Strategic Capital and Commercialization — Rohit Nuwal

Fred Schonenberg
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the VentureFuel Visionaries podcast, where we introduce you to the innovators and builders that are creating the future of business. I'm your host, Fred Schonenberg, the founder of VentureFuel, where we help the world's best companies commercialize innovation through startup collaborations. 

And I couldn't be more excited about our guest today. Rohit Nuwal is the partner at TELUS Global Ventures, which is Canada's largest and most active CVC. They have over 100 investments across transformative sectors like health care, ag tech, IoT and AI. Rohit brings a unique perspective, having journeyed from brand management at a global FMCG giant to top tier consulting to leading investments at Bertelsmann and now at TELUS. 

So today we're going to explore how Rohit and his team structure win-win partnerships, the innovative use of equity incentives to accelerate adoption within the enterprise and how they measure and scale real world impact. So please enjoy this episode. Rohit, welcome to the show.

Rohit Nuwal
Hey, thanks. Thanks, Fred. Thanks for inviting me.

Fred Schonenberg
I'm so excited to talk. You know, we met at Global Corporate Venturing. Then we had a follow up conversation. I was like, I have to get you on the podcast. Because I think what you're doing is incredibly unique. So I'm excited to dive into it. But maybe I thought we could start with your journey a little bit. I mentioned sort of the brand side, consulting, leading over to the CVC side of things. Can you talk about that evolution and how you ended up in CVC?

Rohit Nuwal
Yeah, no, absolutely. And thanks. Thanks for the compliment and inviting me in again. I think, like you mentioned, I mean, it's always in the, I don't know what Steve Jobs or somebody said, only in the retrospective way you can connect the dots. So I mean, if I just look back, there's been a common theme, incidentally, in most of the things that I like doing across these different gigs. 

So be it running brands at global FMCG companies or solving client problems during my time at BCG. I was always sort of drawn to innovation that actually really makes it to the market, you know, there's just so many innovative things out there, which never sees the light of the day at the customer. And yes, fortunately, I was also even in consulting, I was the one who enjoyed the projects the most and had an implementation layer. And so the majority of my work had both strategy and implementation. So that's the part that I sort of enjoyed.

And that's what led me to thinking, hey, I want to be close to technology, because that's where the scale and the impact is truly. But I love that entire piece around how it all comes together as a part of the overall strategy. Right. And so corporate, we see what sort of merges these two pretty well. We sit right at the intersection of strategy, technology. You need that entrepreneurship fuel to bring it all together. And so I tell us, I mean, right now, it's doing it at scale. 

So we are building alongside our founders, helping them find go to market and seeing those products actually land with customers. And the big difference, what I realized in the traditional investing was that corporate investing is like investing in general has long feedback cycles, like especially in the venture world. Like we all know what you invest today, you might get some surrogate market markups here and there, but you'll never know the outcome five, seven, 10 years down the line, whether you've made a good investment or not. 

But I think in the VC world most of what you learn in the traditional VC is often from board meetings or reports or sort of filter through your decks and metrics that comes to you. Right. But what's the difference here is that I can talk directly to the customers because very often those customers are sitting right in the office next to me. The people who are working on the pilot and sort of understand what's working, what's not. 

And because we are also a distribution platform for some of these products, we get a full view of the business in motion. And so the business feedback loop is pretty fast and very visible to us. So while financial returns take their own time, which is the nature of investing, I think valuations fundamentally follow business, not the other way around. 

So we see that feedback loop setting in well, and that's the mix of real world impact, inciting and being able to shape the actual outcome hands on. It keeps me excited, honestly, on this day. So that's like a long drawn answer to your relatively simple question.

Fred Schonenberg
But I think it's great. And it's really interesting because at VentureFuel, we tend to hire folks that have worked at large Fortune 500 in innovation. And I'm always like, why would you leave X huge company to come to us, which is relatively small? And they come back with this idea of tangible innovation or commercializing innovation that they don't want to just do the strategy piece. They want to take that idea to market. I think you've done that throughout your career. 

And then the VC, the long feedback loops, that's that's it's an interesting, it's a fun game. There's value to it. But I'd love that you all start with the business side of it. Then the valuation follows that. So you get that faster feedback loop. And I think one of the things that TELUS is known for, and clearly you just talked about this, is this idea that the commercial deals are the first step. Or at least one of the first steps in the process. I think the stat was 90% of your portfolio companies have a commercial deal with TELUS even before you invest. Can you walk us through how you identify and structure that sort of early stage commercial deal before the investment?

Rohit Nuwal
For sure. I mean, and we don't necessarily do all of it before investment. Just to be clear, it's either most of it is battle or just right after the commercial deal, as you know, they have their own sort of base and metrics to follow. So venture and equity sort of rounds are faster by nature of things. So we cannot time it well, but we try to. But we end up doing like what you said, 90 percent of our portfolio companies have an attached rate, like the investments that we did last year. We did about 28 of them. And we've evolved quite honestly. 

It's not like day one. We just got some magic sauce and we started with that. I think at a portfolio level, we are at 60 percent. And now last year we were able to do it at a 90% mark. How does it happen? I think it's simple. You need to align things. Like so it's simple things. Every year we sit down with our business businesses. And ask them what they see inside out from their strategy perspective? 

We share what we see from sort of outside in what we see out in the market, from our innovations in their space. What are the customers needing? What are the innovative technologies out there? And that sort of collaboration leads us to arrive at some investment teams that we want to pursue for that near future. All of it is obviously linked to the long term strategic priorities of TELUS, whether it's in digital health, your AI enabled automation, agriculture, technology, customer experience. All of it goes through that similar process. 

Once you figure out the teams, of course, the next task is to find the company. And we do that often. But before I mean, we do these couple of meetings with the company to find out if it's truly something relevant, differentiated. The team is the right one solving that problem. But before we go down the proper diligence path, we run joint workshops with our business unit. So we sort of flip that model a little bit. And really try and test three things with them, because they are the ones in the market. 

Is there a real product market fit right in the product problem they are solving? Do they have scalable integration pathways? Because that's the key to both scalability as well as how successful they will be within the TELUS world. And the final piece is like, what's the business case for the business? If there is no business case in the sense of either they will be able to help increase revenue or decrease cost or help TELUS business avoid some capex investment. It'll be difficult for a business to sort of sponsor that deal.

So once those things are done at a high level, we don't even need details around it. We then go down the diligence path and then every deal needs to have a business unit sponsor. And so that creates ownership from day one. And once we do that investment, then we have a team within ventures called the SPD or Strategic Portfolio Development Team, which sort of works along with the two parties involved, the portfolio company as well as the business unit. This is to make sure that the alignment on roadmaps, the pilots, the POCs that we have designed build towards a scalable commercialization and all the promises that we made at the time of investment actually gets realized, you know. 

Fred Schonenberg
So this is when I said I have to get you on the podcast. I think this is one of the most overlooked ideas in all of CBC. Is this idea of a strategic portfolio development team of somebody saying what is the path to commercialization internally? Let us help smooth that path, accelerate it, move the barriers that pop up. I think this is a secret weapon for you all. Can you talk a little bit about maybe where that came from or maybe an example of how the team operates or a story that illustrates that value?

Rohit Nuwal
Yeah, no, absolutely. I think of SPD as our internal commercialization engine or call it internal consulting arm. And as I said, once the deal is done, they are the ones who connect the startup's roadmap with the business unit's goal. They help scope the pilot, guide the execution, make sure that the value that we expected in the investment case actually shows up in the business. 

And the value that we and we are very particular about measuring those values. So it has to be directly attributed, validated by finance. We don't just say, hey, we added some value to the company by this association. The way we define that is rigorously from a revenue side instead of sort of a direct sales motion that gets activated because of this partnership.

Are we bundling it along with some of our existing products? Is there a white label or a commission? Whatever reseller model, the motion that we define is well defined and then converted into revenues. And from a cost perspective, it's like it's pretty easy to do, relatively speaking. Where are the costs involved? If there's a product that we would ideally have invested, when I say we, I mean the business unit.

And that's getting avoided because of this partnership with a portfolio company that is a saving internally from a perspective. So those are the things that need to be tracked. And this is sort of the discipline where it comes in, right, where you need to work day in, day out with the different levels of hierarchy in the organization. 

Because like at the business unit level or the sponsor level, the incentives are pretty clear, right? They sign up for the deal, yes, but they also through the venture model are able to sort of spend this money without sort of burdening their own capex budgets, right? And go through that long cycle of build and try, etc. So they like it. But I think the problem happens typically through many reputations. 

And we have, as you said, over 100 investments. We've learned the execution part of it, like the middle managers who run those pilots, who do these deals day in, day out with the portfolio company. That's where the incentive alignment needs to be managed even better. So that's what this team really excels at.

Fred Schonenberg
Yeah, it's brilliant. I mean, I know when we talked last time I shared with you that early on, I was like, oh, this I see my model. It's very straightforward. We work with large companies. We figure out businesses that are important to solve. We'll find the best in class startups, new solutions to solve them. We'll agree on what the partnership looks like. We'll put it together and then we'll walk away and we'll do it again. It'll be great. 

And over time, we realized really quickly that it is the the implementation, the management of those pilots or early partnerships determine if they are successful. And they need somebody to push them through and to manage them and measure the results and be really honest. So I love that you all are doing that internally. I don't know if you're comfortable sharing, but one of the things I thought was really interesting is that you all do measure that impact. You actually track it across the portfolio. Is that something you all can talk about at all?

Rohit Nuwal
I mean, yeah, sure. I mean, we are pretty proud of it. Like over the last two or three years, we would have added over 100 million dollars into our actual P&L, Telus P&L, through these venture partnerships. These are real dollars, as I said, across revenue and cost buckets, which are sort of measured, validated, approved by finance and then gets recorded. It's part of all our incentive structure. We are very much all of us are aligned towards building that and doing it in a scalable manner.

Fred Schonenberg
Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about the incentive structure? Because I think that is also I have not heard of it in other places. I think it's beautiful.

Rohit Nuwal
You mean the incentive structure internally for the venture team or for the execution team who are on the business unit side?

Fred Schonenberg
Yeah. The business unit side.

Rohit Nuwal
Oh, yeah, I think so. This was back to the problem that we were trying to solve, like the execution piece. The slippage in the execution of that investment promise is done by the middle managers who drive the integration of day to day. As I said, they’re the ones who’re running pilots, building the business cases and also making sure that everyone's working in sync. 

So we realize and historically those people were being incentivized through recognition or some ad hoc inconsistent sort of incentive program. But what we realized was there has to be something meaningful, A, B, and there has to be some skin in the game for the focus. And not because the people don't want to do it. They all have good intentions. But there are like 10 other priorities that they have, which impacts their this quarter's EBITDA and this quarter's revenue, which and often those innovations get deprioritized. We've all seen that. 

What we've done is sort of put a special RSU structure tied to that venture commercialization. These RSUs are linked to achievement of those business case outcomes that we had promised at the time of investment. And that gives them a sort of skin in the game. So instead of relying on these ad hoc recognition or inconsistent programs, we built a structured, scalable incentive model that sort of elevates the ownership and hopefully follows through. 

And it's still early days. Let me be honest here. We are still seeing some stronger follow up and accountability, but this is a long game. It also takes time before you say, this is really successful. So. So, yeah, we are trying.

Fred Schonenberg
Yeah, no, I love it. I think it's so smart and so interesting. And I often think about it as like there's usually the C-suite that has to buy into this idea of corporate venturing or venture clienting. And then you've got the innovation and venture team. And those folks are usually aligned, but it's the business in the middle that actually makes this happen. So I think it's so smart to look at that where the slippage is and address it and incentivize it.

Rohit Nuwal
Yeah. And to be very fair, like the leadership and the C-suite alignment is a completely necessary condition for any of this to happen. It's a no-brainer, like our leadership, to be honest, our CEO, Darren Entwistle and CFO Doug French, they've been pretty pioneers in the CVC model. Like they started this in 2001. Yes. And none, most of these shops weren't around. So they've seen that through cycles and have that patience and sort of push into the organization to make it happen. As you can imagine, a large corporate structure isn’t easy to bring in new incentive mechanisms. So it's all thanks to their leadership and their vision to push this through.

Fred Schonenberg
I think it's amazing, too. And I mean, the average lifespan of a CBC is not particularly long. So anytime you see somebody that's been doing this for 20 plus years, a company that there's a lot of, there's a lot of commitment by and obviously some things are going really well with how it's running. But it's really cool, it's a beautiful model. And also, I love the evolution of it, the tinkering and optimizing as it grows over time. 

I have a question for you looking at, you know, you guys invest across a couple of different areas that are really interesting. We were talking about some of the startups, TasteWise, Flash Forest, CodeLabs, you're packed with these innovative companies. I’m wondering if there's any through line you see in founders or the teams on the startup side that signals that they're ready for that to scale up with a strategic partner like an enterprise or tell us specifically.

Rohit Nuwal
A great question, and I think to be very candid, like the majority of those elements would be similar to any other venture investor, if I'm being completely honest. There are one or two things which we see from our perspective, which is important to be successful in our environment. I mean, your usual like your founder opportunity fit is pretty generic and important, but super important for us, like how they lift the problem. 

And what happens is like why that is important, because if you've spent years inside that space, you know that you're blind spots. Typically, your decisions will move faster. And along with that, like raw intelligence and sort of depth of articulation is sometimes important because it shows us signals that you really understand the business. Is there any insight that others won't be able to get so easily from just by spending a couple of days in that space?

And the other piece is like, hey, you have great vision, mission, et cetera. Can you execute? Can you ship high quality products consistently? And for us, a strong signal there is like, can they handle a sort of dual track? What I mean by that is there is a customer that you need to serve today while building for tomorrow.

And the best ones see another layer thereafter. Like the three. So what are you doing for today, tomorrow and then long term? What do you want to be? But that's not necessary. And so you've got your vision, you have execution capability, but who do you execute with? Like, can you attract talent? Can you get resources in tough markets? 

So founder charisma is, of course, important, but it's very different from showmanship. It's about whether or not great people want to work with you and investors want to back you again or not. And all of this is great, but then reality comes in like technology shifts, market changes, crisis happens. How do founders react to it? Right. Like and that's where I think more than direct interaction, it's more about understanding from their past experiences, what they have, how they have responded to crises before becoming super critical for us. And a big part of it is coachability.

So are you sort of listening to the right advice? You may not agree with a lot of it and you can crash it, but as long as you are open to it. And from a specific perspective, I would say there are just two things. Because we’re looking for people who can build partnership, navigate a complex corporate environment to be successful. To be honest, most of my time is spent on the B2B side of things. And it's inevitable the complexity from an enterprise selling perspective. So can you work from an ecosystem navigation perspective? 

And the final piece is like, is there an alignment? At the end of the day, we roll up our sleeves and end up working a lot of time together with the founders. So is there a mutual respect, likeability? If you're going to be in the trenches together, you might as well have some good time. So, yeah, you have different shades of founders, they're glorified for their different attitude towards life, but yeah, may not work for us.

Fred Schonenberg
Yeah, 100 percent. I love those as characterizations on how to spot the right founders and that resiliency. Like things are going to change. I really love that today, tomorrow and then beyond that, looking at the third layer. You have two last questions. So one is what advice would you have for another large corporate that may be just thinking about CVC or getting into this idea of partnering with startups? Are there any things you've learned over your time that you wish you had known when you started?

Rohit Nuwal
So it's a good question. I think a lot of CVCs and CVCs have gone through various cycles. They've got a little bad rap early on. They started with the right agenda that they have capital and commercialization. That's the product that they’re selling in return for the equity of the company. They are not your financial VCs who're just selling capital and some add on signaling value, etc. So you need to know what game you’re in. And because a lot of CVCs have become masquerading as financial VCs. And that's not your edge.

Like you could be a great financial investor, but then be explicit about it because your edge is what you do with that product that you're bringing to the market. And it's so interesting, like in some of the most dramatic trends that you see in venture space recently, like some of the most elite financial VCs, you're in recent Sequoia, General Catalyst, and Cotu. They’ve started to operate more like platforms than pure capital providers. So they built out multistage firms, which is nothing but an evergreen nature of capital, which is what CVCs do. 

Like, definitely we have an evergreen structure. So we can be patient with our capital and some of the sectors that at least I look at, like health care, agriculture, etc. Those need patient capital. You don't get overnight successes. So they are doing that. And in some cases, like some of their operating teams are often larger than their investment teams. Like you have your go-to-market expert, product and design support, marketing strategy, whatnot. So it sounds very similar to your mature CVC setup. And we've been deploying for years. 

I'm not suggesting that they are copying. My entire point is like there is convergence in this entire thesis of capital plus capability. Of course, there are different incentives, as I said. So my advice would be to lean into your rather unique edge. Whatever is your data, your distribution, your customer access. That's your leverage. Build conviction around the business case that you are signing up with a portfolio company and go all in. You need to see through cycles. It's not an overnight success. Like this tool is not designed for that, unfortunately.

Fred Schonenberg
Yeah. No, it's super interesting. I love that. And I mean, from day one, like the name I think I shared with you, VentureFuel, came from this idea of I was like, oh, there's a better way to fuel your venture. So I was talking to a founder that was just raising money. It's all he was doing all the time. I'm like, why aren't you going to get commercial deals? And I find myself consistently saying that to both CVCs and large corporations. Like, hey, like your unique thing is who you are as a business. You have all these resources, all this access, all this commercialization. 

Yes, you have the capital, which is phenomenal and is part of this. But like to lean into the other side that is super unique to whoever you might be as an organization. So I love that. I'll get you out of here on this question. Is there anything, any emerging technology or startup that has made you very excited lately? 

I think what's interesting is that you get to see lots of great, interesting ideas. And I'm fortunate to be in that same bucket. But I wonder if there's anything that you go home and you tell your significant other about and you go, hey, boy, this is this is going to be something.

Rohit Nuwal
Yeah, you know, it's funny, you know, as I said, I look at health care a lot, you know, and one of the areas that I feel despite all the hype about the AI and for all right reasons. It is. And we can do another podcast just on AI. So I don't want to belabor that topic. 

But I think a massively underestimated opportunity right now is like, how do you sort of unlock the next frontier of data? And especially in regulated industries like health care, financial services, legal, et cetera. And why is this underestimated? Because I think what has happened is the last wave of data interoperability play was heavily funded. And now the investor attention has now gone into building AI models. What do you do with that? 

But even now, the truth is that 90 percent of health care data in particular is locked. They are fragmented, siloed, and very hard to access. And everyone's chasing AI, but without solving the data problems, especially in some of these regulated industries, AI will be incomplete. I would say people will have the early wins and then the incremental value will stop coming. 

So, in fact, a good signal of that. And somebody was telling me this the other day, like some of these big foundational models and players are already paying experts like radiologists, urologists, like thousand fifteen hundred bucks an hour just to annotate data for them. And this is like two hundred thousand dollars, just giving it to them in a year. Like this is like a side job people have started doing, just like your expert calls, your GLGs and Alpha Insights do. It's very similar to that. And that shows you something, right? Like they value this data. 

And with that, you can do a tremendous amount of things. So we've tried, we've invested in one of the companies a couple of years ago, actually. So this is in federated learning. The problem, as I said, with federated learning, you don't need to move data at all. The algorithms actually go where the data resides and update the model's weight locally, and then sync back those to improve your global model or whatever algorithm you're trying to build. So you can run predictive analytics and AI without sort of breaching privacy, governance boundaries, whatnot. We've already invested there. They're doing tremendously. They've moved from healthcare to financial services. And we're excited to double down.

The other piece is around how do you use claims data to have more intelligent, proactive intervention for high-risk populations? So we can go on and on, but claims data has been around forever. Everyone knows that the top 20% of your patients drive 60% to 70% of your costs. And what if you can identify and predict those top 20% cohort early on, intervene through preventive measures, and reduce the cost going forward? On paper, super simple, right? But the capabilities are still not there.

You need three unique capabilities to serve that. We've actually invested in a company in Southeast Asia, solving exactly this problem for the large insurance players. So we are quite excited about that space and want to double down on that. That data piece is still sort of under-levered, I would say, from an investor retention perspective, despite all the great things that have happened in the last decade or so.

Fred Schonenberg
Yeah, it's so neat. It's so interesting to see the cycles, right, of data and how it all works. And like, if you can't use the data, there's a problem that the models don't do all the magic that they're supposed to do. This has been so great. Rohit, thank you, first off, for all your time today and everything you're doing to spark change in the world. Where do you want people to go to learn more about what you're up to? 

Rohit Nuwal
Yeah, I mean, they can check out our LinkedIn page. Actually, most of the updates come about there, what we are doing, what we are looking at, how we are thinking. We publish a lot of pieces, areas around topics that we are learning from our customers, from our portfolio companies there. So go to LinkedIn, go to TELUS Global Ventures. You'll find us there. You can follow us on our webpage for sure, TELUS slash TELUS Global Ventures.

Fred Schonenberg
Awesome. That sounds perfect. Well, I highly recommend everyone go and check it out. And Rohit, thanks to you again for all your time today. This has been absolutely fantastic.

Rohit Nuwal
Thank you, Fred. Thanks for chatting with me. All the best.