Evangelos Simoudis
Seasoned venture investor, senior advisor to global corporations, and a recognized thought leader in big data, digital platforms, and corporate innovation. Author of the book The Big Data Opportunity In Our Driverless Future.
Founder and Managing Director of Synapse Partners, a firm that invests in early-stage companies developing applications that combine artificial intelligence with big data. Previously Managing Director with Trident Capital and Apax Partners.
Prior to his investing and advisory work, Evangelos had more than 20 years experience in high-technology industries, in executive roles spanning operations, marketing, sales, and engineering. He was the CEO of two startups.
He is a member of Caltech’s advisory board, the Advisory Board of Brandeis International School of Business, and the advisory board of Center for Urban Science and Progress. In 2014, he was named a Power Player in Digital Platforms.
Evangelos earned a Ph.D. in computer science from Brandeis University and a B.S. in electrical engineering from Caltech.
Corporate Venture Capital’s Role in Innovation Part 4: Setting Up a CVC Organization
In the previous post I introduced a five-dimensional framework to employ while setting up a corporate venture group and discussed in detail two of its dimensions: strategy and people. The corporation must establish a long-term strategy for its venture group. As part of this strategy it must create a set of objectives, formulate an investment […]
Corporate Venture Capital’s Role in Innovation Part 3: Setting Up a CVC Organization
In the first part of the series on corporate venture capital I explored how the disruption of institutional VCs (IVCs) and the imperative for corporations to innovate provide an opportunity to corporate VCs (CVCs) to make their mark in the startup ecosystem and be viewed as viable and valuable financing sources to private companies. In […]
Improving Corporate Planning through Insight Generation
I want to take a quick breather from writing about corporate innovation and return to another topic of this blog: big data and insight as a service. Host Analytics, one of my portfolio companies, recently completed a $25M financing round. Host Analytics offers a cloud-based Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Suite that streamlines a corporation’s planning, […]
Corporate Venture Capital’s Role in Disruptive Innovation Part 2: Will the Big Numbers Result In Big Success this Time?
I started writing these posts with the hypothesis that in their effort to innovate, corporations must re-invent the traditional R&D model with one that augments the R&D efforts with venture investments, acquisitions, strategic partnerships and startup incubation. Corporate VCs (CVCs) are expected to play a big role in this innovation quest. With that in mind […]
Corporate Venture Capital’s Role in Disruptive Innovation Initiatives
A large corporation recently requested my advice on how to set up and structure their venture fund, which they wanted to base in Silicon Valley. This corporation had initially set up a venture fund in the late ‘90s to invest in Internet startups. By 2002 they closed down the fund after determining that its portfolio […]
Additional Considerations for Corporate Incubators and Accelerators
In my last post I wrote about corporate incubation/acceleration models, presenting four distinct ones, discussed how to start one of these organizations, and how to increase the value derived from them. In this blog I provide additional details on the topic by: Presenting the criteria and guidelines a corporation should use to start an incubator […]
Using Corporate Incubators and Accelerators To Drive Disruptive Innovation
Corporations are establishing incubators, e.g., Samsung, and accelerators, e.g., Orange, in order to advance their disruptive innovation initiatives. They are doing so on their own, e.g., Samsung, Swisscom, or in partnership with independent accelerators, e.g., Disney, Microsoft, and Barclays have partnered with Techstars. Many corporate incubators and accelerators are established in Silicon Valley, but not […]
IBM-Apple Deal: Mobile Enterprise Applications
On July 15 IBM and Apple announced an exclusive partnership. There are several components to this partnership that have been addressed elsewhere (here and here) but of most interest was the commitment to develop 100 industry-specific mobile analytic applications. As I had written, the broad adoption of smartphones and tablets by employees, customers and partners, […]
Acquiring Innovation
In 2001 Apple introduced iTunes based on the IP of a company it had acquired in 2000. By 2003, after the introduction of the iPod and of the iTunes Store, iTunes had become the de facto disruptive innovator of digital music. More recently Apple itself started being disrupted by Pandora and Spotify. These streaming music […]
Measuring the Performance of Corporate Innovation Initiatives
The business models of large corporations are being disrupted faster than ever before, e.g., Netflix is disrupting the video distribution industry, while new lucrative markets being created by innovative startups, e.g., Uber, Nest, and SpaceX. As a result of these developments, corporations are starting to realize they will need to re-invent their disruptive innovation model. […]
