At Global Corporate Venturing, we think the next wave of corporate venturing units have the potential to transform venture capital. Since our company was started in in 2010, corporate venturing, the activity, has boomed and is now arguably at a key inflexion point, which we have dubbed the “Golden Age”, due to the strong levels of interest and activity, and we think this gives the activity the potential to transform how venture capital itself operates.
For this reason the agenda for our Symposium, which we began promoting last week, is titled “Pushing the frontiers of venture capital – creating a sustainable ecosystem from the Golden Age.” The role of corporate venturing can reap positive change on venture capital itself.
Venture capital has long been a peculiar industry, and it is our belief that it is now institutionalising away from an esoteric partnership-based industry. The poor returns of the majority of fund managers in the wider venture industry of the last decade are in part due to a lack of alignment between fund managers and their limited partners – it is an ok lifestyle business managing out an underperforming venture fund. Of course, investors lucky enough to have access to the top tier of managers have performed extremely well and with the latest boom in technology valuations, the wider industry’s historical performance is starting to look more acceptable. Yet as a generalised industry, despite its many qualities and benefits for civilisation, venture capital has failed on the main metric it measures itself on – financial performance.
The most successful independent venture capital firms are now themselves looking to move beyond the partnership-based approach to create organisations which have longevity. In this way, we expect them to look to lessons from the corporate venturing industry, which has learned to incorporate the star culture seemingly necessary to succeed in venture capital, with institutions that have more sophisticated goals than one individual.
For this reason we have sub-titled our Symposium as attempting to create “a sustainable ecosystem”, because we feel venture capital can become a more stable pursuit, which learns to live with its history of cyclicality (although manias sadly seem an in-built characteristic of financial markets). Corporations, with their greater focus on social responsibility than pure financial investors, also attempt to create a more sustainable way of doing business, with a focus on issues such as women in the workplace, the development of accelerators, and ensuring we have decent environment for our communities and the wider world.
We do hope you join us in London on May 20 and May 21 for the conference.