ConnectX
Fostering collaboration between Samsung NEXT’s portfolio companies and Samsung Business Units.
Build. Grow. Scale.
ConnectX is a half-day summit to celebrate its portfolio companies and provide them with unique access to Samsung business units and its leaders. During the event, attendees would learn from our high profile keynote speakers, how to collaborate with Samsung, meet fellow startup leaders, Samsung business units, and Silicon Valley investors.
High-touch, high reward.
This highly curated event would look to engage, inspire and connect, providing startup founders and CEOs a better understanding of how to partner and scale with Samsung, in addition to collaborating with fellow startup leaders and Silicon Valley investors. The day’s activities included a welcome lunch, keynote speech from industry leader, insights from our Samsung teams and curated speed networking between portfolio companies and Samsung’s business units. To finalize the event, we would host an Investor Cocktail event for external partners to attend.
Attendees to the event were companies within Samsung NEXT’s venture capital portfolio, members of the Samsung NEXT Ventures team, members of the Samsung NEXT executive leadership team and leaders of Samsung Electronics Global Business Management teams, including Mobile, Video Display and Health, among others.
Our goal was to provide our portfolio companies with the opportunity to meet Samsung Business Units, learn from industry leaders and to provide a space for our startups to meet other Silicon Valley investors that could be partners as they continue to grow and seek capital.
As a high touch event with a big budget, I set a comprehensive list of metrics to demonstrate ROI to our executive leadership that we needed to achieve in order to continue hosting this event. Main metrics would be to increase our NPS by at least 10%, increase Samsung NEXT access and visibility within Samsung, collaboration discussions facilitated by the event and additional capital raised through introductions (if a company meets a future investor at our investor cocktail hour).
Now you see us.
Over the course of the day, we set up a team to capture video of the main programming, as well as b-roll of the event. We also interviewed portfolio company attendees to share information about their startups and their experiences working with Samsung NEXT.
These full presentation videos (shared internally with Samsung business units after the event and also available via platform portal) would showcase our main session with keynote speaker, executive panels, founder testimonials and short portfolio companies profiles.
We wanted to provide our attendees with an environment that felt exclusive without being ostentatious. I visited multiple spaces in San Francisco and ended up booking the Commonwealth Club. This venue was newly built, open, clean lines and spacious with enough spaces to host our different sessions. Another aspect of our attendee experience and journey consisted in recognizing the importance of our portfolio companies, so we designed a video showcasing all of our startups that was played all over the venue for everybody to see and familiarize with their names before our 1:1 meetings.
The venue was designed to have tasteful and clean branding, modern furniture and spaces to allow for private meetings in different areas. We build a custom moss wall upon entering the main floor and added the event logo for an impact visual. Attendees were provided with personalized brochures with their 1:1 meetings, agenda and startup and Samsung business unit information that they could review before going into the meetings.
As part of the welcome package, we provided all portfolio attendees with a personalized box that included thoughtful gifts and hand-written notes from their deal leads. We also gifted our Samsung business units with their own gift box so that they could bring a part of the event back to Korea.
The results.
We were really pleased with our event and its impact on our portfolio companies and Samsung business Units. 100% of Samsung’s business units and portfolio companies responded that they had connections they planned to follow up with as a result of the event. On average, Samsung’s BU attendees said they would follow up with at least two portfolio companies, one Samsung NEXT connection, and even a few other Samsung BU attendees. .
Portfolio attendees said they would follow up with at least two GBMs they met, 1.5 other portfolio companies, and 1 Samsung NEXT connection. 94% of respondents said that they would like to attend next year and they valued the ability to network with each other. In terms of raising additional capital, we will track this long term metric in future raising rounds. We were really pleased with the initial new connections, greater exposure to our investor network creates more opportunities to make an introduction that sticks.
Attendees said they are highly likely to recommend working with Samsung NEXT (on a scale of 1 to 10, average result was 9) and our NPS score increased by 15%. Qualitative feedback through portfolio companies and Samsung business units was that the event achieved feeling high-touch through the attention to detail and clean design.
One surprising outcome of the event that we did not plan for was becoming a good forum for NEXT investors to meet with Samsung business unit teams, but was highly praised in the feedback notes by multiple attendees and we decided to formally incorporate this experience in the 2019 edition by expanding invites to more VC and CVC’s firms.
