Strategy is about what one decides to do, as much as the decisions one forgoes. CVCs provide significant value to corporations by testing and assessing markets or solutions deemed unviable. 
Renaissance Woman: Lessons in Adaptability and Mentorship with Cargill Ventures’ Erin VanLanduit
Interviewed by on March 13, 2024
Erin VanLanduit’s road to corporate venture leadership has taken “some very hard right and left turns over the last 20-plus years,” she told Corporate Venturing Insider host and TDK Ventures President Nicolas Sauvage. She is now head of Cargill Ventures, the CVC arm of the vast American food and agriculture company.
Cross-Pollinating Success
In a first among the corporate venture leaders CVI has interviewed, Erin graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, taking a degree in law with a concentration in nuclear engineering — a combination may seem counterintuitive. She fulfilled her military commitment with six years in an artillery division. She was promoted to captain during a deployment in Iraq.
After her discharge, Erin earned a master’s degree from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. It was there that her career careened for the first time, as she fell in love with M&A during a strategy course. With no law degree, Erin didn’t have the full background arsenal to approach the field from a legal perspective.
“I wondered, ‘how do I get into it with more of an operator-type background?’”
She answered the question by assuming the role of director of business development for new ventures at SC Johnson, the household cleaning supply and consumer chemicals company.
She said she benefited from the company leaders’ mentorship
“The group had a mandate reporting directly into the office of the chairman to find new opportunities because we want to grow in a certain way and do that separately from the core businesses,” she said.
The team sought out white spaces that companies like Babyganics, Method, and other brands could fill to strengthen Cargill’s position by growing these entities inorganically.
Next, Erin leveraged her business development background to move into the inner circle of corporate venture Tyson Ventures. As managing director, Erin took over a fund set up by VC legend Reece Schroeder. Erin fine-tuned the strategy to ensure the fund conformed to its mandate to take minority investments and enable technology rather than adopting a business development and acquisition model as she managed at SC Johnson. Her successful leadership of the Tyson team convinced Cargill that Erin was the person to lead its venture group.
Working within a Spiderweb
Cargill funded its VC to help Cargill adapt to three different environmental changes. The company noticed changing consumer needs, a shifting regulatory environment, and a threat from a changing climate. To stay ahead of these developments, Cargill needed an internal function that could shape the ecosystem. Cargill realized that it was missing out on external opportunities that would benefit it if it could build partnerships and relationships to gain access to new technologies that it lacked the the core competency to build themselves. Erin could rectify that through venture capital investments.
The first challenge Erin faced stemmed from Cargill’s decentralized organization.
“We’re connected to corporate strategy,” she said “It’s all just a big kind of interconnected matrix. A bit of a spider web. You pull on one part of it, and something else moves. You’ve got to continually manage it and keep a bird’s eye view of it.”
Requiring constant vigilance, Erin’s plan puts her in stealth mode internally so she can secure broader buy-in to the program. Asking internal business units her team approaches to pitch potential investments fosters a sense of ownership and accountability in the venture process.
Leveraging Experience
Erin’s strategy of securing broader buy-in through open communication and collaboration with business units complements her leadership strategy. When a portfolio company founder or a member of her team is stressing about a problem, Erin encourages them to take a step back.
“What really are the consequences of this?” she said “No one’s really going to get hurt here. You’re going to sleep in your own bed tonight. We can figure this out.”
Her ability to zoom out and stay calm from being in more stressful situations has proven advantageous for her career, allowing her to maintain a cool head in a fast and fraught environment.
Erin’s best advice for Corporate Venturing Insider comes from the experiences of others. Several mentors, formal and informal, have helped her hone her craft and her career. The most effective ones have been those she’s found naturally and not those forced through corporate programs.
Sprouting Success
Erin employs the same adaptability in managing Cargill Ventures. With a mandate to provide strategic and financial value for Cargill through investment in the food and agricultural industry that aligns with Cargill’s operations. Cargill Ventures serves a variety of its mothership’s interests.
They further serve as a bellwether for their parent organization.
“If there’s a high concentration of startups trying to solve a problem and VC dollars flowing in, that’s probably an area where we should look at sourcing that external innovation,” Erin said.
Being aware of trends in the external ecosystem allows Cargill to explore potential areas of disruption. Once it identifies a dynamic sector Cargill can collaborate with the companies in that space to source new technologies and make important new relationships.
Providing connections between the mothership and the ecosystem at large is the core of Cargill Ventures’s strategy. It leverages its knowledge of the environment to build relationships. Once they have made an investment, Erin’s team examines whether the relationship can be augmented with joint development, supply, or offtake agreements. Even if a direct equity investment is not in the cards, Erin and her team know there is still strategic value to Cargill in these potential partnerships, and they are happy to make introductions.
