1. Strategic and Leadership measures from fiscal year 2020:
· How many collaborations with startups has your fund done in the last 12 months?
We account for the number of use cases rather than the number of startups. The majority of the startups will have one use case but on several key portfolio companies, we may have multiple. We have explored 28 collaboration opportunities, where eight of them we have successfully delivered.
· Your top three direct investments (excluding fund-of-funds) from the past three years (financial and strategic returns):
They would be Refundit, Volantio and Airside mobile.
· Number of investments you have made in the past year.
In 2020 we made one new investment and were focused a lot more on our portfolio companies from the second quarter onwards.
· Number of collaboration engagements with your portfolio companies.
There were 14 active use case explorations and executions and six successful deliveries as of the end of 2020.
2. Plans for the year ahead:
2020 was a tough year for travel without a doubt and for 2021 we look forward to making one to two new investments to add new blood into our portfolio. Sustainability is a key topic that we want to focus on a bit more this year on how can we support the industry to achieve various net zero growth goals. Another one will be safe travel and continue to explore how the health element interacts with travel being relevant to the industry on an ongoing basis and not just during the current pandemic.
Even though we haven’t exited any of our portfolio companies last year some of them are in the working and we would be supporting those discussions as well.
3. Pain points and opportunities you have encountered in corporate venturing:
At the moment on top of my responsibilities with Ventures I am also leading the discussion on diversification internally – to explore growth opportunities for ourselves for the mid to longer term. A lot of the visibility and knowledge acquired through the ventures programme is very valuable and unique from a corporate standpoint, to get firsthand information on where the market and VC trends are and where growth can be.
In a way, we are working on the upstream strategy that drives not only Ventures’ investment direction – and also make sure that all corporate instruments like M&A, Ventures and partnerships work cohesively to achieve one set of corporate goal that’s agreed upon and shared across the organisation.
It comes back to the strategic relevance of a ventures programme to a corporation where we would be able to foster early-stage growth opportunities when it is too early for acquisition due to future market uncertainty or other factors.
We are also working more closely with Amadeus Partnership Programme which will be relaunched before the summer. Given our strong relationship with the startup ecosystem, it would be yet another way to share the dealflow that we generate and be able to create more value for both the corporate and the startups.
4. What do you think all corporations or CVCs could do better to make it a stronger industry?
Collectively, I think it can be a good idea that we all generate a more positive vibe in the marketplace on our achievements especially on how CVCs and strategic VCs collaborate successfully with our portfolio companies. Not only in industry publications but more in the tech world in general.
It always helps to have regular reminders to people outside of our circle on our impact. This helps to remind senior corporate folks that a CVC programme is essential to a modern corporation, and to startups that regardless of what stage of an economic cycle we are in it’s a good idea to take investments from corporates.
5. For colour, what did you do prior to your venture role or in your spare time?
My career path has been rather traditional – I started with management consulting with Accenture in Hong Kong and in investment banking after MBA in Hong Kong and London. I studied at the Chinese University of Hong Kong for my undergrad, with a major in statistics and a minor in computer science and psychology.
I was seriously considering switching my professional path to clinical psychology at a certain point but settled with Accenture (Andersen Consulting) after all. At that time they were heavily engaged with the telco in Hong Kong to deliver probably one of the first IPTV and video-on-demand projects in the world and I guess that got me hooked on to tech ever since.
