Formalize compensation early (caps, vesting, presence-to-win, liquidity rules) with CVC-savvy counsel; don’t “fix it later.” 
The Compensation Architect: How Jody Thelander Thinks About Incentives, Autonomy, and the Next Decade of CVC
Corporate Venturing Insider for the past five years has featured over 110 episodes spotlighting best practices from leaders across the global corporate venturing ecosystem, each exploring how to better support entrepreneurs and elevate the innovation ecosystem.
In episode #115, Nicolas Sauvage, President of TDK Ventures, sat down with Jody Thelander, founder & CEO of J. Thelander Consulting, whose benchmarks and advisory work have quietly defined how venture capital and corporate venture capital (CVC) teams pay, retain, and empower their people.
From the Boardroom Backwards
Jody Thelander’s path into CVC started in the late ’90s dot-com era, building compensation programs for venture-backed private companies. The vantage point that mattered most wasn’t a spreadsheet; it was the boardroom.
“I noticed that all of the good stuff was going on in the boardroom,” she told Nicolas. “That’s where the first Thelander surveys and consulting started.” From there, one question led to the next: if portfolio companies needed structure, what about the investors themselves? “ We started doing the comp surveys for VCs.Then I noticed several of my VC friends were going to corporate venture firms,” she said. That begged the question, “what’s a CVC and what kind of compensation do they have?” That curiosity became a new lane. Now J. Thelander Consulting both surveys and helps create shared definitions, levels, and benchmarks for CVCs and VCs.
The Professionalization of CVC
Fast forward a decade, and the biggest shift Jody has seen is the growing formality of CVC compensation and role design. “It’s become very formal and structured and competitive,” she observed. Alongside that structure arrived title expansion and the rise of business development roles that “optimize the parent company skillset and talent inside to the portfolio companies.”
Why now? Private markets are staying private longer, rounds are harder to raise, and fund formation is no cakewalk. While the IPO market is beginning to rebound in Q3 of 2025, large startups don’t have the same incentive to IPO. Thus, most returns for VCs are through M&A or secondaries instead of IPOs as they have a set time on funds.
Thus, in the last 3 years, while the IPO market has been down, CVC has been especially attractive to VC investors. CVC offers consistency: corporate stock that accretes annually, fewer fundraising cycles, and no capital contributions, the “golden handcuffs” that bind senior VC partners. However, the pendulum swings both ways. In 2020–2021, many in CVC eyed VC due to the higher returns.
VCs are from Mars and CVCs are from Venus
Both VCs and CVCs invest in innovation but under different rules. As Nicolas Sauvage put it, “CVCs are about predictability, the distribution law. VCs look for high risk but high returns, the power law.” VCs chase outliers; CVCs seek strategic consistency.
Jody Thelander sees this tension as a design opportunity, not a divide. “There isn’t just one way,” she said. “It depends on what the goal of the CVC is and what the parent company wants.” Some aim for technology transfer and learning; others compete directly with VCs through long-term incentives like carried interest. Her advice is to start with purpose, then design compensation and governance to match.
Designing Compensation for Autonomy and Alignment
Designing a CVC’s compensation system is ultimately about independence, alignment, and education—ensuring your mission, incentives, and corporate expectations all move in the same direction.
Autonomy is a design choice. As Jody Thelander noted, “It’s very hard for a CVC to be sustainable if they just have the comp structure from the parent company.” The more independent the vehicle—off-balance-sheet, with its own fund and mandate—the easier it becomes to tie incentives to portfolio success and attract true investors rather than corporate managers.
Hiring follows a mandate. Nicolas Sauvage, as a CVC founder, advises weighting insiders heavily (two-thirds or more) when your goal is exploitation of existing businesses, and flipping that ratio for exploration of new categories. Once outside investors join, they bring market expectations—and broader notions of performance and pay.
Translate for the mothership. Corporate HR understands benchmarks and bands, not carry models. Thelander stresses using familiar metrics like percentiles, geographies, and job levels to explain compensation levers and avoid confusion.
And finally, lawyer up early. Don’t assume details will work themselves out. Define caps, vesting, liquidity triggers, and “presence-to-win” rules upfront. As Thelander cautioned, redoing an incentive plan midstream costs far more than building it right the first time.
The Long Game of Incentives
On long-term incentives, Jody laid out the spectrum succinctly:
- Corporate stock (classic corporate LTIs)
- Shadow/phantom/synthetic carry (tied to portfolio performance or specific exits)
- True carry (a direct participation in portfolio returns)
Nothing about this is fast. “Carried interest vesting times now are heading up more than 10 years,” she noted. And design details matter, not just for motivation, but for optics at the mothership. “You have to be careful that the CVC… wasn’t bringing in more returns than the actual parent company,” she cautioned. Caps and clarity prevent culture clashes.
Looking Ahead: Bullish on CVCs With Better Design
As CVCs mature, clarity and rigor matter. Thelander’s data enforces leveling, validates outliers, and tracks real impact like board participation that turns corporates into founder-friendly allies. Portfolio CEOs value corporates that deliver expertise, not just capital. Her advice to founders: ask the CVC’s true goal and ensure alignment from the start.
Jody is upbeat about the next decade. CVCs “are going to continue to be a very important part of the investment ecosystem,” she said, delivering an “end-to-end solution” for portfolio companies that many traditional funds now try to emulate. They are going to increasingly become bigger players as they return and extract more value from their parent companies. The difference between promise and performance will hinge on thoughtful design: mandates that match the times; incentives that match the mandate; and autonomy sufficient to recruit, decide, and deliver.
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