How CFOs Can Unlock Innovation Opportunities Through Venture Building

Forbes

2 days ago

President Donald Trump's new tariffs—both enforced and threatened—are continuing to have an outsized impact on the global economy. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's new economic outlook report, released on Tuesday, found that global economic growth is slowing from the 3.1% predicted for 2025 in March to 2.9%. The U.S., which saw 2.8% growth in 2024, is now likely to see just 1.6% growth, the report states, largely because of tariffs. In fact, the report states, the countries likely to see the largest slowdown are those most affected by Trump's tariffs: the U.S., Mexico, Canada and China.
'Our latest economic outlook shows that today's policy uncertainty is weakening trade and investment, diminishing consumer and business confidence and curbing growth prospects,' OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann said in a press release.
The OECD identifies three big changes that could rebalance the global economic scales, and potentially move things in the direction of growth: A reversal of new trade barriers, and an end to the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. This week, it feels like all three may be far off. Despite spoken desires for peace talks, the two ongoing conflicts are escalating with new attacks.
And despite two court opinions in the last week ruling many of Trump's tariffs unconstitutional—a three-judge panel at the Court of International Trade ruled that Trump did not have authority to impose the so-called reciprocal tariffs announced at the 'Liberation Day' press conference, and Washington, D.C. District Judge Rudolph Contreras also found the tariffs to be illegal—the tariffs (or threats thereof) are still on. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit paused the order halting the tariffs while those judges rule on an appeal.
New tariffs have been announced since the rulings, and negotiations around the 'reciprocal' tariffs continue. Trump announced a new 50% tariff on imported steel and aluminum last week, which goes into effect this week. And negotiations continued last week with China, although progress remains unclear. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last Thursday that talks have stalled. Friday morning, Trump wrote on Truth Social that China 'HAS TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US.' Monday morning, Chinese authorities shot back, accusing the U.S. of breaching the agreement that both countries came to last month, saying the U.S. introduced 'discriminatory restrictive measures against China' after the talks, including expanded export controls on AI chips and other chip-building technologies.
Many businesses continued to lower their outlooks for the rest of the year, given all the uncertainty. Last week, Best Buy, Macy's and Abercrombie & Fitch all reduced their sales and earnings projections.
Here's a silver lining: There are still some ways for businesses to grow. Alloy Partners CEO Elliott Parker recommends companies use the opportunity to get into venture building: Invest in a smaller venture company to innovate and develop new solutions that can help broaden your business in the long run. An excerpt from my conversation with him appears later in this newsletter.
A customer shops for produce at an H-E-B grocery store in Austin, Texas.
Last week was another bumpy ride for the stock market, with ups and downs related to tariffs, government financial reports and Big Tech. April's inflation figures remained relatively mild, not yet showing the impact of President Donald Trump's tariff policies. Personal consumption expenditures increased 2.1% above April 2024, the lowest PCE inflation rate since last September, and getting close to the Federal Reserve's sweet spot of 2% inflation. However, economists at Bank of America and Goldman Sachs both forecast a jump in tariff-related inflation to 3.6% by December—though they say it is not expected to be as sharp of a jolt in price as the post-pandemic inflation of 2021 and 2022.
The lower inflation rate, however, doesn't mean that interest rate cuts are set to happen anytime soon. Minutes from the Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee's early May meeting were released last week, and they indicated that the Fed is planning to continue to watch the impacts of Trump's planned policies—which to date have been sudden, jarring and unpredictable—before making any moves, writes Forbes senior contributor Charles Lloyd Bovaird II. Forbes senior contributor Erik Sherman writes it's unlikely there will be any changes to interest rates before the end of the year. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell met with Trump last week, and Powell reaffirmed that the Fed would continue to make policy decisions 'based solely on careful, objective, and non-political analysis.'
Regardless of the indicators last week, small businesses are feeling decidedly less optimistic, writes Forbes' Brandon Kochkodin. The April Small Business Optimism Index, published monthly by the National Federation of Independent Business, showed optimism down to 95.8, below the 51-year average of 98, and down 1.6% from March. Retail business owners had the lowest scores, with optimism of 93.7%. More than three-quarters said supply chain issues were impacting their business, and 14% said their inventories were too low. But negative feelings are running high across all sectors; the most confident sector in April was construction, and that was down nearly 4 points from January.
Jaque Silva/NurPhoto via Getty Images
It's been a tough year for consumers, and that's bleeding through to the buy now, pay later loan market. Forbes senior contributor Peter Cohan writes that Affirm, a publicly traded BNPL loan provider, has seen significant growth in the last year—revenues and gross merchandise values are up 36% year-over-year, and the number of active consumers increased 23% to 21.9 million—but it decreased its revenue forecast for the current quarter. Affirm is currently offering more 0% interest loans, in which merchants subsidize borrowing costs, which has also caused some investors to pull back.
The slowing economy coupled with increasing prices are making some economists cast a skeptical eye on the BNPL industry. Affirm reported a 12 basis point increase in 30+ day delinquencies year-over-year in its most recent earnings report, which the company attributes to pricing initiatives that increased its consumer base. Klarna, another BNPL loan provider, reported a 17% increase in credit losses in May. Spokespeople for both Affirm and Klarna told the New York Times they aren't worried about those increases. Still, a former official of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—charged with regulating the industry, but whose oversight capabilities are drastically reduced under Trump—told the Times that a study from the beginning of this year found that many borrowers were using BNPL 'as a Band-Aid on top of their credit card debt.' A separate Times story this week looked into a new trend: Consumers using BNPL loans to finance ordinary purchases like groceries.
e.l.f. Beauty CEO Tarang Amin and Rhode founder Hailey Bieber.
A star-studded mega-acquisition last week in the beauty space showed the power of celebrity branding and a leap of faith from a publicly traded cosmetics brand disruptor. Hailey Bieber's skincare and makeup company Rhode is set to be acquired by e.l.f. Beauty in a deal potentially worth $1 billion, writes Forbes' Gigi Zamora. Bieber created Rhode in summer 2022 in response to the overwhelming number of skincare products available. At the time, she told Forbes it would be a 'very edited and curated, intentional shopping process for people.' The brand quickly went viral because of Bieber's celebrity, and features moisturizers and cheek and lip tints.
Forbes senior contributor Pamela Danziger writes that some analysts believe the deal's valuation is high for the brand. It's a newcomer on the scene with fairly unique products—meaning they could just be seen as trendy—and it remains to be seen whether the deal is more than celebrity hype. Danziger points out that e.l.f. Beauty has had a winning business strategy, more than doubling sales over the last two years. And e.l.f. Beauty CEO Tarang Amin told Vogue Business that Bieber and Rhode's track record gave the company conviction for a $1 billion deal. 'But the thing that made us interested is that she is a fellow disruptor and that gives me a lot of confidence when I'm looking at a long-term M&A environment,' Amin said.
Alloy Partners CEO Elliott Parker.
Innovation is always important, but it can take up valuable resources at your business, especially when the financial picture is uncertain. Elliott Parker, CEO at Alloy Partners, works with companies on venture building—finding and investing in innovation outside of your main corporate structure. I spoke with him about why CFOs should pursue this path to innovation. This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity.
Which companies should be looking at venture building as a way to increase their business?
Parker: All of them. It should be part of the toolkit for innovation.
There's four primary reasons why corporations build new ventures. Number one is the corporation has a problem in their own business that they don't know how to solve, and their choices include building something internally that may not be what they're good at or what they do. You can build an external venture if other people have the same problem. An incentivized entrepreneur can go solve that problem probably a lot faster than you can internally.
Number two is your customers have a problem, and if that problem were solved, they'd be better customers for you. Maybe that's not a problem that's strategically critical to your business, and you wish somebody else would solve it, but nobody is. In that case, you might want to build a new venture outside the organization.
Number three is that strong corporations exist in strong ecosystems. A lot of the businesses we build with corporations are ecosystem plays where [companies think], 'Boy, if this just existed in the ecosystem, we'd be better off, but we can't go build it because nobody else will play along.' An independent startup can go drive some of these ecosystem solutions.
The fourth reason is simply there's a space that the corporation doesn't know what to do with. It seems like a threat, or maybe an opportunity. Building external startups is a really fast and inexpensive way to go learn about that new space. Right now, for example, a lot of companies are reaching out to us to figure out what to do about AI. Building external startups is a fantastic way to run cheap, fast experiments in AI without distracting from the core business.
You talked about how innovation can be difficult in a business because of all the constraints. How is it fundamentally different when you do it through venture building?
Venture building is fantastic for learning and for developing strategic optionality. It is not a good way to augment revenue, at least not in the near term. If you're running a $10 billion corporation, it's a lot easier to go to $11 billion inside the core organization by incremental improvements, entering new geographies, product expansion, than to go from zero to $1 billion in a new venture.
A lot of the mistakes that corporations make when they think about venture building is [it] can be a path to help close our revenue gap or something like that. Absolutely not. It's probably the worst way I can think of to close a revenue gap if you're a big company. But what it can do is produce knowledge about how the world works, how our industry works, how it's changing, what our customers want. That knowledge can then go back into the core business and make it easier to go from $10 billion to $11 billion. If a CFO can get an agreement with that premise—the primary focus of this is learning and optionality as the output—they're more willing to explore building these ventures without requiring control.
This is where companies also make the mistake. They go launch these things and they own the majority of them. There are some instances where that makes sense, but if it's something that's strategically interesting—not strategically critical—where you're trying to learn or solve some of those other issues we talked about, launching that business externally with a minority stake, at least in the beginning, is going to produce a lot more learning and a lot more optionality down the road. We tell corporations to take a minority stake in the business because if you own most of it, that new venture is going to be strategically and financially constrained. It's going to look a lot like what you already do because if you own more than 50%, then you're going to require it to use your HR systems, and your internal lawyers are going to have to review things. And pretty soon it looks a lot like your existing business, which defeats the purpose. Similarly, if you own the majority, nobody else is ever going to want to invest in that.
If you do it right as a CFO, this is a way to fund innovation with your balance sheet, rather than as an operating expense. It caps the investment. A lot of times, internal innovation is like a bottomless pit. We start this thing and are you going to come back to me wanting more money? With an external venture, you launch it and you say, I'm going to invest X dollars in it, and that thing has to thrive on its own by going out and figuring out a way to run profitably or attract other investors.
You have the right to invest more [and] take control down the road, but only if it makes sense to do so. What you're trying to do is optimize for surprises, and you do that by putting these things out in the world, incentivizing entrepreneurs who are very capable, and seeing what they figure out.
Right now is uncertain times for businesses. How does venture building fit into how a company can strategize? Is it a good thing to do right now?
I think a lot of companies are making a mistake right now. They're sitting back and trying to see how things play out. But as industries get reshuffled amid all the uncertainty, new winners are going to be defined, and now is the time to be making bets. In the face of an unknowable future, the very best strategy is to go run as many experiments as you can at the lowest possible cost per experiment. Venture building is a fantastic experiment engine because in the world of business, startups are the way that we run experiments as a society and as an industry. Startups are experiment engines.
There is tremendous risk to the core, and you do not want to take on that risk. A good way to mitigate that risk is to launch some of these experiments externally, in the form of outside ventures. You still learn, you're not distracting the core business, you're not taking peoples' eye off the ball, and you're not presenting new risk. This is especially true in heavily regulated industries, where venture building can be a powerful tool.
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What did the IRS do with its Direct File online individual income tax filing platform last week?
A. Entered into an agreement to sell it to Google
B. Made the code open source, meaning anyone can further develop it for free
C. Deleted all references to it from government websites
D. Backed away from previous statements about canceling the service and announced an expansion to more states for the 2025 tax year
See if you got the right answer here.