"What are you trying to achieve today? If somebody says to me, “I want to build a brand new innovation program and I’m expecting a huge financial return in the next five years,” I will say, “There is none. Other than AI today, maybe, and we still don’t know if the bubble will pop or when.” It is very difficult to do so because startups take time to mature. If you tell me you have time, and you are talking about a huge financial return in five years, for many CEOs that means, “I’m not going to be here anyway.” So I need to make sure that I get something in between to drive that journey forward.” - Ziv Ragowsky, Co-Founder of Wright Partners
"If a corporate does not continue to innovate, they risk dying. That is not just my view. Every major consultancy, McKinsey, BCG, and others, says the same. So they have to innovate. The real question is how and what they spend money on. That is the more difficult and more interesting question, because it is not about whether you innovate. If you do not, you will eventually be outpaced. The Fortune 500 tables show this clearly. Every new CEO says, “We are going to innovate,” based on consultancy research. Then when a new CEO arrives, they kill the previous CEO’s innovation strategy, wait a year or two, and start again. That is the cycle.” - Ziv Ragowsky, Co-Founder of Wright Partners
"You must believe that the problem is crucial and unique for you to solve, or that you can create the right partnerships. There have been many moments when we told corporates, “This is a great problem to solve, but it is an industry infrastructure problem. It is not your corporate problem to solve. You should build something, but collaborate with other corporates.” If you think about Visa or Euroclear in Europe, they were created this way and became strong businesses. Sometimes the innovation needed is for the entire industry. You cannot expect a startup to interact with fifty banks and get them to develop payment rails. That would not work. That is where innovation, and where building, actually makes sense.” - Ziv Ragowsky, Co-Founder of Wright Partners
Ziv Ragowsky, Co-Founder of Wright Partners, joins Jeremy Au to unpack why corporate venture building remains one of Southeast Asia’s hardest but most misunderstood innovation strategies. They explore how large corporations chase growth under pressure, why many internal ventures fail before traction, and how misaligned incentives quietly destroy promising ideas. The conversation covers when companies should build instead of buy, how lean venture design keeps startups investable, and why founder equity must evolve as risk shifts over time. Ziv also shares how venture builders act as translators between corporate logic and startup execution, and why honest advice sometimes means telling a client not to build at all.
03:00 Early ventures look irrelevant inside giant corporates: Small pilot businesses struggle to survive because billion-dollar organizations cannot emotionally commit to tiny revenue bets.
03:55 Overpromising innovation creates failure incentives: Corporates exaggerate projections to justify programs, which pushes ventures into unhealthy growth behavior.
08:45 Build only when buying makes no strategic sense: Companies should create new ventures only when acquisition is overpriced or the problem is uniquely theirs to solve.
15:00 Lean venture budgets protect future funding: Startups that spend like corporates become uninvestable before reaching real traction.
18:10 Corporate-heavy cap tables scare investors: Excess ownership and control crush founder motivation and block external capital.
20:15 Founder-led governance attracts venture capital: Investors prefer startups structured for entrepreneurial control rather than corporate hierarchy.
22:10 Honest advice sometimes means refusing to build: Saying no to bad ventures preserves long-term outcomes even if it costs short-term business.
Jeremy Au: Hey Ziv, good to see you. I'm fascinated to hear your story, a little bit about Indonesia but also about corporate venture building, which is something people are still thinking about, right? And so, Ziv, could you kind of introduce yourself?
Ziv Ragowsky: Yes, my name is Ziv. I'm from the United States. I moved to Jakarta in 2012 after my MBA. I moved as a consultant, actually. I left consulting in 2014 to do a startup. I was an angel in a very small agritech startup and then became the CEO in 2014. That brought me to Myanmar for three years, which is where I started doing more corporate venture building. I was partnering with a local agri player and built a cash-in, cash-out system, scaled their microfinance, etc.
I came back to Indonesia in 2017 and worked across a couple of things, you know, with one of the large corporates here. I ended up doing corporate venture building for them as well. I left in 2019 with a lot of learnings and started a corporate venture builder called Wright Partners in 2019 together with two partners. One of them is named Arnold Egg, out of Indonesia as well—one of the original founders of Tokobagus that sold to OLX and then set up OVO. We've been operating ever since. And I think today we're one of the only corporate venture studios left standing after a bit of a purge in the industry over the last three years, and we're still kicking.
Jeremy Au: Yeah, fantastic. And you know, Ziv, I want to talk a little bit about your prior career history because I think it's quite fascinating. One of the interesting things is that you were working at Sinar Mas, right? You were working at their corporate ventures, etc. So, can you share a little bit more about what that experience was like?
Ziv Ragowsky: So, I was working across a couple of areas within Sinar Mas. One was their—at that time they had an accelerator, which was kind of an incubator-slash-accelerator. It was interesting because there were a lot of things to do, but working from the internal side, there were a lot of things to overcome. Those were a bit of our inspiration later for how we built Wright Partners, which is to then figure out how to bypass some of these walls to create impact.
I then moved to one of their startups on the other side of Sinar Mas called Busy. That's where I met Arnold Egg. And there again, it was a slightly more proper startup, but it still required a quite heavy interface with the mothership, and that was difficult to achieve for a variety of reasons. Beyond the normal stuff like inertia and corporate politics, the most important thing—which I think is less controversial but people often misunderstand—is that when you build a brand-new venture in a corporate, for the first few years, it's actually going to be meaningless for the organization. You're dealing with organizations that have billions of dollars in revenues, and you're trying to build something that, at your best aspirations, is going to have one, two, 10, or 30 million dollars of revenues in the next five to six years.
To expect most organizations to be able to support that in the early days becomes super difficult. I think that is actually one of the biggest hurdles for venture building, which causes so many failures. Organizations try to over-promise and over-invest in the early days because no one is going to promise their MNC boss only 2 million dollars of revenues in the next five years. That actually creates wrong behaviors which lead to failures. So, I think that's where there was a learning there that informed later how we've looked at venture building.
Jeremy Au: Yeah, and I think that's a really interesting insight. These conglomerates are huge; they have multiple businesses, multiple verticals, and multiple geographies. It's a giant organization. So, what is actually the incentive behind corporate venture building? What's the thinking there?
Ziv Ragowsky: It makes a lot of sense. We live in a world that is significantly more volatile than it was even five years ago. Climate change, extreme volatility in terms of political situations, and tariffs that made the world almost freeze a year ago from an economic perspective. If a corporate doesn't continue to innovate, they're risking dying. These are all the consultancies—McKinsey, BCG, Bain, or whatever it is—saying this. And so, they have to find a way to innovate.
Now the question is how and what do they spend money on? I think this is the more difficult and more interesting question because it's not really a question of "Are you going to innovate?" If you're not, you're going to eventually be outpaced. Every new CEO says they're going to innovate. When the new CEO comes, they kill the previous CEO's innovation strategy, wait for a year or two, and then start again. That's the cycle. So, that's where the conundrum is: how do you innovate, not if you innovate.
Jeremy Au: I've seen that happen before. I mean, you not only have CEOs, but business unit CEOs who may be there for a certain period of time or on rotation. So, I think that drive or imperative behind innovation is a little bit tricky. Can you talk a little bit more about what's driving it? Is it just to score points and look innovative, or is it to generate a value stream that can be huge? How do people think about those incentives at the individual or CEO level?
Ziv Ragowsky: Right. We've spoken with some corporates that have innovation teams that say when they create enough buzz and there are some successes, there is a pretty significant uplift to the share price. Actually, the benefit to the share price, if the program is communicated well, far outweighs the cost of the corporate program itself.
But in general, we've seen effectively four elements of why corporates venture:
- Financial return: But to be fair, there are easier ways for corporates to get pure financial return.
- Technological advancement: Or pure innovation.
- Branding element: Which impacts share price and engagement.
- Developing new capabilities and skills: Within the organization by working with entrepreneurs and founders.
All of these four reasons are extremely relevant. Corporates need to think about which ones matter more to them today. They also need to think a bit ahead and plan their innovation route. If somebody says to me, "I want to build a brand new innovation program and I'm expecting a huge financial return in the next five years," I will say, well, other than AI today, maybe not—and we still don't know if the bubble will pop and when. It's very difficult to do so because startups take time to mature. If you're talking about a huge financial return in five years, for many CEOs, they won't even be there anyway. So, they need to make sure they get something in between to drive that journey forward.
Jeremy Au: I agree about the context of competition driving the need for innovation. I just think that from a corporate perspective, you have a choice of buying, building, or improving your core business. I'm just curious, between those three options, how do people land on building an innovation venture builder rather than buying or improving the core?
Ziv Ragowsky: I would add a fourth one: partnering. There is now what's called "client venturing," where you can partner with a startup without having to invest. We have a whole issue tree that describes this because, as a venture builder, we're quite strict about what we want to build. We often advise corporates not to build.
Essentially, you build when you can't buy at a fair price. Often, corporates don't have the ability to buy a startup at a fair price; they pay a premium and then try to integrate, which is not always successful. You build when the problem you're trying to solve will give you significantly more value by doing it yourself. If you're leveraging your unique capabilities, then you can actually do it better and more cost-efficiently. You build when you really believe this problem is crucial and unique to you to solve, or you believe you couldn't create the partnerships.
Sometimes the innovation needed is for the industry. You can't have one startup trying to interact with 50 banks to develop payment rails. That's where building makes sense. Other forms of innovation should happen far more often than actual venture building.
Jeremy Au: I like what you said, that you advise companies to maybe not build because it can be tricky. Partnering is straightforward. But I'm curious about the buy-versus-build dynamic, especially since many startups in Southeast Asia need to exit.
Ziv Ragowsky: If you look at exits through mergers, M&A in the region generally happens at around a hundred million dollars. Some VCs are not happy with that kind of outcome unless the venture is doing really bad. We have seen far more buying overseas than in Southeast Asia.
On the other hand, when we built Wright Partners, we had three ideas:
- Many interesting problems to solve here are not from Europe, the US, or China.
- Infrastructure is lacking.
- Founders need help.
Most of what we build are things that simply don't exist in the market. For example, a large energy player might want to look into biomass in a way that works specifically in Indonesia, the Philippines, or Malaysia. There might not be a startup to buy because the building of that startup hasn't even happened yet.
Jeremy Au: I agree that historically, with the oversupply of capital in Southeast Asia, many funds didn't want to do M&A because they needed home run returns. I think that is reverting, where M&A and buying from a corporate perspective is becoming more viable today. But I appreciate that the building side is true where categories are currently impossible or lack the talent/insight. So, how does a company get the sensation that they can succeed in building a business model?
Ziv Ragowsky: Step one: companies have been paying consultants for building new businesses for a long time. The new part is that there are now other models like venture builders. It’s difficult to pay consultants who have often never built a business to build a new business.
We try to go as close to entrepreneurial elements as possible. We give the corporate the same approach as what two guys in the wild would achieve. This allows us to save the decision about whether to "spin in" or "spin out" until later. Traditionally, a corporate builds a business, strategy changes, and then they try to get external funding. But the market says the venture isn't ready because there's no founder, the cap table doesn't make sense, and they spent too much money for the traction they have.
Research shows it costs about 2.5 million dollars to bring a venture from 24 months to a Series A. A corporate should not spend more than that unless they strongly believe the business will scale. Our model allows us to take risk with them. We've worked with a bank and developed their SME banking; we held that startup on our books for two to three years until it cleared internal compliance, then transferred it back. Because we are equity shareholders, we support the ventures much longer than the corporate can.
The Singapore government, specifically the EDB, has a program called the Corporate Venture Launchpad that helps corporates de-risk venture building. Because we build in a very lean way, we enable the corporate to maintain the decision of spin-in or spin-out for as long as possible. We discuss investability with VCs, and the decision usually happens more than a year after the work has started. At that point, the cap table is still relevant for VCs to come in.
Jeremy Au: As a VC, I've often received decks from corporate ventures with very difficult cap tables. Either the corporate has massive economic value and control, making it hard for a VC to add value, or there are insufficient incentives for the management team. What’s your reaction to that?
Ziv Ragowsky: We were trying to answer that in 2019. Today, we have a lot of discussions with VCs because the world has changed. Many Asian founders are not looking to be the next Elon Musk; they would be very happy with an exit at less than a billion. When we started, the cap table was no less than 50% or 60% for founders on day one; now we try to get to 60% or above. The corporate invests for less than 30%, and we generally take 10% to 15%.
We educate corporates on two elements: they need to provide help, and their return profile is not the same as a VC, so they should be willing to give more shares to founders as they grow. On day one, the corporate and our firm have taken the risk. As time goes on and success is achieved, the risk shifts to the corporate, and we facilitate that flow back to the founders.
Jeremy Au: Could you share a personal story about a time you've been brave?
Ziv Ragowsky: Taking equity in today's age with companies is the base of what we do. For us, it means having very difficult conversations with corporates. We’ve told corporates they shouldn't build certain ventures, which got us uninvited from working with them for more than two years—though they brought us back when they needed to fix their system. Just yesterday, I told a corporate we were unlikely to do the scaling because their initial decisions didn't allow for their stated goals.
For a small firm that isn't McKinsey or BCG to tell corporate partners they are wrong is our version of bravery. We've had literal discussions where we told a corporate they really lost money on a venture building project, and I was happy to tell the consulting partner to his face based on the facts.
In the first year of the EDB Corporate Venture Launchpad program, EDB said our model of doing equity with corporates would never happen. Today, we are the best-performing player on that program because we are the only ones whose ventures have raised external funding. For us, bravery is about having the right discussion and fighting for what is best for the venture and the outcome.
Jeremy Au: Amazing Ziv. To summarize the big takeaways: First, thank you for sharing the corporate perspective and the incentives that drive venture building. Second, thanks for the trade-offs between building, buying, partnering, and iterating on the core business. And lastly, thank you for explaining the models for talent, equity, and how a venture builder partners with both corporates and the broader ecosystem.
Ziv Ragowsky: Thank you very much, Jeremy, for having me. That was a wonderful chat.
