Gaule: Give a brief description of the purpose of your venture unit, when it was formed and how the process occurs in your organisation.
Schröder: MSVC, formerly Motorola Ventures, was formed in 1999 as the strategic venture capital arm of Motorola Solutions, formerly Motorola before its demerger into two parts 12 months ago. The purpose of having the corporate venturing group is to provide access to external innovation through our group’s network in the entrepreneur and venture capital community. We seek to make minority investments, usually less than 20%, in best-in-class startups that provide innovative solutions to fill gaps in our portfolio or adjacent white spaces. Motorola Solutions invests in companies that have a current or, we believe, future strategic fit with our business. These fit the government and public safety sectors, for example video and security, and the other big business is the enterprise space, such as retail, RFID (radio frequency identification), mobile computing and advanced data capture.
Gaule: Give us an overview of the people in the team and the partners you work with.
Schröder: Five of us are based in America’s Schaumburg and we are focused on investing in companies headquartered in the US. We come from diverse backgrounds – legal, finance, engineering – and all have significant experience in Motorola Solutions. We range in time with the company from 16 to 38 years. We partner multiple organisations across Motorola Solutions, including strategy and leadership teams from our government and public safety, enterprise and advanced services businesses. We also have a strong relationship with our chief technology officer’s team. MSVC also partners venture capital organisations across the US, both traditional financial as well as other corporate venturing groups, which help with leads and dealflow.
Gaule: What has been the impact on venturing of the recent split of your core business?
Schröder: As part of the separation of Motorola on in January last year, we split the portfolio and the Motorola Ventures team. The split of people and portfolio companies was roughly 50:50, leaving us at MSVC with about 20 active companies at the time of the division and five team members. Following the separation we are focused on the businesses that are part of Motorola Solutions. We do not usually announce our annual investments but I can tell you during 2011 we made about six to eight new investments and this is the current rate.
Gaule: What is your view on current market conditions for starting a new venture?
Schröder: A corporate venturing programme is an important tool for all large companies that need to continue to innovate to compete – you cannot do it all alone. Corporate venturing provides the eyes and ears into some tremendously innovative young companies. Valuations are starting to increase, but there are still some great deals in the market.
Gaule: What do you do to relax when you are not involved in the corporate venturing role?
Schröder: I have a wife of 28 years and two sons, 25 and 21. I enjoy spending whatever time I can with them. I also enjoy exercising, our aquariums, going to the movies, Nascar races and Kansas City Chiefs football – except for this year.