses can still be helpful to corporate venturing groups even if no deals are subsequently struck together because of the difficulty or transparency needed to pass competition requirements.
As the corporate venturer said, having a well-regarded and rich investor trawl early-stage or different markets for opportunities could be beneficial, especially when the angel investors cross different sectors from their former businesses.
In February last year, NABsys, a US-based gene-sequencing company, raised $7m in its B round, following $4m at launch in 2009, and Ray Stata, chip maker Analog Devices co-founder and chairman and subsequent founder of venture capital firm Stata Venture Partners, said: "NABsys represents the merger of two industries which, until now, have been quite disparate: semiconductors and genomics."
As venture funding of entrepreneurs continues to expand in types of investor and their motivations, therefore, the groups that develop their connectivity will increasingly do better than peers that remain reliant on one type of investment partnership.
This comment has been greatly helped over the past week thanks to readers responding to my request in last week’s column.
*Those with at least $1m in investible assets, excluding such things as primary home and collectables.