Warm introductions reach the companies that already know your name
A corporate venture arm inside a technology group looked at where its deals came from. Every one had arrived through somebody it already knew: a co investor, an accelerator or a warm introduction. That pipeline is efficient, and it is a picture of a network rather than of a market, so it comes out incomplete in the same direction every year.
Scouting run through those channels finds more of what the channels already carry. What it does not surface is the company building something adjacent, in a market the arm does not follow. Correcting for that meant asking people with no relationship to the arm at all: practitioners who see what is being built because they buy it, integrate it or compete with it.
We chose the room for what it sees
We convened a workshop of practitioners in operating roles across the markets next to the arm’s own: enterprise buyers, technical architects and systems integrators. The question put to them was simple. What is being built that a corporate buyer would be unlikely to hear about? The session was structured around what these people are seeing rather than around a list of companies.
The brief deliberately excluded investors. An investor view describes what has been funded, and the arm held plenty of that. Participants were screened for operating exposure and against any relationship with the arm, its portfolio or its co investors. That second screen is an unusual one, and it was the entire point. Everyone cleared our compliance framework, and the client’s identity was withheld.
A map of ground the pipeline had never covered
Areas of activity surfaced in adjacent markets the arm had treated as somebody else’s ground. Some were early enough that no funding signal existed yet, which is exactly what a pipeline built on warm introductions cannot reach.
The arm changed what it measured. It had been judged on deal count, and it began to be judged on coverage, which changed what the team spent its time on. The scan became a repeating exercise rather than a one off, because a landscape delivered once goes stale and a standing group of practitioners keeps the picture moving.
