A look at Intel Capital before the 34-year-old firm strikes out on its own

Summary

When Intel Capital announced its plans to spin out from semiconductor giant Intel in January, it came as a bit of a shock considering the firm has been operating as Intel’s venture investment arm since 1991. In many ways this decision marks the end of an era for what’s considered by some to be the first corporate venture capital firm of all time. The firm was founded nearly 35 years ago and has backed notable enterprise tech companies including: DocuSign, MongoDB and Hugging Face, among nearly 2,000 others. But for Mark Rostick, vice president and senior managing director at Intel Capital, the transition represents a new opportunity for the VC while allowing the firm to keep many of the benefits it had as a CVC. Rostick joined the firm back in 1999 after a friend at Intel Capital recommended he should try to get a job there. Rostick, who wasn’t enjoying working as a tech licensing attorney at the time, took her up on it. After he met the team, he said he’d do anything — even mop the floors — to get involved. “You get to work with the smartest people in the world,” Rostick told TechCrunch. “The hardest thing to do in business is to start something from nothing and get it to literally leave the ground. Those are the coolest people to hang out with because they’re doing something special. The combination of being able to use that training I had [combined] with working with people doing the hardest thing in business, it was irresistible for me.” Rostick has stuck around for over two decades and seen the firm invest more than $20 billion across more than 1,800 companies while racking up more than 700 startup exits. The thought of Intel Capital spinning out from its parent company was not a new one, Rostick said, and had been discussed multiple times in the past. The debate always centered on the pros and cons of how the firm would be able move faster, or be more nimble, on its own but also how much the firm would have to give up without a parent company. But these conver...