$100M or even $50M is real money though. If Stripe had wanted to enter the market directly, that pays for many person years of compensation. Corporate VC funds

$100M or even $50M is real money though. If Stripe had wanted to enter the market directly, that pays for many person years of compensation. Corporate VC funds are supposed to do one of two things: find uncorrelated investments or adjacent partner opportunities. You can argue that acquiring the company is downside protection ("worst case, we buy the team") but it's still pretty inefficient. tl;Dr: the real goal is (should be?) to generate large, cooperative partners not overpay for R&D and integration later.