CVC Unplugged Mawsonia

Jeppe Hoier is a long-time venture investor with experience in financial VCs, corporate VCs and on his own as an angel investor, based in Copenhagen, Denmark. A former partner at Maersk Growth, the CVC arm of Danish logistics giant Maersk, Hoier talks about how he was initially sceptical of going into a corporate VC, having been initially dissuaded by the reputation that CVCs had at the time, but how he has since been convinced of the benefits a corporate can bring.

We’re going back into the vault this week! They say that the only constant in life, and business, is change – so how do you manage it effectively? That’s why last year I spoke with Jonny Crowe, a lawyer by training whose long career has been tied together by one central theme: executing and managing transformation. This is something he’s done both as a member of the C-Suite within the structure of an organisation, or in an advisory capacity, for many companies including Cinch, BCA Marketplace, Naspers and Axel Springer, to name just a few.

For a while now, there has been a clear trend, for example, of hospital functions like patient monitoring, diagnostics, and other treatments being moved closer to the patients, even into their homes, which frees up space within hospitals, which of course, even before covid, have been dealing with huge capacity constraints. Many hospitals are operating at capacities in the high 90s and have a lot of trouble finding enough beds, enough appointments, or enough staff, for a number of reasons, but a big one is the fact that the processes within hospitals need to be overhauled and streamlined for higher efficiency.

The way we buy things has been changing. Supercharged by the pandemic, the digital and physical sides of the retail experience continue to merge, data analytics continues to play an increasingly large role in how companies target and sell their products, and the consumer journey is, hopefully, getting easier and easier.

Today I speak with two people who know a lot about getting stuff from A to B– Rose Chen, head of innovation investments and partnerships at supply chain and distribution company Wesco, and Hector Shibata, who has for over half a decade led AC Ventures, the CVC unit of coca cola bottler Arca Continental.

With valuations down from where they were a couple of years ago, the exit horizons that investors had in mind when they made their original investment ended up being further away than they thought. The IPOs are still scarce, and M&As are still too few and far between, but investors still want exits.