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CVC Unplugged

Author: Mawsonia

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The CVC Unplugged podcast is a weekly show that brings you fascinating and wide-ranging conversations with leading corporate venture capital investors, subject matter experts, startup founders, journalists and other market participants to keep you informed of the most important trends affecting early-stage investing.
454 Episodes
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My guest today is Alejandro Solé, chief investment officer of TechEnergy Ventures, the CVC unit for the energy transition division of Tecpetrol, an energy company that is part of Italian-Argentine industrial conglomerate Techint group, which has under its umbrella companies in areas like steelmaking, engineering and construction, and energy. The post Investing in the hard assets of cleantech – a conversation with TechEnergy Ventures’ Alejandro Solé appeared first on CVC Unplugged.
Investment is no longer the exclusive domain of investors. Increasingly sophisticated tools are coming on the market that are giving everyone access to investment capabilities that used to be confined to institutions and financial professionals. My guest today is Alokik Advani, managing partner of Fidelity International Strategic Ventures – or FISV – the CVC unit of asset manager Fidelity International. The post Making investing for everyone – a conversation with FISV’s Alokik Advani appeared first on CVC Unplugged.
My guest today is Murat Arcan, managing director of Sabanci Climate Ventures, the CVC unit of Sabanci Climate Technologies, the international energy arm of one of Turkey’s largest conglomerates. The post Sabanci wants to invest $200m into renewables technology appeared first on CVC Unplugged.
As companies are increasingly looking for faster innovation cycles and increased collaboration with startups, but don’t always want the risk associated with direct investment, venture clienting has grown massively in popularity in recent years. The post Venture clienting as an entry point for more risk-averse corporates appeared first on CVC Unplugged.
Paradoxical though it may seem that an industry as extractive in nature as mining would be so important to making the world more sustainable, that’s exactly the case. Partly that’s because of the need to reduce its own impact – bringing down its emissions and reducing its waste – but also because most other energy transition technologies rely on metals that need to be mined. The post Can mining be at the forefront of the energy transition? A conversation with Vale Ventures’ Bruno Arcadier appeared first on CVC Unplugged.
Historically, Latin American corporates, have been risk averse, wanting control, often family-owned, and that has been a barrier to innovation, but that is changing now, and they are more open to doing things in a new way, if for no other reason that it’s imperative to not being out-competed. The post LatAm is hungrier for venture service providers – a conversation with Innova 360’s Laura Chicurel appeared first on CVC Unplugged.
The “typical” accelerator model as we know it – a cohort of young startups that go through some sort of curriculum and hopefully convince investors to back them at the end of it – sometimes offers mixed results. Founders may well find that the conversation they have at the end is an investor telling them to call them back when they have more revenue. The post Should accelerators chase revenue instead of investment? appeared first on CVC Unplugged.
The US healthcare market is a big, complicated one. It’s fragmented, it’s large, with long sales and feedback cycles, making it difficult to innovate and bring about change at scale, especially that which the venture model would be patient enough for. The post Innovating in an intractable healthcare system appeared first on CVC Unplugged.
Last September, I had the pleasure on this show of speaking to Mike Smeed, managing director of InMotion Ventures, the VC unit of Jaguar Land Rover, when he had just recently completed his first year on the job, which was also his first year as a CVC at all. Now, I’m happy to have him back on to talk about what he has learned, and how the team has applied those lessons, in Year 2. The post A year of learning at InMotion Ventures – Mike Smeed returns appeared first on CVC Unplugged.
Payments, payments, payments. In a world with a diminishing reliance on cash, payment technology is quite literally making the economy go round. But obviously, it's not always as easy as tapping a credit card. Today I speak to David Rolf, head of Visa Ventures, about the difficulties, and the opportunities out there, when it comes to letting people pay each other as quickly and easily as possible. The post The future of payments – a chat with Visa’s David Rolf appeared first on CVC Unplugged.
The world of sports has been seeing some really dramatic shifts in recent years, including huge changes in how sports are consumed – less via the big networks and more via mobile platforms, for example – and that’s having big implications across the space, opening up opportunities for startups and investors alike. The post The Next Wave Webinar: Investing in the changing world of sports appeared first on CVC Unplugged.
Universities, by their very nature, have always been strong centres of innovation. Scientific discoveries are routinely made in university research labs – but spinning those discoveries out into an operational business comes with numerous hurdles. Academics who go on to found companies based on their research have not just a steep learning curve to adapt to the new commercial environment, but also a wider shift in their mindset. The lab, after all, is a much different place than the market. The post The transition from academic to entrepreneur appeared first on CVC Unplugged.
Just because you can grow very quickly, doesn’t necessarily mean you should. That’s the argument that Rob Bier, managing partner of Trellis Partners and 6:30 Partners, makes against the concept of “blitzscaling”, the hypergrowth philosophy popularised by Reid Hoffman. In his new book, called Smooth Scaling, as well as in a recent op-ed for Global Corporate Venturing, Bier argues that growing at all costs may work for a few startups, but for the majority, following the move fast and break things with loads of money in your pocket approach can have deeply detrimental effects. The post Slower and steadier wins the race – Rob Bier’s case against blitzscaling appeared first on CVC Unplugged.
Financial services permeate every other industry, and is a crucial part of everyone’s lives – whether you’re talking about payments, wealth management, or anything else, fintech touches it all. Today I’m joined by Hugo Bongers, partner at Motive Ventures, who by his own admission “lives and breathes” fintech. Formerly the head of ABN Amro Ventures, he has a great overview of the space from both the corporate VC and financial VC sides. The post Let’s give everyone more control over their finances – A conversation with Hugo Bongers appeared first on CVC Unplugged.
Fred Schonenberg is the founder of VentureFuel, a New York-based advisory firm focused on bringing together startups and large organisations, mainly corporates including the likes of Coca-Cola, ABInBev, The Hershey Company, Comcast and more, to efficiently create commercial partnerships between them. The post How to get startups and corporates to fit together – a conversation with VentureFuel’s Fred Schonenberg appeared first on CVC Unplugged.
One of the biggest hurdles to getting technology from universities out into the market has been that of intellectual property – who does this technology belong to and who can benefit from it? Traditionally, many universities have been loath to part with their IP rights, which is a death knell for any investment a potential spinout may be hoping for. Investors want to know that the company they’re investing in owns the very thing that gives it value. The post Universities take a more investor-friendly approach to IP appeared first on CVC Unplugged.
Jeppe Hoier is a long-time venture investor with experience in financial VCs, corporate VCs and on his own as an angel investor, based in Copenhagen, Denmark. A former partner at Maersk Growth, the CVC arm of Danish logistics giant Maersk, Hoier talks about how he was initially sceptical of going into a corporate VC, having been initially dissuaded by the reputation that CVCs had at the time, but how he has since been convinced of the benefits a corporate can bring. The post A CVC is like an organ transplant, the body would be wrong to fight it – A conversation with Jeppe Hoier appeared first on CVC Unplugged.
We’re going back into the vault this week! They say that the only constant in life, and business, is change – so how do you manage it effectively? That’s why last year I spoke with 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. The post How to effectively manage change and transformation (re-broadcast) appeared first on CVC Unplugged.
For a while now, there has been a clear trend, for example, of hospital functions like patient monitoring, diagnostics, and other treatments being moved closer to the patients, even into their homes, which frees up space within hospitals, which of course, even before covid, have been dealing with huge capacity constraints. Many hospitals are operating at capacities in the high 90s and have a lot of trouble finding enough beds, enough appointments, or enough staff, for a number of reasons, but a big one is the fact that the processes within hospitals need to be overhauled and streamlined for higher efficiency. The post The Next Wave Webinar: What does the hospital of the future look like? appeared first on CVC Unplugged.
The way we buy things has been changing. Supercharged by the pandemic, the digital and physical sides of the retail experience continue to merge, data analytics continues to play an increasingly large role in how companies target and sell their products, and the consumer journey is, hopefully, getting easier and easier. The post Why Cencosud Ventures loves contrarian thinking appeared first on CVC Unplugged.
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