Friday Q&A: Louis Toth of Comcast Ventures

Comcast Ventures was thinking about content long before its parent company acquired NBC Universal. The venture capital arm of the cable giant counts Flipboard, About.com, SB Nation (now Vox Media) and BlogHer among its dozen of investments. Now with NBC in tow, Comcast Ventures has a powerful channel for helping its portfolio companies.
“We have access with all of these resources to help entrepreneurs and tell them how the market is going to evolve and give them heads up on what’s next for Comcast,” says Toth.
Like its parent company, Comcast Ventures has offices in The 67th Ward, Silicon Valley and San Francisco along with its presence on the 55th floor of the Comcast Center in Center City.
After being locally active during the first tech bubble over ten years ago, the firm (which is, as Business Insider pointed out, run by a woman) is dipping into Philadelphia once again funding five DreamIt Ventures companies through the Minority Entrepreneur Accelerator Program and was one of the investors in Invite Media, the ad platform that exited to Google in June 2010.
We spoke to Managing Partner Louis Toth shortly after the firm closed a $6.1 million investment in Catalog Spree in November. After the jump, read why Comcast bothers investing when it could acquire, how his firm views Philadelphia and why it invests in the turbulent media industry.

As always, edited for length and clarity.

How is being a “strategic firm” that’s part of a large company different than your average venture capital firm?
First off, it’s a lot of fun, being at a place like Comcast and NBC. It’s a tremendous platform that enables us to really be educated in a more in-depth way than a traditional venture investment firm that would be looking at a bunch of different areas. Here we focus on a few key areas around communications and payment technology. But we are infused with that knowledge by Comcast and the areas that we are in.
We have access with all of these resources to help entrepreneurs and tell them how the market is going to evolve and give them heads up on what’s next for Comcast. We can make things happen through our network and test products in our labs. We even have one company who is creating a products and an NBC show around that product.
Comcast is obviously a national company, but does the firm have any special connection with Philadelphia?
We did a fair amount in the first tech bubble in the Philadelphia area. We were investors in Half.com and ICG. There were lots of tech companies that were starting in this area. Tech declined afterward, especially here in Philly. Over a space of ten years we didn’t make any investments in Philly but that’s changed. We have made a couple new investments in this area: Invite Media and Packlate. We are active but we could certainly do more. That’s an initiative we’d like to put more effort in 2012.
We always wondered: why invest in companies? Doesn’t Comcast have the money to just acquire them?
It’s really not about locking up technology or getting talent on the cheap. We are really focused on building significant companies. We know there’s a whole wide world out there of other companies, customers and service providers. Comcast should get the first look at the technologies. I think we’ve only acquired two out of the 120-some companies.
Can you elaborate?
Say we invested in two companies that were able to develop a new type of video on demand system, and these companies had a better way of doing it. Comcast doesn’t need to own that. You don’t need to own the construction company that builds your house. We just want access to the best.
You guys invest in the media industry, a vertical that typically doesn’t scale as well as, say, enterprise tech. Why the focus on media?
The internet is a fantastic tool lowering the cost of content creation. When you have a community with SB Nation or BlogHer, the content is created by the community.  So we think that’s a powerful part of the business model. If you can distribute it, then it will be a whole lot of less expensive so it’s a viable venture investment.
People automatically assume that we need a tight strategic investment for everything that we do. We can certainly link each company to NBC Universal and Comcast but not everyone is going to know what the next thing is out there.
Sort of like hedging your bets?
I don’t think any large company can possibly claim they have a lock on innovation, so everyone is figuring out how to tap into great innovation centers. We’re one other mechanism to do that.