In this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Minh Tran, founding partner of Mandalore Partners (and also her co-founder at Alchemy Crew) about the world of Venture Capital Funds. He has worked in the Corporate VC world for 30 years, most recently in financial services and founding Mandalore Partners 10 years ago.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• When you are a Corporate Venturer you have two models, one is to invest in VC outside – that’s not really a corporate venture, but you have that option, the second is to create your own team internally, for many reasons, this model hasn’t worked in the long run. I came up with a third model, which is how to externalize corporate venture funds – to reach out to startups with both a financial interest and a strategic alignment of corporates. This is Venture Capital as a Service.
• Resilience comes from lateral thinking too when investing. You can enter the market of your core industry, but you can also reach out to new industries that can impact your core industry. If you’re a retailer, you invest in your core business, but FinTech could disrupt retail finance, so you could reach out to FinTech ventures, not just retail. So you’re prepared for disruption.
• SIDE – Source, Invest, Develop, Exit. Each step of our process has been optimized. Source is the ability to source better than a corporation, we combine public data (Crunchbase) with private data (corporate assignments) to come up with a list of startups. We then invest like a VC. We develop a portfolio management plan like a VC, but I do things differently, more hands-on than VCs. Then Exit, again I use VC techniques to exit at some point with or without the corporate. 
• Like any VC I look at if the market is growing, how the product would fit in the market, what is the business model/plan, and what is the team? I also look at a fifth element: The leverage we can access from the corporation. This could help accelerate the startup or the valuation of the startup.

BEST MOMENTS

‘The Mandalore Partners name came from a planet from Star Wars because I wanted to look to the future and I found out it was a good name to have because it was about mobility, globality, tech, and now The Mandalorian TV series.’

‘There’s a bad reputation to having a corporate venture fund in the market that has the same name as your corporation, this is why externalizing VC activities and having a different name is attracting more startups to our fund while also providing the returns the corporates want.’

‘When we talk to corporates when they’re looking to InsurTech and they want to be exposed to another tech, an external model can help you assess the new industries you seek where you have or you don’t have expertise.’

‘I focus a lot of work on where to invest to have the best impact tools and platforms.’

ABOUT THE GUEST

Minh is the Managing Partner of Mandalore Partners, which seeks to create an innovative framework that enables investors of firms in early stages to achieve scale exposure to a range of traditional, alternative, and tech venture capital assets.

In addition to his experience as one of the founding team members at AXA Ventures, Minh was also an integral part of several other VC firms, including Nokia Ventures, Bertelsmann Ventures, and Truffle Capital.

Mandalore Partners: https://www.mandalorepartners.com/ 

ABOUT THE HOST

Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew, a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers & accelerating over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner. 

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