Pramilla Mullan: Thank you. So my journey into corporate venturing took an unconventional path actually. I actually come from a background in research and development, spending a number of years with Bell Labs during the eighties and nineties at Bell Laboratories, doing research in distributed systems. Subsequently, I came out to the Bay Area to join a startup and spent a career navigating both the research environment along with product development, product engineering, and product management environments for a number of companies, both small and large in the Bay Area. Subsequent to that, I joined Accenture Technology Labs, actually in research and was conducting research when the Accenture Ventures organization was formed. And that was the start of my journey in venturing, without really any background in that, not really knowing much, and came to my first global corporate venturing meeting looking to absorb with wide eyes and trying to figure it all out. I am now at IBM Consulting and I head up the Ventures and Ecosystems organization within IBM Consulting, where we are focused on not just ventures for this, but also really, as we talk about the three knobs of how to do innovation, which includes acquisitions, equity investing, and open innovation, and how to leverage all three arms collaboratively together. So I sit within an organization called Ventures Ecosystems and Acquisitions, actually but I focus primarily on the Ventures and ecosystems part of that. Academically, I have an engineering background, but in addition to that, I also did academically pursue an MBA. And for those who are deep into engineering, some would say you can then, there are a lot of different ways of learning different things, but for me, having that MBA exposure helped me a lot in the financial statement analysis and some of the gaps in the skill sets that I had as I transitioned into venturing. So I leaned back on that academic experience to help me figure certain things out, which I didn't have.
Nicolas Sauvage: So it's interesting, very few people I have interviewed for the CVC Insider series talk about a product management background. That's one that I have, and so I have probably some bias towards that, but how helpful do you think the product management discipline helps you to be a very good investor?
Pramilla Mullan: Yes. See, this is exactly what I was talking about, finding that commonality from some time in the past and then using that. I've learned something about you today, Nicolas, that I didn't know. I look forward to a number of conversations about that particular topic. What do product managers do, right? They're talking to a number of clients. They are working with their clients, and they're using those conversations to structure today and future roadmap of the product that they're working on. The releases that they're working on. Now those skills are hugely important in terms of having that conversation with a startup that you're potentially looking to make an equity investment in and understanding where that company is today and where the potential of that company is, five years from now! And being able to roadmap that potential in order to assess whether to make an equity investment in that company. Now, we've been talking about equity investments over here a lot, but I wanna go back to a topic that's near and dear to my heart. Okay? And that is this idea of multiple knobs when one is thinking about innovation and leveraging all knobs to their fullest capacity. So it's not about equity investing only, especially from the perspective of a GSI, because from the perspective of a GSI, we are making an equity investment. Before the equity investment, we are a partner with the company, we don't have to invest in the company, and hey! guess what! After the equity investment is done, we're not just looking at the numbers and looking for the return on equity. In fact, it's about the fact that post-equity investment, they are a partner of ours. So it's business as usual to a certain extent, on steroids right?
Nicolas Sauvage: Wait, you mentioned GSI. I'm not sure everyone in the audience knows what GSI is.
Pramilla Mullan: A global systems integrator. So IBM Consulting is a global systems integrator. They provide professional services to large enterprise clients and they help the startup integrate into a larger solution and provide the professional services to ensure the success, the delivery success at any client now.
Nicolas Sauvage: I think is one of the key parts which I like to talk about, which is a superpower of a corporate VC. As a GSI, you have the opportunity to have startups who are not yet credible and bring a huge amount of credibility and guidance. Can you talk a little bit about this and then we'll go back to those three knobs.
Pramilla Mullan: Correct. No, so I was actually really going to talk about that particularly. Okay. So what I wanted to do was I wanted to bring out this notion of open innovation and the partnership with the startups, post-investment or even without an investment. Yeah, so as part of the open innovation function, what we do with the startups is we work collaboratively with the startups as they're looking to scale. So the types of startups that we work with are startups who are not looking for their first lighthouse client win because they're still working on their MVP, they don't necessarily have an MVP. A systems integrator is not going to be able to help a company, to be honest with you, and would not engage with a company that's working on their first MVP. Okay? What we are good at is helping a company that has their lighthouse win and helping them scale, right! And in helping them scale, these product management skill sets again help you with a discipline in scaling methodically, systematically, working with that startup going, doing the rinse and repeat. Okay, we have a lighthouse win, we've got this client in this industry, we've got this amazing lighthouse win. How can we help bring new clients to the table? How can we help lift the scale at which we can deploy? Those are the types of strengths where GSI particularly is helpful. And from my perspective, I see time spent in product management helping me today on a day-to-day basis, working with the startups that I work with.
Nicolas Sauvage: In a way, it would be very strange for a GSI company not to have this type of open innovation and corporate VC because you're at the edge of the innovations coming from the startup ecosystem. Is there any reason why you think a company, a GSI company, would not have a CVC?
Pramilla Mullan: I think it would not benefit them not having a, yeah, and I'll tell you why. Increasingly clients are working with startups. Gone are the days where clients are very risk-averse and not willing to work with the startup. Yes, they want success in delivery, and that's where the GSI comes into place, because the GSI can bring the scale to ensure success, but it's not to mitigate risk anymore. It is to help with the delivery. The clients are working with startups today, period! Now you can either join that or you can miss out. And Ergo, a GSI that does not have an open innovation function or does not work with the startup community is increasingly missing a seat at the table, I would say.
Nicolas Sauvage: Very nice. So let's talk about investment decisions. How are you structured? How is your investment committee thinking about things? How do you make sure you are fast at the same time as very thoughtful?
Pramilla Mullan: You have brought up a very important point over here because as strategic VCs, as I always say, we are always the last to the table because we have a small equity investment to make, and we typically don't lead investments. We have to be very nimble. We have to be able to make decisions fast because we will miss out on rounds, and we cannot expect the lead investor or the CEO of a startup to hold rounds open indefinitely for us. That's just not practical. And so in forming that approach to decision making within an organization, it is very important to ensure that the process is set up for very efficient decision making in terms of equity investment. Right. At the same time, there is this aspect of, speed to decision is great, but you cannot have speed and compromise the thoughtfulness aspect of it.
Nicolas Sauvage: Yeah, you can speed, but not rush.
Pramilla Mullan: You have to develop your own conviction using the term that I referred to earlier. You have to allow yourself the time to develop the conviction before you go off and speedily make an investment. Because without the conviction post-investment, you're gonna struggle.
Nicolas Sauvage: So here first, it's a golden nugget, but I want to double-click. How do you build conviction? And you mentioned earlier you are thesis-driven, how do you build the thesis?
Pramilla Mullan: I think thesis-driven depends on the type of company, so for me, the thesis-driven is very simple. What IBM consulting looks for is those companies that are not trying to figure their MVP out. Because we're not gonna be able to help them, to be frank with you, we are going to be able to help those companies who have their MVP, who have validated their MVP with a few clients. Those clients are intersecting with IBM's client base, and the startup is now at a point where they're saying, "I'm running out of steam. I can either build a really large organization to scale, or I can partner. And a company like IBM Consulting can come in and be that route to market from a partnering perspective for that company. So what that translates into is, Series B being the sweet spot. Yeah. But somewhere between series A and series C, certainly not at the seed round level. The second thing is as a GSI, selfishly of course, we are going to look at companies that need professional services to integrate into a solution that is meaningful for the client because that's where we make our bread and butter. And so obviously we are gonna look at startups, series B startups. But if the series B startup needs to scale by increasing their hardware capabilities that's perhaps not a good fit. Right. It's professional services that we are looking at over here, right. And so that's unique to IBM Consulting. Also, I see a lot of technology companies investing very early because they have a front-row seat to innovation. Right. And IBM is an interesting company because we've got both the technology and the services all wrapped up in one company. And when we look at companies, we look at companies that sometimes and very often benefit both sides of the organization. And so having that lead indicator of innovation direction is a critical component of an evaluation of whether to make an equity investment in the company or not.
Nicolas Sauvage: Actually, I can see definitively the case of augmenting what's already there. Would you also consider investing in a startup that could disrupt part of IBM?
Pramilla Mullan: I would have to refer to IBM technologies for that because that is squarely in the space of IBM technologies. But and I work in the consulting side of the equation, so (you know) that is a question for IBM Ventures, I would be remiss in answering that question. If you're not looking for potential disruptions and keeping an eye on potential disruptions and figuring out how you're gonna deal with the disruptions, you're not gonna be doing yourself a service as a company. The question then becomes how do you keep an eye on disruptions? And there's no one safe answer to that. There are, again, lots of different tools that you can use, and making an equity investment is just one of the tools.
Nicolas Sauvage: It's one of the tools and it's all about addressing blind spots. Which actually goes back to my question about the investment committee. So who is in your investment committee? Do they all need to approve it, is some of them? How does that work so that maybe the audience gets a sense of best practices that you've developed.
Pramilla Mullan: Yeah. So from an IBM consulting perspective essentially what we do is, we have our key leaders and we make sure that our key leaders from the market as well as from the head of IBM consulting as well as the service line leader who's bringing forward that equity investment are all aligned because it's very important to have everyone aligned. That thoughtfulness that we were talking about earlier, that alignment; Without that alignment before you make an equity investment, will hurt you post-investment. And what we are looking to do is post-investment because we are a GSI, we wanna go fast, right. We wanna be selling fast, and so we need to put a lot of constructs in place ahead of that equity investment to enable us to sell fast. And (you know) that- any amount of time that is taken, even if it means not making that equity investment because you miss out on the opportunity, having that alignment- taking the time to have that alignment is hugely important, right! Because even if we miss that equity investment, it's not the end of the world. We can partner, yeah, we were a partner before, we are a partner after.
Nicolas Sauvage: You may decide the alignment is not that strong at a series B, and then you ensure the alignment becomes very strong at Series C, you could still invest.
Pramilla Mullan: Exactly because we are looking at the business. We are looking at the large amount of money you can get from the business.
Nicolas Sauvage: I think the golden nugget in all the work of insurance is the alignment. Maximize a chance for very good on-ramp of the startups with the rest of the groups. Any best practice on how to ensure that alignment is done well?
Pramilla Mullan: Having a good handle on the potential market and being able to plan a reasonable expansion of the business over time, because this is a new practice. This is, you're building a new practice with this company in many cases, and new practice development is not easy. So having, what I find is that very often we will build a business case, and if that business case is not well aligned with the roadmap of how the company is going to evolve, you won't make the business case. So the business case has to be grounded in reality, has to be conservative to a certain extent and yet show the potential of that market. The upside (you know) so that is a very careful dance, and making sure that startups, how often have we had startups that were really good startups, but they mistime. So that conservative approach to what you're really gonna be able to generate from a revenue perspective is really important.
Nicolas Sauvage: And that's also maybe where series B is your sweet spot because at that point you can actually have a good grasp on the business case. If it's Series A, there's still quite a few unknowns, and they haven't proven their market fit and so on, so how do you approach a series A versus a series B in this case?
Pramilla Mullan: Yeah so it's really, why is Series B a sweet spot and where would you consider series A? When you've got brand spanking new technologies and I'll, give you a case in point. I dipped my toes into blockchain for the first time seven years ago.
Nicolas Sauvage: All right. Which is about the time of the white paper.
Pramilla Mullan: Exactly.
Nicolas Sauvage: Yep.
Pramilla Mullan: You've got it.
Nicolas Sauvage: Yep, I read it too that was impressive.
Pramilla Mullan: Even if you say Series B is my sweet spot, there ain't no company in the world that isn't at the series B stage and yet this technology area is hugely in important technology area. Fast forward, okay. Quantum computing is another example, alright. Hugely important area. But where are we in terms of the availability of companies in the industry? In quantum computing, you're gonna have to take some risk. And that's when you start dipping your toes. Because even if that investment is not successful, it's not about the success of that specific company, it's what you, in the process that will help you play in the game and inform your subsequent investments. And so that's when you go early when it's not clear yet. And having a portfolio approach helps.
Nicolas Sauvage: It does, especially when it's such technologies like blockchain or quantum computing where you're trying to discover use cases that has an end-to-end delivery. How do you share back all these learning back to the organizations? Do you have some type of reports newsletter? How do you make sure that all these insights you gain as a corporate VC become actionable inside the mothership?
Pramilla Mullan: That part of every corporate VC that is called portfolio management, everyone has it, right? That part of portfolio management in the case of an organization like a GSI is actually the organization that's doing the business development. So what I found was that when I was working with co-investing with some companies, right? A lot of the companies that I would co-invest with would. Work very closely with me because they found me working day-to-day with the startups in helping them grow. So it wasn't just fire and sit back and watch the equity investment. It's being in the trenches and helping those startups do what they need to do. That learning from working with the startups and mediating between what that learning is and the organization that sponsored the equity investment in helping them learn from and evolve and grow their business plans on a quarterly basis as they adjust. My team works with the business owners in the field, in the market, and works with the startups and basically helps bring those two together on a regular basis to adjust to the ebbs and flows of the business and to learn and then evolve their next version of the business plan based on their learning.
Nicolas Sauvage: Very nice. When you say portfolio management, you mean the, you don't mean the portfolio, just of the startups you invest in, but also the ones you decide not to invest in but partner?
Pramilla Mullan: Yeah, absolutely. So we do that across the board through all of our portfolio of companies that we work with.
Nicolas Sauvage: So I will double-click here on the skill sets of that portfolio team because this is so critical a team. And whether you think it should be internal recruitment, external, or some kind of hybrid?
Pramilla Mullan: I think for that team I'm less concerned about internal or external because revolving doors do change. It's having the domain expertise to really be able to help the partner.
Nicolas Sauvage: I agree otherwise, you can't find a win-win.
Pramilla Mullan: Yes. Having the domain expertise, and that's not easy. Believe me, as I say that it's not easy when you are dealing with the breadth and depth of companies that we are dealing with, but I think over time, having that team build their domain expertise and have their business development in, in, in my case, I value the business development skills a lot because what we are doing is we are helping with the pipeline.
Nicolas Sauvage: Very nice. And then my last question is, what would be your advice to someone thinking about starting a CVC in their company when they don't already have a CVC?
Pramilla Mullan: Yeah so it's really important as I look at the successes, right? There are two types of skill sets that are hugely important. One type of skillset is internally facing, and that is having a good handle of the business and having someone leading up that CVC unit that has a good handle of the company, the business, and the network that enabled them to develop that CVC. And the second aspect of it has to do with leading the way in terms of creating that CVC organization and building the team of multiple skill sets that you've got. Now, again you will not always have, as you're filling out this organization to help guide you, you will not always have those skill sets necessarily found in any one individual. And so you will have to develop that through a number of individuals, but forming the right team, making sure that you've got legal counsel, whether it's internal legal counsel or whether it's external legal counsel, because there are ways of bringing that expertise in and just systematically thinking through what that structure is required and then filling that structure is going to be hugely important.
Nicolas Sauvage: Very nice I think you finished with a really nice golden nugget so I want to thank you Pramilla for all your time today and your insights and your tips, thank you so much!
Pramilla Mullan: Thank you, thanks!
Nicolas Sauvage: So it's interesting, very few people I have interviewed for the CVC Insider series talk about a product management background. That's one that I have, and so I have probably some bias towards that, but how helpful do you think the product management discipline helps you to be a very good investor?
Pramilla Mullan: Yes. See, this is exactly what I was talking about, finding that commonality from some time in the past and then using that. I've learned something about you today, Nicolas, that I didn't know. I look forward to a number of conversations about that particular topic. What do product managers do, right? They're talking to a number of clients. They are working with their clients, and they're using those conversations to structure today and future roadmap of the product that they're working on. The releases that they're working on. Now those skills are hugely important in terms of having that conversation with a startup that you're potentially looking to make an equity investment in and understanding where that company is today and where the potential of that company is, five years from now! And being able to roadmap that potential in order to assess whether to make an equity investment in that company. Now, we've been talking about equity investments over here a lot, but I wanna go back to a topic that's near and dear to my heart. Okay? And that is this idea of multiple knobs when one is thinking about innovation and leveraging all knobs to their fullest capacity. So it's not about equity investing only, especially from the perspective of a GSI, because from the perspective of a GSI, we are making an equity investment. Before the equity investment, we are a partner with the company, we don't have to invest in the company, and hey! guess what! After the equity investment is done, we're not just looking at the numbers and looking for the return on equity. In fact, it's about the fact that post-equity investment, they are a partner of ours. So it's business as usual to a certain extent, on steroids right?
Nicolas Sauvage: Wait, you mentioned GSI. I'm not sure everyone in the audience knows what GSI is.
Pramilla Mullan: A global systems integrator. So IBM Consulting is a global systems integrator. They provide professional services to large enterprise clients and they help the startup integrate into a larger solution and provide the professional services to ensure the success, the delivery success at any client now.
Nicolas Sauvage: I think is one of the key parts which I like to talk about, which is a superpower of a corporate VC. As a GSI, you have the opportunity to have startups who are not yet credible and bring a huge amount of credibility and guidance. Can you talk a little bit about this and then we'll go back to those three knobs.
Pramilla Mullan: Correct. No, so I was actually really going to talk about that particularly. Okay. So what I wanted to do was I wanted to bring out this notion of open innovation and the partnership with the startups, post-investment or even without an investment. Yeah, so as part of the open innovation function, what we do with the startups is we work collaboratively with the startups as they're looking to scale. So the types of startups that we work with are startups who are not looking for their first lighthouse client win because they're still working on their MVP, they don't necessarily have an MVP. A systems integrator is not going to be able to help a company, to be honest with you, and would not engage with a company that's working on their first MVP. Okay? What we are good at is helping a company that has their lighthouse win and helping them scale, right! And in helping them scale, these product management skill sets again help you with a discipline in scaling methodically, systematically, working with that startup going, doing the rinse and repeat. Okay, we have a lighthouse win, we've got this client in this industry, we've got this amazing lighthouse win. How can we help bring new clients to the table? How can we help lift the scale at which we can deploy? Those are the types of strengths where GSI particularly is helpful. And from my perspective, I see time spent in product management helping me today on a day-to-day basis, working with the startups that I work with.
Nicolas Sauvage: In a way, it would be very strange for a GSI company not to have this type of open innovation and corporate VC because you're at the edge of the innovations coming from the startup ecosystem. Is there any reason why you think a company, a GSI company, would not have a CVC?
Pramilla Mullan: I think it would not benefit them not having a, yeah, and I'll tell you why. Increasingly clients are working with startups. Gone are the days where clients are very risk-averse and not willing to work with the startup. Yes, they want success in delivery, and that's where the GSI comes into place, because the GSI can bring the scale to ensure success, but it's not to mitigate risk anymore. It is to help with the delivery. The clients are working with startups today, period! Now you can either join that or you can miss out. And Ergo, a GSI that does not have an open innovation function or does not work with the startup community is increasingly missing a seat at the table, I would say.
Nicolas Sauvage: Very nice. So let's talk about investment decisions. How are you structured? How is your investment committee thinking about things? How do you make sure you are fast at the same time as very thoughtful?
Pramilla Mullan: You have brought up a very important point over here because as strategic VCs, as I always say, we are always the last to the table because we have a small equity investment to make, and we typically don't lead investments. We have to be very nimble. We have to be able to make decisions fast because we will miss out on rounds, and we cannot expect the lead investor or the CEO of a startup to hold rounds open indefinitely for us. That's just not practical. And so in forming that approach to decision making within an organization, it is very important to ensure that the process is set up for very efficient decision making in terms of equity investment. Right. At the same time, there is this aspect of, speed to decision is great, but you cannot have speed and compromise the thoughtfulness aspect of it.
Nicolas Sauvage: Yeah, you can speed, but not rush.
Pramilla Mullan: You have to develop your own conviction using the term that I referred to earlier. You have to allow yourself the time to develop the conviction before you go off and speedily make an investment. Because without the conviction post-investment, you're gonna struggle.
Nicolas Sauvage: So here first, it's a golden nugget, but I want to double-click. How do you build conviction? And you mentioned earlier you are thesis-driven, how do you build the thesis?
Pramilla Mullan: I think thesis-driven depends on the type of company, so for me, the thesis-driven is very simple. What IBM consulting looks for is those companies that are not trying to figure their MVP out. Because we're not gonna be able to help them, to be frank with you, we are going to be able to help those companies who have their MVP, who have validated their MVP with a few clients. Those clients are intersecting with IBM's client base, and the startup is now at a point where they're saying, "I'm running out of steam. I can either build a really large organization to scale, or I can partner. And a company like IBM Consulting can come in and be that route to market from a partnering perspective for that company. So what that translates into is, Series B being the sweet spot. Yeah. But somewhere between series A and series C, certainly not at the seed round level. The second thing is as a GSI, selfishly of course, we are going to look at companies that need professional services to integrate into a solution that is meaningful for the client because that's where we make our bread and butter. And so obviously we are gonna look at startups, series B startups. But if the series B startup needs to scale by increasing their hardware capabilities that's perhaps not a good fit. Right. It's professional services that we are looking at over here, right. And so that's unique to IBM Consulting. Also, I see a lot of technology companies investing very early because they have a front-row seat to innovation. Right. And IBM is an interesting company because we've got both the technology and the services all wrapped up in one company. And when we look at companies, we look at companies that sometimes and very often benefit both sides of the organization. And so having that lead indicator of innovation direction is a critical component of an evaluation of whether to make an equity investment in the company or not.
Nicolas Sauvage: Actually, I can see definitively the case of augmenting what's already there. Would you also consider investing in a startup that could disrupt part of IBM?
Pramilla Mullan: I would have to refer to IBM technologies for that because that is squarely in the space of IBM technologies. But and I work in the consulting side of the equation, so (you know) that is a question for IBM Ventures, I would be remiss in answering that question. If you're not looking for potential disruptions and keeping an eye on potential disruptions and figuring out how you're gonna deal with the disruptions, you're not gonna be doing yourself a service as a company. The question then becomes how do you keep an eye on disruptions? And there's no one safe answer to that. There are, again, lots of different tools that you can use, and making an equity investment is just one of the tools.
Nicolas Sauvage: It's one of the tools and it's all about addressing blind spots. Which actually goes back to my question about the investment committee. So who is in your investment committee? Do they all need to approve it, is some of them? How does that work so that maybe the audience gets a sense of best practices that you've developed.
Pramilla Mullan: Yeah. So from an IBM consulting perspective essentially what we do is, we have our key leaders and we make sure that our key leaders from the market as well as from the head of IBM consulting as well as the service line leader who's bringing forward that equity investment are all aligned because it's very important to have everyone aligned. That thoughtfulness that we were talking about earlier, that alignment; Without that alignment before you make an equity investment, will hurt you post-investment. And what we are looking to do is post-investment because we are a GSI, we wanna go fast, right. We wanna be selling fast, and so we need to put a lot of constructs in place ahead of that equity investment to enable us to sell fast. And (you know) that- any amount of time that is taken, even if it means not making that equity investment because you miss out on the opportunity, having that alignment- taking the time to have that alignment is hugely important, right! Because even if we miss that equity investment, it's not the end of the world. We can partner, yeah, we were a partner before, we are a partner after.
Nicolas Sauvage: You may decide the alignment is not that strong at a series B, and then you ensure the alignment becomes very strong at Series C, you could still invest.
Pramilla Mullan: Exactly because we are looking at the business. We are looking at the large amount of money you can get from the business.
Nicolas Sauvage: I think the golden nugget in all the work of insurance is the alignment. Maximize a chance for very good on-ramp of the startups with the rest of the groups. Any best practice on how to ensure that alignment is done well?
Pramilla Mullan: Having a good handle on the potential market and being able to plan a reasonable expansion of the business over time, because this is a new practice. This is, you're building a new practice with this company in many cases, and new practice development is not easy. So having, what I find is that very often we will build a business case, and if that business case is not well aligned with the roadmap of how the company is going to evolve, you won't make the business case. So the business case has to be grounded in reality, has to be conservative to a certain extent and yet show the potential of that market. The upside (you know) so that is a very careful dance, and making sure that startups, how often have we had startups that were really good startups, but they mistime. So that conservative approach to what you're really gonna be able to generate from a revenue perspective is really important.
Nicolas Sauvage: And that's also maybe where series B is your sweet spot because at that point you can actually have a good grasp on the business case. If it's Series A, there's still quite a few unknowns, and they haven't proven their market fit and so on, so how do you approach a series A versus a series B in this case?
Pramilla Mullan: Yeah so it's really, why is Series B a sweet spot and where would you consider series A? When you've got brand spanking new technologies and I'll, give you a case in point. I dipped my toes into blockchain for the first time seven years ago.
Nicolas Sauvage: All right. Which is about the time of the white paper.
Pramilla Mullan: Exactly.
Nicolas Sauvage: Yep.
Pramilla Mullan: You've got it.
Nicolas Sauvage: Yep, I read it too that was impressive.
Pramilla Mullan: Even if you say Series B is my sweet spot, there ain't no company in the world that isn't at the series B stage and yet this technology area is hugely in important technology area. Fast forward, okay. Quantum computing is another example, alright. Hugely important area. But where are we in terms of the availability of companies in the industry? In quantum computing, you're gonna have to take some risk. And that's when you start dipping your toes. Because even if that investment is not successful, it's not about the success of that specific company, it's what you, in the process that will help you play in the game and inform your subsequent investments. And so that's when you go early when it's not clear yet. And having a portfolio approach helps.
Nicolas Sauvage: It does, especially when it's such technologies like blockchain or quantum computing where you're trying to discover use cases that has an end-to-end delivery. How do you share back all these learning back to the organizations? Do you have some type of reports newsletter? How do you make sure that all these insights you gain as a corporate VC become actionable inside the mothership?
Pramilla Mullan: That part of every corporate VC that is called portfolio management, everyone has it, right? That part of portfolio management in the case of an organization like a GSI is actually the organization that's doing the business development. So what I found was that when I was working with co-investing with some companies, right? A lot of the companies that I would co-invest with would. Work very closely with me because they found me working day-to-day with the startups in helping them grow. So it wasn't just fire and sit back and watch the equity investment. It's being in the trenches and helping those startups do what they need to do. That learning from working with the startups and mediating between what that learning is and the organization that sponsored the equity investment in helping them learn from and evolve and grow their business plans on a quarterly basis as they adjust. My team works with the business owners in the field, in the market, and works with the startups and basically helps bring those two together on a regular basis to adjust to the ebbs and flows of the business and to learn and then evolve their next version of the business plan based on their learning.
Nicolas Sauvage: Very nice. When you say portfolio management, you mean the, you don't mean the portfolio, just of the startups you invest in, but also the ones you decide not to invest in but partner?
Pramilla Mullan: Yeah, absolutely. So we do that across the board through all of our portfolio of companies that we work with.
Nicolas Sauvage: So I will double-click here on the skill sets of that portfolio team because this is so critical a team. And whether you think it should be internal recruitment, external, or some kind of hybrid?
Pramilla Mullan: I think for that team I'm less concerned about internal or external because revolving doors do change. It's having the domain expertise to really be able to help the partner.
Nicolas Sauvage: I agree otherwise, you can't find a win-win.
Pramilla Mullan: Yes. Having the domain expertise, and that's not easy. Believe me, as I say that it's not easy when you are dealing with the breadth and depth of companies that we are dealing with, but I think over time, having that team build their domain expertise and have their business development in, in, in my case, I value the business development skills a lot because what we are doing is we are helping with the pipeline.
Nicolas Sauvage: Very nice. And then my last question is, what would be your advice to someone thinking about starting a CVC in their company when they don't already have a CVC?
Pramilla Mullan: Yeah so it's really important as I look at the successes, right? There are two types of skill sets that are hugely important. One type of skillset is internally facing, and that is having a good handle of the business and having someone leading up that CVC unit that has a good handle of the company, the business, and the network that enabled them to develop that CVC. And the second aspect of it has to do with leading the way in terms of creating that CVC organization and building the team of multiple skill sets that you've got. Now, again you will not always have, as you're filling out this organization to help guide you, you will not always have those skill sets necessarily found in any one individual. And so you will have to develop that through a number of individuals, but forming the right team, making sure that you've got legal counsel, whether it's internal legal counsel or whether it's external legal counsel, because there are ways of bringing that expertise in and just systematically thinking through what that structure is required and then filling that structure is going to be hugely important.
Nicolas Sauvage: Very nice I think you finished with a really nice golden nugget so I want to thank you Pramilla for all your time today and your insights and your tips, thank you so much!
Pramilla Mullan: Thank you, thanks!
