Johan van Jaarsveld doesn’t want to sound defeatist, but he reckons the money made by his venture capital team at BHP will be trivial, even if they successfully pick the next big thing.

“If you think about the small amounts we put to work here, even making five times or 10 times your money is frankly not going to make a difference to BHP,” he says of the seed funding BHP Ventures has put into about 25 start-ups over the past two and a half years.