Corporate Explorer

9Risk and Reward for the Corporate Explorer

Motivation Puzzle

One of our clients faced a conundrum. They sponsored an employee to build a new business leveraging the firm's artificial intelligence platform that is outside of their own market. This represents a potentially disruptive play that could see them create a business equal to the size of the parent company within a decade or two. Were this new business to be seeking funding from a venture capital firm, it would have access to abundant capital to fund its expansion, and the Corporate Explorer would have a path to significant wealth creation. However, if the business wants to keep this new venture in-house, it must fund expansion from within the existing operating budget, with our Corporate Explorer receiving a modest bonus. Keeping the new business in-house creates a safety net for the employee, who will still have a corporate salary if the new venture fails, but the employee's growth upside is limited by what can be funded from the parent corporation's operating budget. It is a tale of two worlds. The gap between what you can earn as a Corporate Explorer working for a large company and the potential rewards from a successful venture-backed startup are startling. Whatever Krisztian Kurtisz earns from Cherrisk is unlikely to rival that of the insurtech startup Lemonade whose founder netted $87 million from selling stock in the company after it went public.

This presents an apparent motivational conundrum that has led ...