What is Corporate Venture Capital and how to do it well with Mike Smeed, Managing Director @ InMotion Ventures
Mike Smeed from InMotion Ventures challenges conventional thinking about corporate venture capital, arguing that the traditional strategic versus financial return framework is outdated and broken. He reveals why CVC leaders typically get fired after 3.5 years despite investments taking 15-20 years to mature, and explains how automotive CVCs are uniquely positioned to navigate complex regulatory challenges that pure financial VCs can't solve.
Key takeaways
- •CVC leaders face a structural mismatch where investments take 15-20 years to mature but leadership tenure averages just 3.5 years, creating organizational survival challenges.
- •The traditional strategic versus financial CVC framework is outdated and doesn't capture how modern corporate venture capital actually operates.
- •Corporate VCs collaborate rather than compete with each other, frequently co-investing because they're solving the same industry-wide challenges.
- •CVCs derive their power from internal parent company connections, which is why successful CVC teams increasingly hire from within the parent organization.
- •Corporate venture capital excels in highly regulated industries like automotive where deep industry networks and regulatory expertise provide advantages over traditional VCs.
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Best moment
Why CVCs are uniquely positioned to solve automotive's biggest regulatory challenges
these are really good examples of where having a CVC saying that, you know, yes. This is a problem. Yes. This is something that we really see. And, actually, we can help because we have a range of technologies. You know, we're we're very well networked in terms of whether it's our own labs or other people's labs or all of these kind of things to get things through automotive because, as you know, it's an incredibly highly regulated industry. And therefore, having the ways in which you take something and and it be homologated and and authorized and and regulated to be used in the vehicle is incredibly
“And as you can imagine, you know, everyone's crammed into the middle and and and it ends up almost being an alphabetical list.”
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