Olivia Steedman, Executive Managing Director of Teachers' Venture Growth, discusses the challenges and opportunities of leading a venture capital arm within a large pension plan.
Olivia Steedman, Executive Managing Director of Teachers' Venture Growth, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. Ms. Steedman’s team has investments in 36 companies that make up more than $7.5-billion of Teachers’ overall portfolio.Olivia Steedman sometimes thinks of herself as the captain of a patrol boat, scouting the horizon for treasure and perils just ahead of its much larger ship – the $256-billionAs global head of Teachers’ Venture Growth (TVG), Ms.
Steedman’s first job is to find late-stage venture investments in leading-edge technology companies that can produce outsized returns for 340,000 Ontario teachers whose pensions depend on the plan’s success. At the same time, her team is expected to be a source of advance intelligence on emerging trends to ensure some of Teachers’ big, long-term investments don’t come under threat from disruptive startups. “We’re looking and we’re calling back and we’re saying, ... be careful of that, and check this out,” Ms. Steedman said in an interview. “There was a desire to bring some of the insights from the world of technology to the mothership, if you will, and make sure that we wouldn’t find ourselves in a situation where one of our portfolio companies in our infrastructure book or our private capital book was about to be disrupted.” The TVG patrol boat – a unit of one of Canada’s largest pension plans – has been in the water for five years and, after a fast launch, things got choppy. TVG had early wins in 2019 when, as Ms. Steedman says, “it was the heyday of tech and everything was running really hot.” Then came the COVID-19 pandemic and a mass shift to online communications and commerce, sparking a bubble in technology valuations, and driving up the cost of entry for funds such as TVG that wanted in. Almost as quickly, a spike inTVG and other venture investors that bet heavily during the early 2020s were caught up in that reckoning. M
VENTURE CAPITAL PENSION FUNDS TECHNOLOGY INVESTMENTS STARTUPS MARKET TRENDS
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