What are the biggest do's and don'ts in corporate venture building? And how can you manage to build a venture in a completely new industry? This episode features Antonio DeLorenzo, Head of ING Labs Singapore, as he talks about his experience from venture building to corporate venture building, along the journey of Kapsool. This digital maritime solution sets out to digitalize and centralize port calls in the shipping industry, facing many challenges and road blocks.
What are the biggest do's and don'ts in corporate venture building? And how can you manage to build a venture in a completely new industry? This episode features Antonio DeLorenzo, Head of ING Labs Singapore, as he talks about his experience from venture building to corporate venture building, along the journey of Kapsool. This digital maritime solution sets out to digitalize and centralize port calls in the shipping industry, facing many challenges and road blocks.
Antonio: (00:02)
We were doing very short design sprints, or let’s say just sprints, that would allow us to look at an industry or a segment, expose some of the problems that exist, hone in on those problems, pick one, and then try and solve for it.
And so we really honed in on the notion that there is quite a lot of paper, a lot of time wasted. Which of course is, you know time is money, so a lot of money wasted.
Christine: (00:31)
Welcome to the Lost in Transformation podcast series dedicated to the complex world of Digital Transformation. We feature guests from large corporations, start-ups, consultancies and more, to shed light on the success factors around Innovation, Transformation, and adjacent topics.
We share first-hand insights and inspiration from experts for all the intrapreneurs, entrepreneurs, and anyone curious about Digital Transformation.
Christine: (00:59)
In this episode, we talk to Antonio DeLorenzo, Head of ING Labs Singapore. Antonio guides us through his experience in corporate venture building including all the challenges, all the mistakes, and learnings from it - all based on his work with the venture Kapsool, in trying to transform the shipping industry. We hope you enjoy this episode.
Christine: (01:22)
Hi Antonio, it’s great to have you on the show today, on Lost in Transformation. And we’re really happy to have you on and thanks for taking the time. And, you are the Head of ING Labs in Singapore, basically driving innovation out of Singapore. And I’m really curious to hear more about your personal entrepreneurial journey. Basically your background in corporate venture building as well, and specifically with one special venture that we’re going to cover today.
But to start off, I’d like to learn more about yourself first. About your background, your journey that kind of led you to where you are today. Can you share a bit more about that?
Antonio: (02:00)
Sure. So I'm a student of finance and computer science, and I began my journey more on the tech side and then ended up gravitating to finance where I really stuck in the capital markets for most of my career. I did mostly work with funds, hedge funds, wealth management. I ended up in regulation in Malaysia in 2009. Came to Singapore in 2012 and joined swift. So very much financial market infrastructure. And this was my first foray into FinTech. At the same time, you had kind of this growing interest around FinTech. Cryptocurrencies had kind of started to pop their heads out. People knew who they were, what they were, what they were doing. And that prompted me to kind of maybe start something of my own. And a couple of friends got together and started something called HelloGold, which is now running in Malaysia still. And the basic notion is, is that it's tokenized physical gold where the gold sits in a vault, and it's represented by digital tokens.
Antonio: (03:00)
After that, I helped an Australian startup, which enhances swift payments, so very close to my own background, by putting a solution that's based on blockchain together to help carry all of that extra information, that's required for a payment to be processed along with the payment. Then I created a venture fund or exchange in which MING was involved, and which failed, unfortunately. We recognize that it was coming towards failure, the market wasn't necessarily ready for the digitization of the securitization process. And we decided to close the venture. As that was closing, I was approached by a venture building outfit and they were asking, could I come and help them run a project in ING? So I thought about it and thought, okay, that's very different from venture building. It's corporate venture building. So why not? Let's try. And the positives that I thought would help fuel how fast we can go, how far we can go would be that one, it's a big corporation to the notion of trust and its own customers are there. So you don't have to have a pipeline of a hundred customers you're going after. And it's all cold calls. It ends up being much more friendly contact because they're customers of the corporation. So we've built something called a Kapsool. It was myself and a guy named Gijs Hoogeveen who has since relocated to the Netherlands where we worked on this project for about two years. Roughly.
Christine: (04:33)
Cool. It's really interesting. Also for me to hear more about your personal experience also in venture building and then coming to corporate venture building and how this kind of differentiates from what you did before. And you are already telling us a bit more about Kapsool, a venture out of the ING lab in Singapore. And I'm curious to hear all about the journey here and your experience with corporate venture building. So you basically start from the very beginning. What is Kapsool exactly? How would you explain it?
Antonio: (05:04)
Sure. So Kapsool was built around the port calls. So we started looking at maritime data and seeing, well, what can we encapsulate digitally and hence Kapsool. And as we started to dig, we started to realize that you can break the world of maritime data into two. One is vessel-related and the other is cargo-related. For cargo-related data to be digitized you need governments working together. So we quickly thought, okay, let's not focus on that. Let's focus on vessel data, but what is it about vessels when they're out on the open ocean? Not much happens. They're going from point A to point B, but as soon as they come close to a port, lots of stuff starts happening. You have anywhere from 15 to 40 separate actors who need to coordinate things, they need to communicate, they need to pass documents. They need to plan how people are going to get onto the ship, how cranes are going to interact, whether cranes are needed, whether tugboats are needed, all of this stuff kind of plays in. We also realized that it was a highly manual world filled with lots of paper and stamps and signatures and dates. And so we thought this was ripe for digitization.
Christine: (06:20)
So with Kapsool, you were basically doing corporate venture building in the shipping industry, in the maritime industry. And I'm just excited to learn more about how this whole journey came about because as you were mentioning a bit about your background, it kind of seems like your experience is relatively unrelated to the shipping industry. So you being new in the field, I'm kind of curious to learn more about that experience. Can you share more about that?
Antonio: (06:50)
I mean, so the way that we used to run our innovation programs at ING was cohorts and, you know, without getting into what the pros and cons of cohorts or any other systems are, we were doing very short design sprints, or let's say just sprints that would allow us to look at an industry or a segment expose some of the problems that exist, hone in on those problems, pick one, and then try and solve for it. And so we really honed in on the notion that there was quite a lot of paper and a lot of time wasted, which of course, as you know, time is money. So a lot of money wasted at ports, to do with ships that are coming in and making port calls that then evolved into pitching to our innovation fund and finally getting a "yes". I remember the first time we pitched, it was so far away from what, what the people on the innovation fund understood that we actually had to write a glossary for them, which was a few pages long.
Antonio: (07:56)
And it was to be able to bridge that gap because if I mean now in hindsight, it's easy for me to think why we would have to do such a thing, banks, finance assets, and here we weren't talking about financing assets. We were talking about digitizing workflows and creating truly a platform where you have identities, you have communication, you have payments happening. And those interactions are really what will generate revenue and value.
Christine: (08:23)
What exactly was Kapsool trying to solve?
Antonio: (08:25)
So I mean the lack of digital, right? If I can be so vague, it was that the entire maritime industry is really complicated. It's different in not just every country, but every port, every port issues, one type of paper in their own language. So when that paper is carried to the next place, someone has to be able to interpret it. Maybe it requires a translation, maybe it doesn't.
So there's lots of paper. The joke in the industry was that can have 300,000 tons of cargo, make it in three days from one port to the next, but the paper that's associated with that cargo sometimes takes three weeks to get there. So if you digitize, what you're saying is, is that it's there almost instantly. And so now all of the planning for the vessel coming in can begin in a more holistic kind of manner. So that was really, really where we were trying to focus. As we started to expose a lot of stuff, the human language thing really came into play. And we realized that the way people are planning is like on paper calendars at best, it's an outlook or, you know, some mail software, calendar software. And the way that they're communicating is SMS, is phone calls, WhatsApps, emails. And, we followed around a couple of ship managers or shipping agents. And you just see that they have these emails popping up a lot. Like I'm following a guy thinking he's like checking, I don't know, Tinder, Instagram, whatever it is. But in fact, it's just like Gmail and you just see the notifications filling up his screen hour by hour and it's insane. And that is what led us to think, okay, this can be consolidated.
Christine: (10:09)
Yes. It's interesting to hear all about the problems and the challenges that basically came up and you entering the industry from the outside, being new to the whole field. I think that's a special project to take on in itself. And so basically encountering all of these obstacles along the way. It probably wasn't all smooth sailing. So is there one specific mistake that you remember where you would say, okay, this is actually interesting to share with the audience who also might find themselves in the field of corporate venture building just to share what you've learned there?
Antonio: (10:46)
So I think the biggest mistake we made, I'll call it a mistake and let me turn it around. Right? The best thing that you can do to avoid this mistake is that you acquire sponsorship from the business as in money/time/people that kind of sponsorship or investing into the project from the word "go". So I think the biggest mistake you can make in the corporate venture building, at least for the continuity of the venture is not getting buy-in or sponsorship at a very early stage. If you do get buy-in at an early stage, you have people that invested from the word go into seeing this thing through, to either success or its failure, or let's put it in our language at ING, either winning or learning from it, right? If you don't get people in very early, what you run the risk of is that they're kind of dipping in and out, or that they're not releasing budget the way they're supposed to, or that they're not committing to taking time out of the calendars to have calls with you to help direct you, because it's very much, it's a corporate venture build. They're very much a part of it. They need to be a part of it. And without them actually, you should just be out on the street, building something unique for yourself.
Christine: (12:08)
So you're especially highlighting that buy-in, getting that sponsorship very early on. So that's something where you kind of learned from because you didn't do it that way. So I think that's an interesting takeaway. And then, on the other hand, we've now talked about the mistakes. What would you say is one thing you did, you actually did do right. And where you're now happy that you did it that way in the first place that you can share with us where also the audience can learn a bit from?
Antonio: (12:37)
I think the thing that we did right, really was when we recognize that the direction of the venture and the appetite of the corporation, we're going in two separate directions, we pitched to stop the venture within ING labs. And then we said, let us go and try and find a home for it somewhere in the world. And luckily we did. So in order to not waste what we had spent so much time and effort on, we ended up going out into the market and casting our net pretty wide. And finally, we came to be in touch with two gentlemen who one is based in San Diego, and the other one is based here in Singapore. Together they are Incrementum capital partners. They had done things like work on financing, the infrastructure of ports, flipping ship agencies, building software for ship agencies. So it was like such a natural kind of a fit. So we've brokered a deal between Incrementum and ING.
Christine: (13:40)
Cool. So actually coming to the point where you were saying, okay, it's that Kapsool as the venture is not going to be based within ING anymore, but we take it outside, I think that's also a success point to actually reach that point. And now looking at the current situation or looking ahead to the future, is there anything you're especially looking forward to for the journey of Kapsool or anything that you can share with us already that's next in terms of the corporate venture building journey?
Antonio: (14:11)
Yes, absolutely. I would love to see this thing go to market. I think the timing is really important and that Kapsool had the benefit of starting around now it might have more wind than its sales. And I think Kapsool can benefit now from this as well because the technology that we built does not invalidate us using these new standards and the new standards have to do with the identity, uniqueness of documents. And that's really key to digitizing in such a disparate sector.
Christine: (14:44)
That's a super interesting outlook and also super interesting to hear all about the journey and the challenges and the mistakes that came up along the way of Kapsool corporate venture building journey. Antonino, thank you so much for taking us along this journey with Kapsool and sharing all of the insights and all of the challenges that you were facing along the way, and being so honest and open with it. It's been a pleasure having you on and thank you again.
Antonio: (15:12)
Thank you.
Christine: (15:14)
Thank you for listening to this episode of Lost In Transformation. If you enjoy our podcast, please subscribe to our channel and leave us a review on iTunes. Join us next time for another episode of our podcast.