Interview with Matt Barrington, Partner and Chief Operating Officer at Koru

Matt Barrington is Partner & COO at Koru, a venture studio within Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan.

Prior to Koru, Matt was involved with RBC Ventures, where he helped stand up and run the Strategic Design practice and then co-led a venture in the money management space. Before that, Matt was in the film and television industry, where he started a number of film and digital media projects, before launching his first MarTech startup.

He joined Koru in 2020 as a Venture GM, leading a number of ventures from zero to commercial launch. Learn more about "zero to one" here.

Matt has a ton of experience working within corporate venture studios, which continue to gain popularity. He shares similar experiences to Becky Splitt, who previously was with American Family Insurance's studio Tenney 110.

Also, Koru is hiring!

1. Before Koru you worked at RBC Ventures (now RBCx), which was a corporate venture studio. Can you share a bit about that experience?

Being part of Canada's largest bank as it launched a corporate venture program from day one was a unique experience. My initial role was to help establish and lead the Strategic Design practice, all while the bank itself was figuring out how to build a venture program. There was a strong focus on "just getting started", with the understanding that we would figure things out as we went along, backed by solid support from the CEO.

About a year in, a colleague and I came up with an idea for a venture in the money management space. We received the support we needed, built it, and launched it into the market. However, as the earliest ventures progressed, we began to encounter some of the fundamental challenges that often arise in corporate venture programs. Specifically, as these ventures moved through the build and launch stages, they ran into obstacles like risk management and other control functions, which weren’t fully equipped to handle them.

Throughout this journey, I learned a lot about navigating a complex, matrixed organization, leading people, and understanding where corporate venture programs succeed and where they fall short. I also gained valuable insights from making key decisions for our venture, including the mistakes made along the way. These experiences provided me with a wealth of lessons that have shaped my approach to leadership and innovation.

2. How did RBC Ventures compare to Koru?

The first few years at RBC Ventures had many similarities with my experience at Koru, which allowed me to apply what I’d learned. Both involved working with corporate partners, and in Koru’s case, an investor, who were new to early-stage venture building. A big part of the challenge was learning how to navigate this, finding common ground, and aligning on what success looks like.

Both RBC Ventures and Koru focused on unlocking unfair advantages, which is a tough problem to solve. While the methodologies in most studio programs are similar, both RBC Ventures and Koru managed to attract incredible talent—some of the smartest people I’ve had the privilege to work with. These models offer a unique value proposition to talent, balancing risk and reward for those interested in early-stage building.

However, RBC Ventures and Koru differed in terms of incentives. In my opinion, Koru got this right from the start. With a complex set of stakeholders—including our team, portfolio companies, and the deal and value creation teams at Teachers’—aligning incentives was crucial. It’s simple in theory but difficult in practice, and it’s not something you can just pay lip service to because that approach is only short-term. Additionally, Koru had a clear mission and definition of success from the beginning, which served as a guiding star for everyone involved.

3. What's a "day in the life" like at Koru now?

My work at Koru is fairly evenly divided between venture work, stakeholder management, studio operations, and supporting our venture teams.

Starting with the team, they are Koru's most valuable asset, and over the past four years, we’ve invested a lot of time and energy to ensure they have the support and resources needed to perform at a high level.

Another major focus is managing our stakeholders, including our board, the deal and value creation teams at Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, and the portfolio company teams we partner with. Many of these stakeholders are new to venture building, which has a different risk profile than they’re used to. Since these partnerships are critical to our success, I spend a lot of time building relationships, establishing trust, and working toward alignment.

When it comes to the ventures themselves, my main focus is on providing clear direction, removing obstacles, and empowering the team to do what they came here to do.

4. How do things work at Koru, including the team, validation process, etc.?

We have a cross-functional team made up of product, engineering, design, BizOps, growth, research and GMs, who lead our venture teams. We also have an HQ team that leads across finance, talent and studio operations. Combined this allows us to deploy teams against a wide array of opportunity spaces to rapidly go from zero to commercially launching businesses.

Like any other corporate venture studio, the validation process is about identifying and validating venture opportunities where we have an unfair advantage to win and then continually validating and burning down risk as we go through the process.

The unfair advantages come from unlocking assets from OTPP portfolio companies and comes in all different shapes and sizes, but ultimately we need to build conviction that we can, first, unlock them (which is not a given) and by doing so that they will allow us to win both now and persistently into the future.

5. What are some of your lessons learned working at venture studios? Any examples of success or failure/disappointment you'd like to share?

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned for any corporate venture studio, and this comes again from both success and failure, is that unlocking unfair advantages is a hard problem to solve in a repeatable and scalable way. This problem involves people, culture, inertia, incentives and all of the messiness that comes with that. Aligning incentives sounds simple in theory but is incredibly difficult to do in practice. Part of the value our team brings to the table is looking at opportunities and doing things differently which creates immediate tension with portfolio companies, but the goal is to make this a healthy tension.

6. What are your recommendations for people trying to get jobs at venture studios? What do you look for in people? How do you know if someone will be successful in a venture studio environment?

We spend a lot of time focused on this at Koru. Execution is a large part of what separates a great idea from a great business and the studio model suggests by doing this zero-to-one motion repeatedly you can materially improve your ability to do this well. So there is a huge focus on attracting people with the ability to execute in the high ambiguity, high uncertainty of early stage.

• We give a lot of space and autonomy to our teams to explore and figure it out so we need people who both love and are great at that.
• We need people who are innately curious and get value from learning.
• Given our stakeholder environment, we need people with patience, who can look beyond the day-to-day challenges and see the bigger opportunity and then navigate towards that.
• And finally, we need builders. We need people who think and learn by building things and have the skill set to do so.

7. You've also worked in other places (not venture studios) - how is a venture studio different from those: either compared to a startup or compared to a corporate/big company job, or both?

This relates to what we look for in talent. On the one side, I think there are similarities to a startup in that you’re in a small team, with constrained resources, working early stage to both identify and validate an opportunity. We of course have a methodology that we are continuously improving based on experience but the methodology, like many frameworks, does not determine the outcome. On the corporate side of things, given we are wholly owned by a pension plan and partner with existing portfolio companies of Teachers’, there’s a large element of stakeholder partnership that I've mentioned and navigating matrixed organizations.

Experience from working in corporates goes a long way in learning how to do this well. At both RBC Ventures and Koru I’ve seen talented startup people get incredibly frustrated by the corporate partner challenge and give up. I’ve also seen talented corporate innovation types flounder with the realities of early-stage building.

8. Why do you think working at a venture studio is an interesting opportunity for folks?

For the right person, a venture studio can be a powerful career accelerator. The opportunity to quickly move from idea to commercial launch across different industries is unique. If you aspire to be a founder, join an existing startup, work in corporate venture, or even transition to the management and investing side of studios, the experience you gain in a studio environment positions you perfectly to accelerate along those paths.

We’ve had incredible talent join our studio and go on to become founders or join one of our launched ventures. We strongly support this because it’s a great indicator that we’re building the right things.

9. What does the future hold for venture studios in the next 5+ years? Where do you think they need to iterate / improve?

I believe that studio models, in all their forms, will continue to grow in prominence within the early-stage ecosystem and will keep evolving in terms of their characteristics. Over time, we’ll likely see certain models emerge as winners while others may not succeed, as the underlying theories are tested.

Ultimately, studios need to demonstrate that they can reliably and significantly reduce the risk of early-stage venture investing compared to traditional VC models. Some studios, like Highline Beta, have been in the game for a while, but for many, the jury is still out on whether they can consistently achieve success.