[BITE] Redefining CVC with Intel Capital's $20B Portfolio w/ Nick Washburn, Intel Capital

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Welcome back to Billion Dollar Moves! This week, we revisit an episode with one of the world's leading corporate venture capital outfits, Intel Capital that has invested over $20 billion in companies across the tech ecosystem. We chat with seasoned leader, Senior MD, Nick Washburn who blends decades of experience with a contrarian lens on traditional VC practices.

Why is this conversation so timely? Because 2025 is shaping up to be a pivotal year. While it felt like a slog for some, investor sentiment has snapped back it seems, with institutions like pension funds, family offices, and insurance companies increasing their VC allocations some say by 33% in the next 12 months. The "tourists" of the asset class may have exited, but the true believers are doubling down, recognizing that even amidst recent poor fund performance, the magic of innovation cycles never fades.

As Nick shares his insights, we unpack five key themes that define his outlook for building a resilient and dynamic VC ecosystem; which frankly are some pretty awesome parallel life lessons too. Let’s dive in—because founders, innovators, and capital allocators —it’s time to get excited for 2025!

Key Takeaway 1: "Chasing the Puck"

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Nick’s passion for ice hockey doesn’t just stay on the rink — it informs his investment philosophy. Like Wayne Gretzky, who famously said he skates to where the puck is going, not where it’s been, Nick sees venture as a forward-thinking discipline. It’s about predicting trends, spotting where markets and technologies are heading, and positioning investments ahead of the curve. 

And what a great parallel for life as well— how often do we stick to something just because we’ve been at it for the longest time, when it really isn’t where the puck is going?

Nick:
“Yeah, I love ice hockey. I still play, actually played the ice hockey tournament this weekend with a bunch of friends. My father who's in his early seventies still plays a couple of times a week too. Um, there's a famous ice hockey player, Wayne Gretzky's, the great one, the best hockey player of all time. And famously, he always said, The reason why he was very good is because he would go to where the puck was going. And that's where it was. And I think that's venture. That is, just thinking about the future, where markets are going, where consumer sentiment is going, what's next and be able to like think ahead. 

And I can honestly say like, I enjoy the practice more than the games, if that makes sense. And why I like venture is I just like the process of learning and like life diving into things much more than like the outcome necessarily.

And so I think that does enable me to take on more risk when I'm looking at opportunities and thinking about things because I'm not necessarily worried about, I'm not fearful of like failing, I'm just much more enjoying the process of it. “

Key Takeaway 2: "The Anti-Pattern Matcher"

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Now this you should know is one of my favorite points— is pattern matching a code / a mask for unconscious bias? Pattern matching is a common practice in venture capital, and sometimes it is more “pattern” than “matching” — backing founders or companies that fit a familiar mold. But Nick challenges this approach. He believes the most transformative businesses come from outliers, people and ideas that don’t conform to traditional norms. 

Nick’s approach is a reminder that venture should be about breaking barriers, not reinforcing them. By focusing on problem solvers, not patterns, he’s helping drive innovation and equity in the ecosystem, which you can do too.

Nick:
"If there was a   for having to do this, it would just be called the way the truth is, is like, all of the biggest outcomes are extreme outliers and there is no path. 

This is a little different than a lot of folks in venture, but like, I don't believe in pattern matching.

It's easy to say this team went to MIT and Harvard and they're building something where this market has done before and so it's just the path of least resistance.

I think the truth is it's like, there's a bunch of different gates to decide how at the end of the day, you have 24 hours in the day, just like I do. And you have to decide where you want to spend time. A lot of that comes down to the people you want to spend time with and how, when I work with founders, I focus a lot on folks that I think have a learning mindset in the sense of like they're very, have very strong beliefs about what they know very, very well.

And then everything else they have, they lean in towards learning and they lean in towards finding expertise around the table. 

Like I don't have expertise in quite a lot. And so I focus on a network of people to kind of help me out. And I think really successful founders do the same. And over time, I think that just indexes me a little bit towards highly technical, humble, work really hard.

And I've had the privilege of working with great diverse teams. I mean, I'm on the board right now, of several companies that have incredibly strong female co-founders, CTOs. 

And I just try to not focus necessarily on the background of folks, but more of their understanding of the problem statement and why they feel best position to solve it.”

Key Takeaway 3: "Building Legendary Companies"

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While with the constant bombardment of new raises and what sound like overnight successes, building a company that sustains, thrives and scales is actually really really hard.
Building a company is never easy, but creating a legendary one takes something extra. It’s the day-to-day execution — hiring the right talent, solving real problems, and building value incrementally. 

Nick highlighted the importance of a collaborative ecosystem where founders, investors, and teams come together to tackle challenges head-on. 

Nick:
“It's very, very hard to build legendary companies and it takes a village to do so.”

“All these things are really hard to judge. It's like 2020 hindsight, as they say, you kind of always, it's until you see someone and you work with them through that process, it's really hard to ultimately know. I think I try to bring approach of here at Intel Capital and myself in particular, I guess I'd say like trying to be really thematically focused.

And so I focus on like a pretty narrow area. It's kind of like embarrassing to share, I suppose. Like I'm not spending really any time on AI right now, even though we're infrastructure software investors. We're prolifically investors in AI and have been for decades just because, one, we have enough people looking at it too.

Two, I think it's where kind of everyone's going focusing. So I want to kind of go look elsewhere where I think there's other opportunities. And three, I just think like when I talk to folks who are working on more core problem statements that are not the latest shiny object, it's because they have deep passion for those problem statements.

It's usually born out of something like, it's a problem they almost feel like maniacally compelled to solve because it's mind blowing to them and isn't solved. I'll spend a lot of time before I talk to founders just trying to like really inspected like the process of learning. Like I feel like I get paid to learn, it's awesome.

And so I'll just spend a lot of time researching an area, talking to hypothetical line customers, really trying to understand like, okay, this thing seems very small right now. But like over time, it's a very big problem for you. But over time, like there will be a lot of value capture.

Now I'm wrong all the time, but it's like, that's the approach I try to start out with and then I, once I start to think about a problem statement, then I go try to find the best teams working on it. That's another example. I get inbound deal flow, but like most of the deals that you mentioned, the investments like Augtera, I had already spent a lot of time around intent based networking and like what I thought was a new way to handle the growing complexity of networks.

We reached out to Rahul, Moderne I reached out to Jonathan and Olga, like as part of a mutual connection, but thinking through the problems of like aging code frameworks. And so I tend to do a lot of outbound and just reach out to smart builders in the space where I think that there's underpinnings of probably like a big category that could get created over time, but rooted in like a problem statement that's pretty urgent to a very particular persona, like here and now.

And the question is over time, how does this grow? I mean, we have pretty interesting debates like internally. And I think about this all the time. You hear about TAM, like you need to have really big TAMs and venture markets. I don't focus on them at really early stage. Cause the truth is, I think, There's two kinds of sins in venture, sins of omission and commission.

Now commission, like making a choice, like I think if I over focus on a TAM really early, I'm probably going to make the wrong choice of convincing myself of something that's going to have a big TAM when it doesn't. Or the sin of omissions, the bigger one, you'll pass on something because you don't think it has a big enough market.

But in truth, if you look at all the biggest outcomes in venture, they look like super niche categories to start. “

Key Takeaway 4: "Patience and Discipline in Venture"

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Patience and discipline aren’t just virtues — they’re necessities in venture capital. Leaning on the 30 years of experience of Intel Capital, Nick shares how staying true to a core strategy has led to remarkable success. 

Nick:

“We have the benefit of having existed for north of 30 years. The model has been refined over time as largely in the backs of data, because we just have so much data to look at where our best returns are, how we help companies the best, how we best engage and show up for founders, where we have the most access, to the best founders around the biggest problem statements.

And so, Intel Capital, we invest off the balance sheet of Intel, but we kind of run fairly autonomously. So myself and five other partners or general partners, we operate internally a lot like you would think any of the Sand Hill Road firms, or not to be geographically specific, like any early stage venture capital firm.

So we have our Monday partner meeting. We meet kind of all day, we meet with entrepreneurs really whenever we need to. Quite candidly a lot of times ends up on Mondays and Tuesdays. So we invest between three and five hundred million dollars a year. We have about 250 portfolio companies right now of that $300-$500 million dollars a year, around $275 million tends to be our new investments. The rest are just follow ons. 

Most of our deals are early stage. So our bread and butter is generally Series A. We invest in Seed, we invest in series B and occasionally we invest later too and that's usually we have deep conviction have met the founders multiple times, just didn't have an opportunity to invest.

We tend to lead 70 percent of our new investments a year. We sit on boards. We have high ownership relative for the venture model to work at early stage. We invest in those domains, I mentioned cloud, silicon frontier devices, because We know they drive the future of compute. We know they're going to matter to Intel in the long term.

But for the short term we have a lot of flexibility and autonomy and I think Intel senior leadership and the board have always given us a lot of runway because we're kind of like the eyes and ears. We really can be long term to your point. Like corporations, ultimately public companies, they have quarterly reports to the street.

There is always that balance. But we focus in Intel Capital and really like long term thinking because for us to the Intel board, like how is Intel successful? We founded back the next five Intel's like, that's how I think about it. We're trying to find like the next things that will become generational huge public companies in doing it early.

And so to do so, you need to operate at venture speed. We believe in domain experience. Our whole team are all specialists in the areas. They know it very deeply well because we really believe in a prepared mind so that once we've seen something we can move very fast.

Had the privilege of having north of 250 IPOs in the past 30 years, another 500 exits. I think since 2018, we've had something like $12 billion plus of market cap companies hit the public markets. So it's pretty amazing to be in stuff early and see it grow to such scale.”

Key Takeaway 5: "Focus on What You Can Control"

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This last takeaway is especially relevant today. In uncertain times, staying grounded and controlling what you can is the key to resilience and success.

In a world full of uncertainty, Nick emphasizes the importance of focusing on what you can control. This mindset is not just empowering but essential for navigating challenging markets, and challenges full stop. Here’s how he explains it.

Nick:
“Macroeconomics where the political landscape goes, it is so impossible to forecast. So I kind of go back to where we started with of like, talking to my founders, like you cannot control any of this. I cannot control this as an individual investor. 

I'm going to focus on like what I really kind of think I can control, which is my process, how I meet founders, the areas I'm focusing on, if there is one macro thing I would say generally, not be disingenuous, I certainly kind of talk about this enterprise sales cycles are very hard right now.

Like there is just more eyeballs in size, large companies, budgets are tighter, new tools, new software procurement processes are harder. So when I do look at investments and I do counsel our boards and our portfolio companies, it's like, A lot of the assumptions that were from like the past five years, like you just throw those at the door, like everything is going to take longer, growth rates are gonna be smaller. 

A share of wallets just going to go down. And so I like we take that into account in our underwriting. “

“It takes a lining of the stars and many things to go the right way over a long period of time, to have huge outcomes, particularly in venture given it's so power flawed. And there's only so much, founders control. There's only so much investors control. And so I think it's really kind of, once again, I try to focus on the practice and the day to day.”

Closing Remarks

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What a conversation huh? What I love about all of these conversations I repackage is revisiting and deriving a new lens on what was shared by some of the leaders of our time I get to spend time with.

Nick Washburn’s insights remind us of the importance of discipline, forward-thinking, and focusing on the fundamentals. And yes, of course, to someone who's just listening to this. Sounds pretty simple, right? Like these key principles. But in fact, to apply them over time consistently, imagine Intel Capital has been doing this for over 30 years with billions of AUM. 

And this is not an easy feat at all. And I hope that, you know, as Nick exemplifies what it means to be a thoughtful, impactful investor, that you too can take snippets of what we talked about into your investments, into your life. 

And with that, as we head into the new year, if this is an episode you're listening into as you count down to 2025, I want to take this opportunity to thank you all for tuning in to billion dollar moves every week. It has been a pleasure to serve you. It's been a pleasure to surface the unicorn founders and funders that are shaping our future.

And I'm super excited for 2025. And guys, I have big plans, big goals. We have big goals here. And billion dollar moves for 2025. You want to be tuning in, but do me a favor. Do me a solid as we enter the new year here. Share this with a friend. Share this with someone who may not have heard about us, but should; as a way to continue to improve themselves in their career, in their venture investing and in life. 

Because that's what we do here at Billion Dollar Mouse. And with that signing off, my name is Sarah Chen-Spellings, and Happy New Year!