Masters of Corporate Venture Capital: Collective Wisdom from 50 VCs Best Practices for Corporate Venturing How to Access Startup Innovation & How to Get Funded

by Andrew Romans, William Kilmer (Foreword)

Andrew Romans captured wisdom from interviews with 100+ Corporate Venture Capitalists (CVCs), independent VCs, CEOs of startups, bankers and lawyers to write the definitive book on the topic of CVC. Masters of Corporate Venture Capital is packed with invaluable advice about how to best raise capital from CVCs, unlock synergies of partnering startups with large corporations for rapid international growth and avoid potential disasters and other dangers related to CVC. More than 20% of all Venture Capital financings include at least one CVC and thus startups need to understand this previously misunderstood area of funding. Corporations need to establish their own CVC arms to access external innovation and learn how to bring this inside via VC investing, partnerships and M&A. We work in a very complex ecosystem and this book captures stories that bring the complexity to life with simple lessons. This book is • Entrepreneurs • VCs • Angel investors • Family offices • CVCs • Corporates thinking about launching a CVC • Anyone advising startups.

Genres: Business, Entrepreneurship

286 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 28, 2016

About the author

Andrew Romans, based in Silicon Valley, is a General Partner at Rubicon and also the CEO and General Partner of his new Series A VC fund 7BC Venture Capital actively investing in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Financial Technologies (FinTech), enterprise and consumer internet and software startups. Romans is a successful VC-backed entrepreneur, author of two top-selling books on venture capital and the industry standard on blockchain and programmatic digitization of work flows – Masters of Corporate Venture Capital, The Entrepreneurial Bible to Venture Capital and Masters of Blockchain which have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Italian and Russian by major publishers.

Romans also advises large corporations and governments on policies about Venture Capital, Corporate Venture Capital (CVC), tax incentives and specific technologies such as AI, FinTech, blockchain and digitization of the enterprise, government, healthcare and education.

Romans raised over $48m for tech startups he founded by the age of 28. He has continually raised VC funding as a founder, banker or VC ever since. Romans was the founder and General Partner of The Founders Club and also acted as the Managing Director of EMEA at VC-backed Sentito Networks where he raised over $58m in VC funding (acquired by Verso Technologies). Founder and President of The Global TeleExchange (The GTX), where he raised $50m from VCs and corporates including Lucent Technologies, built and managed a team of 90. He managed enterprise software sales at VC-backed Motive Communications (NASDAQ IPO) opening new markets in France, Benelux, Scandinavia and Ireland. Opened new markets and acted as country manager for fiber optic cable manufacturing and turn-key project construction company Dura-Line in the UK, Austria, Czech & Slovak Republics, Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

He is also a frequent VC guest speaker on TV shows including MSNBC, CNBC and ABC, as well as various TV channels in China and Russia. He was born in Japan, lived in Europe for 15 years and is fluent in English, German, and French, can speak conversationally in Slovak and holds US and UK passports. He began his career in 1993 working in the UNIX computing industry at Pencom Systems in New York, Silicon Valley, and Austin. He holds a BA from the University of Vermont, studied in Paris and Berlin at École Active Bilingue (now École Jeannine Manuel), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Freie Universität Berlin and an MBA in finance from Georgetown University, which he completed on scholarship.

Andrew resides in Silicon Valley with his wife and twin sons and leads the Rubicon office in San Francisco.

Reviews

[Enrico · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very mixed bag. There's some interesting information sprinkled amidst the accounts, and you get the feel of the attitudes and preoccupations of a possibly representative slice of the CVC sector, but there's also a lot of filler sounding like a rehearsal of well memorized industry routines. The main problem is that it reads more as a collection of drafts from an Evernote notebook than a proper book: it doesn't feel as it's been edited for repetitions, clarity, coherence. Still, it manages to be a very worthwhile, if a bit frustrating, read if you're involved (or thinking to be involved) in a CVC undertaking.

[Javier García Quiroga · Rating 4 out of 5]

Andrew compiles relevant conversations with dozens of people with a collective experience in Corporate Venture Capital that one cannot find packaged together elsewhere. He also sprinkles his own thoughts as he goes. The book’s sections make it very practical to use if you are considering the possibility of participating in the CVC/VC ecosystem as any of the different stakeholders. Would have loved more players in non-tech related industries.

[Nguyen Le · Rating 4 out of 5]

Did I enjoy the entire book? No. There was a lot of repetitive information due to the way the book is presented: a collection of interview notes.
However, if you look for interviews that were of interested CVC then the lessons and advice are extremely valuable.
I still rate it a 4 out of 5 for the concluding chapter, in which the collection of interview notes become well structured advice and roadmap for setting up the CVC operation