Session Highlights

Fireside with Seasoned VCs Promod Haque & Nagraj Kashyap

Promod Haque of Norwest Venture Partners and Nagraj Kashyap of Touring Capital reflected on the hundreds of companies they have invested in throughout their career. They touched on the growth in fund sizes and capital required to finance early-stage startups, recently fueled by the hype of the AI sector.

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Golden Age of the WNBA with Cathy Engelbert & Pau Gasol

Drawing from Commissioner Engelbert's corporate background (33 years at Deloitte), she and Pau chatted through the WNBA business transformation case: a $75 million fundraising round for the WNBA back in 2022 set the stage for league expansion and a new $2.2B media rights deal.

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Cutting through the AI Noise to Enterprise Application

Andrew Ferguson and Sagi Paz, the head of Databricks and AMD’s funds took the stage with Rashmi Gopinath and Tanvi Narain to put the Big Tech AI “arms race” in perspective with emergent players who have catalyzed investment (Open AI, Anthropic, Mistral, etc.).

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Decrypting the Motives of CVCs for Traditional VCs

Trae Stephens of Founder’s Fund spoke with Travis Bales of Booz Allen Ventures, largely about the merits of doing CVC. Trae articulated that CVC is “very much like insider trading” with the ability to strike a commercial relationship and he questioned why CVCs would ever invest without a commercial relationship.

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A Brief History on the SoftBank Vision Fund

Lydia Jett was a Partner at the SoftBank Vision Fund, a $100B vehicle led by SoftBank Founder Masayoshi Son. She spoke with TenOneTen Ventures’ Minnie Ingersoll about Son’s 300-year vision and incredible investment style that paved the way for writing huge checks in household names including Coupang, WeWork, Uber and others.

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Raising External Capital as Balance Sheet CVC

Chris Douvos of Ahoy Capital and Ramneek Gupta of PruVen Capital discussed the current capital raising market from the LP and the GP perspective. Ramneek recently closed PruVen’s latest fund a $378.5M vehicle anchored by Prudential Fund and now with multiple corporate LPs.

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Corporate Healthcare Investing in AI

Michelle Snyder of McKesson Ventures, Amy Belt Raimundo of Kaiser Permanente Ventures and Matthew Blum of Cigna Ventures shared strategies towards AI investing and thoughts on how AI can be better applied to America’s healthcare sector. Some of their recent investments  mentioned include Abridge, Galileo, Babyscripts and Alma.

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Current Equity Capital Markets Outlook

Becky Steinthal, Head of TMT Equity Capital Markets at Jefferies provided color on the IPO market slowly marching back and differences between the 2021-22 market and today. Becky talked on why companies are staying private for longer and views from the banking sector towards Silicon Valley.

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New, Intermediate and Distinguished Breakout Sessions

New funds dug into topics like building strategic partnerships to scale and some tips and tricks to stand out as an emerging CVC investor, while the intermediate and distinguished funds dug into more advanced topics like managing process flow and creating an enduring CVC fund.

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Thank you to our partners Aduro Advisors, DLA Piper, PitchBook and Silicon Valley Bank who made it all possible. Also to Forward Search for hosting the morning networking, PepsiCo Ventures Group for the halftime show and to Hub International for the bringing the smoke show to the after-party.

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