The Venture Intelligence Blog

“Corporate VCs should invest not only in technology adjacencies for their Business Units, but also to capture innovation in disruptive areas.” Here is an interview with Joydeep Bose - veteran corporate VC (Intel and Cisco) and currently Executive Vice President-Corporate Strategy & Business Development at Tejas Networks - brought to you in association with  Global Corporate Venturing (GCV) magazine .  Q: You have one of the best track records of CVC investing in Asia over the last 16 years. What do you attribute your success to? A: I strongly believe that success is always a function of timing and opportunity with a bit of luck. I attribute my success to mainly three things - sector knowledge, operational experience and deep understanding of the ecosystem. Guy-Kawasaki once said “Venture capital is something to do at the end of your career, not the beginning. It should be your last job, not your first.” I relate to this a lot. I started as an engineer,d...

In the context of online restaurants review service Zomato raising about $20M with revenues of less than $2M, seed investment specialist Anand Lunia has a quora post on how corporate VCs (like Naukri, One97, etc) have more " courage, belief and patience" to take such leaps of faith than pure commercial VCs. Extract: That a large proportion of Consumer Internet companies, at least in the past, have been funded by Corporate Investors. Perhaps regular VCs have preferred topline first businesses like restaurants, healthcare chains, pharma manufacturing (!). The early stage VCs in India have done a decent job, however, of following these corporate nurtured ventures  with Series B/C investments, in a slightly herd like behaviour (the way everybody queued up recently for a certain on-line fashion co was funny.) ...The operating word for the failed ones was 'revenue'. The operating word for the successful ones was Product and Usage. Revenue is the best strateg...