How CBA's x15 Ventures is redefining corporate venture capital
Four big banks, four models of corporate venture capital. CBA's is the most tightly controlled — but in return, it promises a more efficient pathway to scale.
As he walks through x15 Venture’s airy, plant-filled, and wood-rich offices in the Axle Building in an emerging tech precinct in Sydney’s inner south, Toby Norton-Smith keeps an eye out for black screens.
“One major measure of efficiency is, when you’re walking the floors, how many black screens are up? What’s the ratio of people coding to other work?” he says. “Not to imply that other work isn’t valuable, but good technology companies really pride themselves on having a very high ratio of engineers and technologists to other roles.”
That Norton-Smith can adopt that walking-around management style as the head of a corporate venture capital fund speaks to a key difference with Commonwealth Bank’s x15, the youngest of the big bank venture capital funds: many of its investment startups are essentially in-house, occupying the same premises as the bank fund.
“We call ourselves a venture scaler,” Norton-Smith says. “Having gone last (of the big four) we thought really hard about how we do (CVC) and we think the way we approach that is quite different. And we do that by investing very heavily in our venture platform.”
