We sat down with Jennifer Vancini, general partner at Mighty Capital, to discuss the importance of a product-first strategy, the challenges of digital transformation, ecosystems, the evolution of key roles and the emerging technologies that she is most excited about. Be sure to listen to our full conversation.
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“We say the best product wins in the market. I think the best product with the best ecosystems win bigger and faster.”
– Jennifer Vancini, general partner at Mighty Capital
THE SECRET OF PRODUCT-LED GROWTH VENTURES
Mighty Capital stands out as a female-led venture capitalist fund with a diverse portfolio of technology companies in segments like AI healthcare, streaming services and blockchain. Jennifer has been investing in technology and alternative assets for over 10 years and has held senior executive roles in corporate and strategic business development, especially in the high growth, security and mobile sectors, with companies such as Telefonica, Symbian, Nokia and Certicom, which she helped take public.
All that experience has honed her focus to product-led teams, strategies and companies. She believes product-driven user acquisition, expansion, conversion and retention is the best way to unlock value. For the large OEMs, this means a potentially difficult process of digital transformation and a culture shift.
There too, she has advice. She believes the CEO operates best when they are also the chief digital officer. That gives the entire company a tech-oriented growth mindset. Of course, aligning incentives for everyone in the company, from engineers to marketing to sales, is also key.
Another consideration is elevating the chief product officer (CPO) to a strategy position, much in the way chief marketing officers have been brought into decision making. According to Jennifer, today 15% of Fortune 5,000 companies have a CPO. She expects that number to rise to 70% in the next five years.
ECOSYTEMS ARE FOR EVERYONE
“Here’s an important message: Every company has an ecosystem. The question is, do you have an ecosystem strategy?”
It is helpful to imagine ecosystems and partnerships in the way Jennifer does: on a spectrum. On one side of the spectrum are the simpler, lower resource partnerships. These might be partnership programs or simple product integrations. On the other side of the spectrum are the complex, resource intensive deals. These might include joint development, mergers, acquisitions and joint ventures.
The question is not whether you’ll have a partnership ecosystem. You will. The question is where on the spectrum will these partnerships fall and when. Here too it’s important to align the team to make sure KPIs on one side of the company are not at odds with strategy on the other side. Everyone from change-resistant IT to network-driven product managers need to be on board.
INVESTING IN EMERGING TECH
“It’s like convergence on steroids between networks and the cloud and platforms and IoT and devices and artificial intelligence and blockchain.”
Times of upheaval often lead to times of great creativity, or what Jennifer refers to as “creative destruction.” In that way, we live in very interesting times. In a world that is still dealing with the pandemic two years on, supply chain woes and political upheaval, the opportunities for creative destruction and disruption are vast.
In times of uncertainty, it’s important to stick to the fundamentals when it comes to growth and investment. Jennifer’s advice is to valuate a company’s opportunity in terms of the team, the problem they’re solving, and the size and potential of the market. And whether you’re an investor or a company undergoing digital transformation, plan for long-term investments.
The three growth technology pillars she is most excited for are health AI, FinTech and blockchain. But it’s the combinatorial nature of these technologies – the convergence – that has her truly amped up. Low code and no code platforms, distributed and edge computing, these technologies are all coming together to improve entire systems. ◆
Listen to our conversation below and download the transcript here.
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