As vice-president of corporate development at Micron, René Hartner’s job is to turn “intelligence accelerated”, a term coined by Micron to indicate the company’s intention to harness artificial intelligence and machine learning, building tools the company can use.
These tools include M&A, corporate venture capital, creating joint ventures, licensing, strategic partnerships, strategy and ecosystem development.
Hartner said: “I started my career in CVC with the creation of the SanDisk Venture Fund in 2012 [before its acquisition by Western Digital in 2016]. In my current role at Micron, started in October 2018, I am responsible for our global M&A, post-merger integration, our artificial intelligence and machine learning transformation initiative as well as for our new $100m fund that focuses on artificial intelligence and machine learning.”
Hartner has concentrated on so-called competence clusters. “A very similar asset and technology that reached a B-round maturity stage, for example, can be priced five-times higher in Silicon Valley versus Munich.
“On the flip side if a business model requires you to raise several hundred million dollars, there are only three cities in the world where you can do this – Silicon Valley in San Francisco, Shanghai and Beijing. Historically it was just Silicon Valley, hence we can expect a gravitational shift of leading tech companies towards China.”
Although not authorised to publish results from specific investments or exits, he said: “Our biggest success had been to shape our own thinking, strategy, roadmap and approach to the enterprise storage appliance industry.”
