20VC: What Are The Big Questions Entrepreneurs & VCs Must Ask Corporate VCs, Why Corporate VCs Are Not Your Best Lead For Series A & Why The "You Have To Network Your Way To Us' Is Wrong with Allison Goldberg, Managing Director @ Time Warner Investments
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 23 August 2017
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Allison Goldberg is a Managing Director & Senior Vice President @ Time Warner Investments, focusing on investment opportunities that directly enhance Time Warner's ability to meet specific strategic goals. Their portfolio consists of the likes of Mashable, Discord, Admeld (acq by Google) and Mic just to name a few. Allison also directly sits on the boards of Outpost Games, Yieldmo, Bustle and Mic. Prior to Time Warner, Allison cut her teeth in the finance industry with a stint at Morgan Stanley.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Allison made her way from investment banking with Morgan Stanley to running the investment arm of Time Warner?
2.) How has Allison seen the world of corporate VC change over the last 16 years? How has Allison seen the VC perception of corporate VC change over the years? Do corporates still get the preference rights they once received?
3.) What are the big questions entrepreneurs must ask corporate VCs when entering into discussions with them? What are the big red flags entrepreneurs should look for in their dialogue? What line of conversation should give the entrepreneur confidence?
4.) Is there a signalling risk for startups of having corporate investors rather than Tier 1 VCs? How can this signalling risk be mitigated? Why does Allison not think corporates make for good Series A lead investors?
5.) How does Allison view fund structures for corporates? How does the lack of fund end affect how corporates can invest long term? How does it affect their time allocation without needing to raise future funds?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Allison’s Fave Book: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Allison’s Fave Blog: NextDraft
Allison’s Most Recent Investment: Mic
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Allison on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome back to another episode of the 20 minute VC with me, your host, Harry Stebbings, |
| 0:04.5 | and you can find me on Snapchat at H. Stebbings with 2Bs, where you can ask me questions and suggest |
| 0:09.3 | future guests for the show. It would be great to see you there. But to the show stay, and over the |
| 0:13.0 | last few years, we've seen this incredible rise of corporate VC, so to speak. And so a very special |
| 0:17.9 | and different interview today, as we're joined by Alison Goldberg, |
| 0:21.2 | managing director and senior vice president at Time Warner Investments, focusing on investment |
| 0:25.7 | opportunities that directly enhance Time Warner's ability to meet specific strategic goals. |
| 0:31.1 | Their portfolio consists of the likes of Mashable, Discord, Ad Meld, acquired by Google, and Mike, |
| 0:36.6 | just to name a few. Allison also directly sits on the boards of Outpost Games, Yieldd, acquired by Google, and Mike, just to name a few. |
| 0:42.4 | Alison also directly sits on the boards of Outpost Games, Yield Mo, Bustle, and Mike. |
| 0:46.6 | Prior to Time Warner, Alison cut her teeth in the finance industry with a stint as Morgan Stanley. |
| 0:50.9 | I'd also have to say a massive thank you to Hunter Walk at Homebrew for the intro to Allison today, |
| 0:53.2 | without which this episode would not have been possible. |
| 0:59.1 | But before we head into today's episode, Pendo helps companies create products that customers love. It was founded when alumni from Raleigh, Google, Cisco and Red Hat combined their heads and their hearts to build |
| 1:04.3 | something they wanted but never had as product managers, a complete platform for product teams. With |
| 1:09.4 | Pendo, you can understand product usage and rapidly make data-driven decisions. |
| 1:13.6 | Survey users in-app for NPS and feedback, deliver contextual help to improve UX and user onboarding, |
| 1:19.6 | promote new features in product to drive adoption without requiring any engineering resources. |
| 1:24.6 | Pendo is the proven choice of innovative product leaders at |
| 1:27.8 | Salesforce, optimizely, Citrix, and many more leading companies. Learn more today at go.pendo. |
| 1:33.5 | io slash harry. That's go.pendo.combo.com. But what if you're starting out in the industry |
| 1:39.4 | and want to learn to code? Like I was four years ago. I went to Treehouse, the online school |
... |
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