Allison Goldberg, managing director and vice-president at Time Warner Investments, the corporate venturing unit of the US-listed media group, has done more than many to support New York City’s burgeoning venture ecosystem. This has been recognised by the media company in her promotion to lead Time Warner Investments after the retirement of Rachel Lam last year.
She has maintained Lam’s policy of actively supporting companies and promoting her team. At the GCV Synergize conference in NYC last autumn, Goldberg explained its investment strategy, which has both strategic and financial goals and with the majority of deals being B or C rounds with an average investment of $10m.
Goldberg said: “We lead about half the deals we participate in and we either take a board seat or an observer role otherwise we would not get strategic value.” Its focus is on areas of interest to the three divisions of Time Warner: HBO, Warner Brothers and Turner, while the sector focus includes content, games, adtech, eSports, virtual reality and augmented reality.
Time Warner’s investment in data management platform Krux, recently sold to Salesforce for $800m, was led by Scott Levine, this year’s GCV Rising Stars award winner.
In 2017, Time Warner closed two investments as lead investor: one was a $27m series-B round for augmented reality technology developer 8i, and the other a $6m series-A round for Vemba – a player-agnostic video distribution platform.
The unit also took parts in several rounds as non-lead investor, including a $12m series-D round for Bustle Digital Group, a $21m series-C round for Mic Network, a $40m round for over-the-top (OTT) video analytics group Conviva (in which Levine was involved), and a series-B $30m round for Samba TV.
Goldberg’s previous investments include Visible World, acquired by Comcast, Adify, later sold to Cox, AdMeld, later sold to Google, Bluefin Labs, later sold to Twitter, Everyday Health, now listed publicly, MediaVast, later sold to Getty Images and Tremor Video, which is also public.
Goldberg joined Time Warner in 2001 after a year as a venture capital associate at Groupe Arnault, having jumped from media investment banking at Morgan Stanley during the dot.com years after graduating in economics and finance at Wharton School.