Latest Episodes
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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.
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Dina Routhier & Michael Mahan – Stanley Ventures
Listen nowOne of the interesting shifts that happened during the covid pandemic was in building things. Larger construction projects slowed down while at home DIY projects took off as people had to spend inside. This is but one of the patterns that Stanley Ventures, the venturing unit of Stanley Black & Decker, had a front-row view to, sitting on the intersection of construction and consumer goods.
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Erin VanLanduit: Cargill Ventures
Listen nowEveryone needs to eat, and as one of the largest private companies in the world, Cargill has played a large role in providing much of what, at least in the US, shows up in supermarkets. But what does the future of food look like? And what innovation is needed to bring agriculture up to speed with the demands of a growing population with shifting views?
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Raj Singh: JLL Spark Global Ventures
Listen nowEvery business needs a space, but how will those spaces be valued in the future? Commercial real estate is in the beginning stages of some important changes in the way it looks, operates, shares its space, and even where it is located, much of the changes coming in the aftermath of the pandemic.
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Lukasz Garbowski: Btomorrow Ventures
Listen nowBtomorrow Ventures (BTV), the venturing unit of British American Tobacco, is a CVC unlike the rest, in the sense that While the typical aim of corporate venturing is to complement and innovate on top of its parent company’s business, BTV’s main purpose is to help its tobacco producing parent to move away from its core product and into new categories that will create growth in the future.