Try Before You Buy
Why Strategic Intimacy Is the New Playbook in Corporate Venturing
Previously on Open Road Ventures: in the last episode of Venturing Insights, I shared insights from the latest episode of The Corporate Venturing Podcast with A2A . If you missed it, you can catch up here!
From Pipeline to Pathway
Corporate innovation used to follow a predictable formula. Spot a trend, find a startup, write a check. Sometimes as an investor, sometimes as an acquirer. Either way, the decision came early and the commitment was binary.
This model made sense when information was scarce, replication was hard, and advantage could be protected. A strong product or team might justify a pre-emptive acquisition. A few promising metrics could secure a corporate venture round.
But the ground has shifted.
Today, technical moats are shallow. AI levels capabilities. Distribution is rented, not owned. And what used to be a six-month advantage is now a feature drop away from irrelevance. The margin for error has narrowed. The cost of misalignment has grown.
This is why companies are rethinking how they engage startups—not as transactions, but as relationships. Not as bets, but as tests. The goal is no longer to pick winners early. It’s to learn fast, build optionality, and move forward only when the fit is proven.
This is where the “try before you buy” model emerges—not as a buzzword, but as a real strategic shift. And Salesforce, for example, has turned it into a system.
Salesforce: The Blueprint of Strategic Intimacy
Salesforce doesn’t just acquire startups. It grows into them.
Take a closer look at its biggest deals—Slack, MuleSoft, Vlocity, Airkit. Almost all followed a consistent pattern: first came a partnership or pilot, then a venture investment through Salesforce Ventures, and only later, a full acquisition.
This suggests that follow-on rounds from Salesforce Ventures confirm a high degree of conviction in the company (the “try” period) before Salesforce moves to buy. On average, the time from first investment to M&A is a bit over 3 years. This timeline shortens when looking at last investment to acquisition — which averages 1 year and 5 months for the 5 M&A targets that raised successive rounds from Salesforce’s venture arm.
By engaging first as a client, Salesforce gets to test what really matters: integration friction, user feedback, roadmap alignment, strategic fit. It sees how the startup performs inside its actual workflows—not just on a slide deck.
If the fit is strong, it moves to a minority investment. Not for control, but for commitment. The startup gets capital and credibility. Salesforce gets proximity and a clearer view into the team, traction, and direction.
Finally, when the relationship deepens—and the strategic case sharpens—Salesforce makes a move. But by then, it’s not a bet. It’s a convergence. The tech is already embedded. The teams already know each other. The risk is radically lower.
It’s try, learn, shape, then buy—with fewer surprises and faster post-deal integration.
In a market where traditional M&A outcomes are often shaky, this approach doesn’t just de-risk innovation. It builds momentum before the contract is even signed.
The False Binary – Venture Clienting vs. CVC
Much of the conversation around startup engagement still frames Corporate Venture Capital and Venture Clienting as opposing models—mutually exclusive paths for how a company should interact with startups.
In one corner: CVC. You invest in startups. You join the cap table. You gain visibility, some influence, and optional future M&A rights. It’s about skin in the game, both financial and strategic.
In the other: Venture Clienting. You don’t invest. You don’t take equity. You become a paying customer—early, demanding, and ideally influential. It’s fast, lean, and minimizes risk. The startup gets validation and revenue. You get to test-drive the future.
But this framing misses the point. The real distinction is not between whether to use one model or the other—but when and how to use them in combination. Or in “escalation”.
Leading corporate innovators no longer treat Venture Clienting and CVC as a binary choice. They treat them as sequential tools within a coherent engagement strategy. Venture Clienting is no longer just an alternative to CVC—it’s increasingly the filter that makes CVC meaningful. It allows companies to build operational intimacy before committing capital.
This is where the Salesforce model becomes instructive. Because what looks like a textbook CVC-to-M&A pathway is actually built on a foundation of usage-first learning. First, Salesforce engages as a client. Then it invests through Salesforce Ventures. Only later—once traction, integration, and alignment are proven—does it acquire.
The insight here is simple but powerful: investing is no longer the first move. It’s the second. The decision to fund is informed by evidence, not by promise.
This sequence flips the traditional logic of venturing. It moves from financial exposure to strategic intimacy. From abstract potential to embedded performance. From portfolio theory to practical progression.
Why This Works in a Post-Moat World
The traditional logic of corporate venturing was built on the idea of defensibility. You’d find a startup with a technical edge, a data moat, or a novel distribution model, then move quickly to lock it in.
That playbook is harder to run today.
Technology is modular. Infrastructure is rented. Features are copied. Even strategy is open source. The real risk isn’t missing out on the next unicorn—it’s acquiring something that doesn’t fit.
Fit is no longer a soft metric. It’s the hard stuff: technical integration, product resonance, internal adoption, cultural compatibility. If those fail, no amount of potential can save the deal.
The “try before you buy” approach addresses this head-on. It shifts the focus from promise to performance. From pitch decks to actual deployment. From market buzz to internal traction.
It’s about speeding up understanding.
And in a world where the cost of being wrong is rising, and the shelf life of advantage is shrinking, that kind of clarity is its own competitive edge.
Building Optionality, Not Obligation
The strength of the “try before you buy” model lies in how it structures decision-making over time. Rather than locking into a strategy early, companies build layers of engagement that allow for continuous validation.
Starting as a client enables teams to evaluate real-world performance. It surfaces friction points, adoption hurdles, and integration complexity. These are insights you don’t get from a pitch or a pilot. You get them from use.
If the solution proves effective, a corporate investment can follow. This deepens the relationship and signals long-term interest—without forcing a commitment to acquire. It also creates better access: to the team, to product discussions, and to performance data over time.
From there, strategic optionality increases. You can continue as a partner. You can ramp up the investment. Or you can start shaping the path to acquisition—on stronger terms and with greater confidence.
This approach builds a portfolio of validated relationships rather than a pipeline of isolated bets. Each step is informed by the previous one. And every move has operational learning behind it, not just strategic intent.
Rethinking Innovation Pipelines
Most corporate innovation models are still built around linear funnels: scout, screen, pilot, invest, or acquire. Each step is treated as a filter. The goal is efficiency—move fast, fail fast, and allocate capital where it counts.
But this model assumes that startups are static entities—that their value can be assessed quickly and in isolation. In reality, the relationship between a startup and a corporate evolves over time. Product relevance changes. Strategic alignment deepens. Fit improves as both sides learn.
The historical assumption was that CVC was a pipeline for M&A. But the data tells us that this pipeline is not linear, nor is it always converging. Instead, what we see is a multi-layered engagement strategy:
First comes exploration: CVC as a sensing mechanism.
Then collaboration: partnerships, pilots, and product co-development.
Only eventually, convergence: equity deepens the bond and, in rare cases, leads to acquisition.
Think of this as progression logic, not funnel logic.
This is why leading organizations are shifting away from rigid sequences. They don’t treat client relationships, investments, and acquisitions as separate tracks. They treat them as stages in a longer engagement cycle—dynamic, adaptive, and strategic.
Salesforce shows what this looks like in practice. It doesn’t try to optimize for quick wins. It builds familiarity over time—starting with operational exposure, followed by selective investment, and culminating in acquisition when alignment is clear.
Other corporates are following similar paths. BMW’s Startup Garage starts with purchasing agreements, not funding. Bosch co-develops solutions with startups long before equity is discussed. Telefónica combines investment and procurement under the same strategic lens.
And even among big tech, where less than 1% of CVC investments lead to acquisitions (CB Insights), companies like Nvidia maintain strategic relationships with over 40% of their portfolio startups—highlighting that value is increasingly created through engagement, not exit.
Strategic Intimacy as a Competitive Advantage
In high-velocity markets, execution speed and innovation access are no longer enough. Startups move fast, but corporates move deep. The advantage lies in how well—and how early—you understand which startups are not just promising, but relevant.
This is what the “try before you buy” approach enables: a way to build conviction through exposure. Not by picking winners in theory, but by testing them in practice. The emphasis shifts from scouting to sensing. From selection to interaction.
The goal isn’t to find the next unicorn. It’s to create a repeatable path from contact to commitment—one that’s informed, adaptive, and aligned with strategic intent.
Strategic intimacy—earned through use, investment, and shared learning—is what turns startups into high-fit acquisitions. And it’s what turns corporate venturing from a portfolio play into a capability.
As more companies adopt this layered approach, the edge will belong to those who don’t just fund or buy innovation, but who build the conditions to grow into it.