Latest Episodes
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Cassio Spina: Alya Ventures
Listen nowMy guest today is Cassio Spina, founder and lead partner of a new advisory and venture management firm Alya Ventures, which launched earlier this year.
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Michelle Gonzalez: M12
Listen nowMy guest today is Michelle Gonzalez, the global head of Microsoft’s corporate venturing unit, M12. She joined me to talk about the strategic shift that M12 has been executing since the beginning of this year to align the unit’s investments closer with Microsoft, as well as the ever-growing prospects of generative AI, the resilience of other verticals like cybersecurity and the enduring appeal of blockchain infrastructure technology despite a crypto-winter.
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Arthur Alves: Gerdau Next Ventures
Listen nowMy guest today is Arthur Alves, corporate venture capital manager of Gerdau Next Ventures, the CVC arm of Brazilian steel manufacturer Gerdau. The venture fund was established in 2020 under in partnership with American CVC-as-a-Service firm Touchdown Ventures, and Alves was hired last year to fully integrate Gerdau Next Ventures into its parent company.
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Youssef Mawad: JCI Ventures
Listen nowIncreasingly, buildings are more than just bricks and mortar. Today they’re smarter, they’re more capable, they’re greener, and they’re continually improving. Few companies are doing more work in this space than Johnson Controls, and today I’m speaking with Youssef Mawad, managing director Johnson Controls’ CVC unit, JCI Ventures.
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Jonny Crowe: Liminal Ventures
Listen nowMy guest today is Jonny Crowe, a lawyer by training whose long career has been tied together by one central theme: executing and managing transformation. This is something he’s done both as a member of the C-Suite within the structure of an organisation, or in an advisory capacity, for many companies including Cinch, BCA Marketplace, Naspers and Axel Springer, to name just a few.
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Arvind Purushotham: Citi Ventures
Listen nowMoney, as they say, makes the world go round, and investments in financial services grew forty-fold in the decade between 2011 and 2021, from around $6bn to nearly $240bn. That is a huge leap, but according to today’s guest, Arvind Purushotham, head of Citi Ventures, it is only the beginning.
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Debbie Brackeen: CSAA Insurance
Listen nowEvery successful business needs a strategy, and every business will need to innovate to survive. Strategy, of course, sets out long-term direction and intentionality, while innovation, by definition deals with new things, which naturally can be disruptive. So how do you moderate the two? Which of them informs the other more, and how?
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Miles Kirby: Deeptech Labs
Listen nowMy guest today is Miles Kirby, CEO of Deeptech Labs, the Cambridge-based accelerator and investor focused, as its name suggests, on deep tech – which is of course an umbrella term encompassing a broad set of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, quantum, advanced materials, other advanced compute, and just about any technology that has not quite been commodified yet and still has substantial engineering or scientific challenges to overcome.
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Mario Augusto Maia: Cogent Venture Partners
Listen nowSetting up a corporate venture capital unit comes with a lot of hurdles. You have to deal with a wide range of stakeholders, and you have to find a place to fit within the wider corporate structure, much of which is not necessarily well-versed in the value that a venturing unit can bring.
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Jeffrey Grabow: EY
Listen nowThe scale and speed with which the venture market has changed over the past year has caused some whiplash for startups and investors alike. All of a sudden, we find ourselves in an environment with higher inflation, higher interest rates, and much more difficulty being able to raise money, be it equity or debt. While the current venture market does represent a drop from the heady heights of two years ago, in some ways it also marks a return to normal, albeit in a tougher macroeconomic environment.