The case for patience

In venture, speed is treated as a moral imperative. Founders are taught to sprint. Investors chase the hottest rounds. Markets reward short-term growth and bubbles, with little regard for the consequences.

Having invested through hype cycles, platform shifts, and multiple ‘once in a lifetime’ events, I’ve come to appreciate that real innovation often requires long periods of experimentation, endurance, and trust.

Playing the long game

Corporate venture capital (CVC) firms are born out of a specific need at the parent company. Some venture arms exist purely for the financial upside. And many funds run a dual mandate: seeking venture-style returns whilst creating strategic upside for the parent company.

When deploying corporate dollars, long-term value is rarely found by investing in the immediate business priorities; rather, it lies in the peripheries. It comes by exploring where the world is going, and identifying first-of-a-kind technologies with the potential to strengthen the business over longer time horizons.

By nature, many of these technologies are in their infancy, and whilst we look for the same early-stage signals as any other investor, we also have a commercial interest in a product’s efficacy.

This dual focus affords us flexibility around the traditional exit timelines of institutional VCs. It allows us to place early bets and hold positions in startups that promise an outsized impact on our parent company in the future.

Why wait?

If a startup has the potential to alter the trajectory of an industry, and with it our LP’s core business, we must do all we can to give it the greatest chance of success. Against that backdrop, the ‘growth at all costs’ mentality is replaced with a commitment to sustainable scale.

We have to be more patient than pure-play financial VCs for the simple reason that there’s so much more to play for. Is speed important? Of course. But not at the expense of commercial traction.

Some transformational technologies take time to mature. Cloud computing took years of iteration and infrastructure maturation before becoming the backbone of modern software. And market shifts aren’t always predictable: not a week goes by without discussion on the diverging business models of the powerhouses driving the AI boom.

Yes, being less tied to DPI timelines affords us greater flexibility in portfolio construction. But crucially, it also gives our founders the space they need to achieve product-market fit, secure repeat business, and ultimately facilitate mass adoption. Many of the defining companies of our time would have been declared “too slow” and abandoned long before their inflection point if investors had prioritised speed above all else.

Patience beyond funding

For us, patience is a principle that goes beyond capital. When set up correctly, CVC units help founders understand the intricacies of the corporate maze.

Procurement and compliance teams are the biggest barriers to selling into enterprises. These functions exist to protect access to the corporate. CVCs with strong ties to these departments are uniquely placed to help founders demystify the purchasing process and leverage internal relationships to allow portfolio companies to experiment with pricing structures in a lower-risk environment.

Within these boundaries, CVCs act as a bridge between founders and experts from the corporate world. “Warm” introductions become an education and collaboration opportunity for both parties.

When framed correctly, a purchasing manager will often take time out of their day to help a portfolio company hone its offering. And why wouldn’t they? It maximises the startups’ and therefore the CVC funds’ chances of success, which ultimately benefits the corporate LP that employs them.

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Equally, CVCs with a holistic view of the enterprise can advise founders on when to time their approach. Business priorities are constantly shifting, particularly in sectors heavily impacted by geopolitics and other external factors. Engaging during the wrong week can be the difference between closing a contract and being ignored entirely.

Corporate VCs have the ability to bring nuance to their portfolio’s outreach strategy. We think of enterprise engagement as a managed set of interactions. Without a highly tailored approach, you risk being exposed to startup tourism within the parent company, with business units engaging founders, only to lose interest when priorities change.

Dealer’s choice

The perfect sales strategy isn’t developed overnight, and whilst patience can lead to better business results, it’s important to acknowledge that this approach is not without risks.

No investor wants to be wrong. Long time horizons, high conviction and commercial interests make it challenging to call time on a ‘bad bet’. Our due diligence involves the same checks and balances as any other investor, but we take extra steps to decrease poor outcomes.

One of the benefits of being a corporate investor is access to thousands of subject matter experts within the parent company. Our engineers, designers, and data scientists can assess the technicalities of a product and its enterprise use case in far greater detail than most. You can never fully derisk an investment, but we can leverage the encyclopaedic knowledge of our network to maximise our chances of success.

Patient capital means resisting hype in favour of fundamentals and long-term value. It means backing founders for the upside they can create over decades, not quarters. It means taking the time to help startups learn. More than that, it requires a belief that truly generational technologies take time, and a willingness to let that belief shape how capital is deployed and managed.