Javier García, Femsa: Collaborating with the most disruptive startups in Latin America, Ep 128

<p><span style="font-weight: 400; font-size: 24pt;">Javier García, Femsa: Collaborating with the most disruptive startups in Latin America, Ep 128</span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Javier García knew that there were at least 50 ways of doing corporate venture capital the wrong way, which is why he took a couple of years to figure out how to do it right with FEMSA. Today, Javier is the Director of Corporate Venturing and Growth Capital at FEMSA’s corporate venture capital fund. FEMSA is a publicly-traded conglomerate company that started out as a brewery and has produced popular brands like Dos Equis and Tecate. </span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Founded in 1890, FEMSA has since branched out into other business verticals such as drugstores, gas stations, and restaurants, including OXXO, the  largest chain of small-format stores in Mexico.</span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I sat down with Javier to talk about his transition from consulting to working at FEMSA and getting involved with Latin America’s venture capital ecosystem. We discuss innovation in corporations and Javier shares tips on how to collaborate with startups and large corporations.</span></p> <h3><span style="font-weight: 400;">Getting a slice of the innovation pie</span></h3> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">According to Javier, FEMSA’s venture capital arm started as a mission to collaborate with the most disruptive external sources of innovation. He started to learn about the different ways to approach this collaboration by investigating and conducting over 30 interviews with people involved in the corporate venture capital world. Choosing the right way was another challenge.</span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Learn more about how Javier built an operational design for FEMSA to collaborate with the best startups on their business platform in this episode of</span> <em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Crossing Borders</span></em><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span