Navigating Corporate Venture Capital: Strategic Benefits for Early-Stage Founders with Workday

3. Erin
Yang
Savannah
Greene

5. ● Strategic: Invest for partnership
or strategic value-add to
corporate parent
● Financial: Invest for returns
● Hybrid: Blend of strategic and
financial goals
● Evergreen: Open ended fund;
fund receives capital as needed
(84% of Strategic VCs)
● Single LP: Sole LP is corporate
parent
● Multiple LPs: Minority of CVCs
have multiple investors
● Leading deals: 66% can lead
deals, and 36% of CVCs lead at
least 30% of their deals.
● Board seats: 59% can take board
seats, and 90%+ take board
observer seats
● Check size: Median check size is
$1M for pre-seed, $3M for early
stage, $7M for later stage
Source: SVB State of CVC 2022

6. ● Commercial
agreements (resell,
OEM, Sales
incentives)
● Customer
introductions
● Account manager
introductions
● Introduction to buyer
at corporate parent
● Participation and
sponsorship at events
(partnership events,
sales events, industry
events, analyst days,
customer
conferences)
● Co-marketing
● Introductions to
product leadership
● Potential integrations
● Development of joint
use cases
● Solution mapping
● Access to senior
leadership
● Advisory services
across core functions
(GTM, product,
finance, etc)
● Recruiting networks
● Introductions to
other VCs
● Introductions to
industry analysts

7. 450+ Joint Customers
Using Integration
Certified Worker Sync Integration listed
on Workday Marketplace
Workday Peakon -
BetterUp Connector
● Close collaboration with
Workday Peakon product
strategy to create “insight to
action” playbook.
● Enables managers and teams to
act on Peakon engagement
results to drive meaningful
improvements.
.
Workday Rising
Regularly attend zero-fee Ventures
Program at Workday’s customer
conference in both US and EMEA
● Workday Ventures invested in August 2018 in a $3M SAFE (ahead of Series C)
● Employee coaching and mental health assistant aligned to Workday HCM product

8. ● Consider how your company is aligned to
the CVC parent company’s strategy and
can help their business (for more strategic
or hybrid CVCs), use in messaging
● Know who your joint customers or
prospects are & their use cases
● Use your network for a warm intro:
○ Investors
○ Founders
○ Customers
● Cold reachout on social channels (e.g.
LinkedIn, X)
● Before you fundraise
● CVCs may value more time to determine
strategic alignment, connecting you to
product or buyer team, even PoC
● CVCs may also be more willing to do a SAFE
or convertible note between rounds

9. ○
○
○
○
○