Guest bio
- President of TDK Ventures, TDK Corporation's venture capital arm, which has backed unicorns including Groq and Silicon Box.
- Named on the Global Corporate Venturing Powerlist five years in a row, and has written for Harvard Business Review.
- An alumnus of Stanford Graduate School of Business, he holds a corporate director certificate from Harvard Business School.
Nicolas Sauvage is President of TDK Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of TDK Corporation, which manages $350 million and has backed 42 digital and energy innovation start-ups, including the unicorns Groq, Ascend Elements and Silicon Box. He has been named on the Global Corporate Venturing Powerlist for five consecutive years, has written on corporate venturing for Harvard Business Review and for London Business School and INSEAD publications, and hosts the Corporate Venturing Insider series. He sits on the boards of companies including Analog Inference and AutoFlight, as well as TDK Ventures. An alumnus of Stanford Graduate School of Business, he has also studied at INSEAD, London Business School and a French engineering school, and holds a corporate director certificate from Harvard Business School.
Show notes
In this insightful episode about the business of Corporate Venture Capital (CVC), Suvo Sarkar is in a deep discussion with Nicolas Sauvage, President of TDK Ventures, the much-awarded CVC arm of TDK.
What are some of the factors that are driving legacy corporates to invest in start-ups? Why does innovation have to be external as opposed to internal? Do CVCs turbocharge innovation? What is the ideal oversight for a CVC? And what metrics should we use to measure the success of CVCs?
In a free-wheeling discussion on the merits and challenges of CVCs, Sauvage and Sarkar debate a few big bets versus many small ones, exploitation versus exploration, financial returns versus innovation objectives and cultural osmosis versus a Chinese wall between the corporate and the venture.
Listen to two Stanford alumni discuss the critically important topic of CVCs and share your comments or send us your feedback or questions to contact Suvo
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