When Hubert Joly joined Best Buy as CEO in 2012, he wanted the struggling consumer electronics retailer to solely focus on increasing in-store and online sales. “All hands on deck” was Joly’s unofficial motto. That meant ditching everything Joly deemed irrelevant to fixing the company’s immediate problems. So one of the first businesses Best Buy dumped was its venture capital unit, which had invested about $70 million in tech startups, according to Crunchbase.
