Our Offerings
Core Membership
Navigating a complex, distributed and rapidly changing technology landscape requires access to real-time contextual intelligence, strategic relationships, and driving the highest quality flow of opportunities. Silicon Foundry’s core curated flow membership offering unlocks relevant and impactful opportunities by identifying and exposing organizations to the people, ideas, technologies, and startups that are most critical to their business – whether that is to explore solutions for internal usage (as a customer), strategic partnerships, venture investments or acquisitions. We serve as an extension of our Member’s teams and our dedicated team sources actionable insights, tracks sector and company developments, and makes impactful connections so our Members are ahead of fast-moving trends and make decisions with confidence.
Our core membership offering includes the following components:
In-depth analysis of a particular technology, sector or emerging trend, which covers key market dynamics, segmentation, competitive activity, and category-defining startups. These serve as the starting point for more detailed company spotlights.
Detailed analyses of specific emerging companies with strategic relevance – that provide comprehensive understanding of core technology, product roadmap, business model, and competitive landscape.
Access to an ongoing slate of exclusive events within the Foundry community. These intimate gatherings are held in Silicon Valley, New York, Los Angeles, London, Frankfurt, Dubai, Tokyo, and other key metros and technology ecosystems around the globe each year.
Half, full or multi-day immersive experiences for Member executives’ unique access to the most relevant entrepreneurs and disruptive startups within a given sector.
Access to our physical Hub space, allowing Members to embed colleagues- on a full- or part-time basis – into SiFs community within a central hub in the heart of San Francisco.
Strategic Roadmaps
Most organizations struggle to understand how and when new disruptive forces will impact their business. Silicon Foundry’s Strategic Roadmap offerings help companies assess the impact of new technologies, platforms or services in order to prepare for the future. We equip our Members with the tools and insights they need to future-proof their businesses, and help them decide when to leverage these new technologies. We have built out three offerings that help our members achieve that:
The “Tech Compass” is a roadmap focused on transformative technologies that will shape the organization over the next 3-10 years. The Compass serves to align key stakeholders around a set of platform-level technologies that will inform strategic priorities across the organization. Its goal is to identify areas to invest, build capabilities or acquire talent. The Tech Compass maps key social, corporate, economic, environmental and regulatory shifts against key transformative platform technologies (e.g., AI & ML, Distributed Ledger Technologies, Quantum Computing) to identify new channels, propositions and solutions. This is used to build a strategy for each platform technology, highlighting risks and dependencies, suggested actions the corporate should take over the next 1, 3 and 10 years and provides context around how competitors are responding and investing into these platforms.
Our “Prepared Minds” sessions are immersive one to two-day workshops that bring experts, investors and startups in a single room to educate executives on innovation themes, emerging technologies, or “future of” topics relevant to their organization (and often stemming from the trends and opportunities uncovered in the Tech Compass. Leading up to each workshop, a report is delivered, which summarizes the 2-4 macro trends, technology maturity, competitor activity and emerging companies for each topic. We generally do four Prepared Minds sessions per Strategy & Innovation engagement.
Our “Early Warning System” is an approach and program that continuously scans for early signals of important market developments related to emerging technologies, either identified and prioritized through the Tech Compass or independently highlighted by the Member. Depending on the focus areas chosen, a set of early indicators are identified, the relevant data sources are secured and a quarterly report is generated to share key trends and findings with the Member organization. This allows organizations to know when it might be time to explore, test or scale innovation focus areas on their roadmap.
Corporate Venturing
From opportunistic investing to a dedicated fund, Silicon Foundry has deep experience working with a wide range of corporate venturing units with different levels of maturity. We support from inception, actively advising through fund creation/ structure, strategy development, and team development, as well as supporting existing funds by advising them on deal flow and the deal lifecycle, portfolio management, and exit strategies. We are flexible in our approach and can support the full process, or supplement the team in areas where they have gaps.
For organizations that look to launch a CVC, we help with developing clear KPIs, building out an investment thesis, and defining target deal profiles for impactful end-to-end strategic investing for the long term. We also support creating the required organizational structure for the core CVC team members at time of launch, plus expected evolution over time. We partner with our Members to create channels for recruiting, job specs, compensation and incentive packages and retention tools.
We ensure an impactful launch of a new CVC entity by generating visibility among key ecosystem players and highlighting the CVC’s purpose, focus areas, and partnership benefits with success stories.
We guide CVC Members through the venture investing process, ensuring efficient negotiations and avoiding common pitfalls. This includes delivering a tailored pipeline of potential investments, managing the pipeline in coordination with investing teams, providing competitive analysis and market mapping, assisting with term sheet negotiations, and conducting advanced diligence.
We regularly support with Portfolio Health Checks to identify leading and lagging investments, prioritize resources and provide ‘Portfolio Triage’, offering actionable recommendations for struggling investments. We also deliver quarterly insights to senior management, updating on key market developments, competitor activities, regulatory changes, and technological advancements.
CVCs are often expected to drive commercial traction through pilots, co-development agreements, or partnerships. We support this by connecting CVCs with potential co-investors and partners, advising on exit strategies, supporting roadshows, offering a landing pad in Silicon Valley with our Hub in San Francisco, and providing insights into industry trends and opportunities.
Acquisitions
Mergers and acquisitions are an important path to growth for our Members. Silicon Foundry acts as a trusted partner to corporate development teams across a range of industries. In many cases, these teams are tasked with assessing a multitude of opportunities, and we can assist in discerning signal from noise. We can also act as an intermediary to engage (initial approach) with potential acquisition targets without creating greater demands on our Member teams.
Silicon Foundry adds unique value at critical moments in the M&A journey, complementing traditional pathways with our deep tech insights and innovation ecosystem connections:
Silicon Foundry provides market insights and strategic perspectives in emerging tech to shape a Member’s M&A strategy. Our grasp of the startup ecosystem allows us to identify and assess the strategic fit of innovative technologies, enabling a corporation to make informed, future-oriented M&A decisions.
We lay the groundwork for successful M&A outcomes by assessing synergies between targets and the Member’s long-term goals. Our team anticipates challenges and co-develops a resonant value proposition for targets, leading initial discussions and preparing for negotiations. We guide the selection of investment banks to match the deal’s scale and intricacies and prepare materials for thorough target engagement.
Silicon Foundry partners with specialists for due diligence, legal, tax, and financial structuring, while we provide ongoing support to ensure alignment with innovation and technology insights, giving our clients a competitive edge.
While Silicon Foundry does not directly handle post-merger integration, we entrust this crucial stage to our trusted partners at Kearney, acknowledged leaders in post-merger integration (PMI).
Venture Building
Future-proofing core business activities and creating new engines for growth are strategic imperatives for companies aiming to withstand disruption. Corporate Venture Building has emerged as a promising avenue in corporate innovation. Silicon Foundry assists organizations in navigating challenges and deriving substantial value from building new ventures to drive innovation and adjacent growth.
Our Venture Building Services:
Whether building a Venture Studio strategy from scratch or assessing and optimizing an organization’s existing new venture function, we leverage our global experience with corporate venture teams to design successful organizations. We address objectives and long-term vision, organization, governance, stage gate processes, aligning incentives, capital allocation strategies, risk and compliance, talent sourcing strategy, new venture deployment, and more, mitigating challenges and pitfalls associated with new venture design.
As independent Venture Architects, we utilize our Strategy and Innovation methodology to identify, assess, and prioritize key trends impacting your organization and pinpoint “where to play” opportunities. We delve deeper to distill business implications, define problem hypotheses, focus areas, ideate adjacent growth opportunities, and validate potential impacts in the context of existing (alternative) solutions, providing a solid foundation for investment decisions.
We assist organizations in uncovering trapped assets by applying a structured process similar to Venture Architecture. Instead of ideating new solutions, we assess the problem-solution fit and venture potential of existing solutions or products.
After a decision to bring a venture to market, we continue as Venture Architects, helping you source seasoned entrepreneurs to run new venture builds, identify development and design companies for the actual build, and find potential startup partners. We leverage our ecosystem knowledge to connect you with the right talent or partner based on your venture studio strategy and organizational design.
Business Development as a Service (BDaaS)
For many startups, their biggest challenge isn’t coming up with an offering, securing funding, or attracting talent; it’s forging partnerships with corporations. Navigating the lengthy and tailored sales process for each individual enterprise is complex, and establishing connectivity and trust is crucial to winning large enterprise partnerships. Silicon Foundry works with a select few emerging and category-defining startups to accelerate their enterprise sales process. This entails:
We work with startups to clearly define the ideal enterprise segments and buyers, establish a clear target list and build the relevant narrative. We give BDaaS clients exposure to the real business problems that we’re solving for our Members and help them tailor, refine, and scale their solutions and value prop for maximum impact. Oftentimes this involves unearthing new use cases or translating solutions into new verticals not considered previously.
We maintain continuous discussions with 80% of the Global Fortune 500 regarding emerging companies and technologies that offer solutions to their challenges—either directly or through our partners. At the appropriate times (because timing is everything!), we seamlessly integrate our BDaaS members into these conversations, connecting them with the appropriate executives under the right context at key enterprise accounts.
We engineer exclusive small gatherings and 1×1 meetings for our BDaas members to strategically and authentically introduce them to potential buyers and build their presence and brand in key markets. We also source advisors who act as door-openers for our BDaaS Members.
