3 ms·

The lingering question with corporate venture arms: How do they perform compared to "regular" vc's? as corporate managers will have relative limited upside and

by Nanite 9y ago

The lingering question with corporate venture arms: How do they perform compared to "regular" vc's? as corporate managers will have relative limited upside and zero skin in the game.

lend000 9y ago
I believe Intel's VC arm has been very successful, and there's the added benefit that Intel gets a better preview into technologies it may want to acquire outright -- however, I'd like to see the numbers, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Capital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Capital
- Nanite 9y ago
  Haven't look at their portfolio extensively, but their Basis acquisition, one of the earlier fitness tracker watches with optical heart rate sensor, comes to mind, which was just south of $100M, and was basically shuttered with their flagship product pulled of the market after serious issues. Like most corporate VC's Intel pursues synergy deals, For intel these are categorized as "more Moore" and "more than Moore" i.e. as long as it contains silicon it could expand their markets
- colbyh 9y ago
  not sure why this is downvoted - Intel was ranked #1 in at least one major VC rankings list for like 3 years in a row (2012-2015ish). not sure how they have done recently but for a while they were def at the top.
mathattack 9y ago
Since VC is such a #s game it's hard to analyze by example. (Did they get the one outlier that pays for the fund?) I would still like to look at Cloudera as an interesting example. As an investment, they most certainly lost money on it. But if their investment helped Cloudera grow, they may have sold a ton of chips that Cloudera ran on. Big data requires chips. Being able to make money indirectly allows them to benefit from otherwise seemingly unprofitable deals. (And allows execs to hide from mistakes - even less skin in the game)

3 ms·

The lingering question with corporate venture arms: How do they perform compared to "regular" vc's? as corporate managers will have relative limited upside and

by Nanite 9y ago

The lingering question with corporate venture arms: How do they perform compared to "regular" vc's? as corporate managers will have relative limited upside and zero skin in the game.

lend000 9y ago
I believe Intel's VC arm has been very successful, and there's the added benefit that Intel gets a better preview into technologies it may want to acquire outright -- however, I'd like to see the numbers, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Capital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Capital
- Nanite 9y ago
  Haven't look at their portfolio extensively, but their Basis acquisition, one of the earlier fitness tracker watches with optical heart rate sensor, comes to mind, which was just south of $100M, and was basically shuttered with their flagship product pulled of the market after serious issues. Like most corporate VC's Intel pursues synergy deals, For intel these are categorized as "more Moore" and "more than Moore" i.e. as long as it contains silicon it could expand their markets
- colbyh 9y ago
  not sure why this is downvoted - Intel was ranked #1 in at least one major VC rankings list for like 3 years in a row (2012-2015ish). not sure how they have done recently but for a while they were def at the top.
mathattack 9y ago
Since VC is such a #s game it's hard to analyze by example. (Did they get the one outlier that pays for the fund?) I would still like to look at Cloudera as an interesting example. As an investment, they most certainly lost money on it. But if their investment helped Cloudera grow, they may have sold a ton of chips that Cloudera ran on. Big data requires chips. Being able to make money indirectly allows them to benefit from otherwise seemingly unprofitable deals. (And allows execs to hide from mistakes - even less skin in the game)