Even as substantial numbers of corporate venture capitalists have headed for the exits in the past year and a half, some big companies-including Intel, Microsoft, and Qualcomm-have publicly committed themselves to continued high levels of investment. Those missteps have, in turn, tended to make some companies hesitant to launch programs to invest in external start-ups, even in good times.Ī number of companies, however, have defied this stereotype of the bumbling corporate behemoth and have continued to make investments in new ventures. They also point to some high-profile missteps by individual companies to support this conclusion. In their eyes, the wild swings are further evidence that big companies have neither the stomach nor the agility to manage investments in high-risk, fast-paced environments. Such inconsistent behavior certainly contributes to the low regard with which many private venture capitalists view in-house corporate VC operations. While private VC investments also ebb and flow as the economy changes, the shifts in corporate VC investments have been particularly dramatic. This decline in investments was part of a historic pattern of advance and retreat, but the swings in recent years were even wider than before: Quarterly corporate venture-capital investments in start-ups rose from $468 million at the end of 1998 to $6.2 billion at the beginning of 2000 and then tumbled to $848 million in the third quarter of 2001.
Nearly one-third of the companies actively investing corporate funds in start-ups in September 2000 had stopped making such investments 12 months later, according to the research firm Venture Economics, and during the same period, the amount of corporate money invested in start-ups fell by 80 %. Recall the mad dash to invest in new ventures in the late 1990s-and then the hasty retreat as the economy turned. More often than not, though, they just can’t seem to get it right.
Large companies have long sensed the potential value of investing in external start-ups.
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