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What does a year of learning look like at corporate VC unit?
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.
He emphasises the importance of listening closely to what the parent company needs, which for them led to a change in how the unit approaches its areas of investment – away from being too focused on the core automotive business and with a wider look at adjacencies that will bring value to the company as a whole, across climate, industrial and enterprise technology.
He walks me through InMotion Ventures’ early stage strategy, which he says allows them to bring real value to the startup with smaller cheque sizes, part of which is the ability to engage in a meaningful way with Jaguar LandRover, which 100% of the unit’s portfolio companies are currently doing.
We also talk about how he does not see the classic financial-strategic spectrum as a sliding scale or mutually exclusive, why the UK is lagging behind other comparable CVC markets and what may be done about it, and why it’s not a bad thing to rub shoulders with ostensible competitors.