The annual GCVI Summit opened this morning in Monterey, California with a welcome speech by Nick Washburn, senior managing director and chief operating officer of chipmaker Intel’s corporate venturing arm, Intel Capital.
Washburn, who stepped in for Wendell Brooks, welcomed the audience and noted that Intel Capital had been a proud member of the GCV Leadership Society for several years and was excited to see how much the industry had grown.
He cautioned however that it was important to reflect on this growth rather than resting on these laurels.
Washburn played a video with comments from several portfolio companies as well as Brooks, who reiterated his call to other corporate venture capital units to collaborate and co-invest in startups.
Surprisingly, co-investments between corporate venturing units had actually gone down since 2016, Washburn said, though pinpointing the exact cause would be challenging. There could be a whole range of reasons, he explained, such as the different stages at which corporates invest.
On the upside, the share of corporate involvement in the VC industry overall had gone up from just 6% in 2000 to 15% in 2019.
One aspect Intel Capital was particularly proud of was the increased diversity among its portfolio companies: 25% of investments in 2019 was in diverse teams. This was not yet a figure to write home about, Washburn admitted, but it was a positive trend.
That positive trend also followed Brooks’ invitation to other heads of units to hire diverse interns, a program that, in Intel Capital’s case, even led to it partnering HBCU.VC, a fellowship that aims to bring ethnic minorities into venture capital.
Finally, Washburn also took the opportunity to thank Lee Sessions, who recently retired from Intel Capital, for his leadership. Sessions, the former managing director for global corporate venture relationships at Intel Capital, was announced as the first-ever executive-in-residence for GCV earlier this week.
