🎓The Bulletin #31: Our Year in Review!
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🎓The Bulletin #31: Our Year in Review!
For our last bulletin of the semester, we're doing something a little different from previous Bulletins, and taking a look back at the 2022/2023 academic year for our fund🎉🍾
The month of May is here! Which means that we aren’t too far from the end of the semester (and graduation, for all our beloved seniors here at the fund 🥺). In our final bulletin of the academic year, we look back on milestones, learnings, and all the fun we’ve had as a team.
🚀Our Core Mission: Better Education, Better Investment Processes, Better Returns.
This year, our fund’s purpose was directed by the new concept of the VWV flywheel 🎡— a three-feature self-sustaining cycle of Education-Investments-Returns.
At the heart of our fund is a simple idea: to achieve a self-sustaining evergreen model. This goal drives us to seek out and invest in promising ventures that can generate sustained returns. As we succeed in this mission, our organization's prominence grows, which, in turn, attracts more advisors and encourages greater participation from them. This virtuous cycle of growth further enhances the educational value of VWV, benefitting all those involved.
The flywheel gives us clarity on the three priorities that are integral to our mission of making venture capital education more accessible to students, while tangibly supporting entrepreneurship on College Hill and beyond. We’re excited to continue our work in the upcoming year!
🚂Deal Flow: 148 Sourced, 16 Diligenced, 1 Investment!
This year, despite the challenges posed by the sourcing environment, we were able to refocus on our core values and ethos as a student fund during the downtime, gaining practical experience with market cycles and refining our investment strategy.
We are proud to share that amidst the strong macro headwinds, our team sourced a total of 148 companies, bringing the total number of companies sourced over the lifetime of our fund to 665. Of the 148 companies, we diligenced 16, presented 8 to our Investment Committee, and ultimately invested in 1 company— Apprenta! 🕊️
We’re excited to be on this journey with Apprenta, and can’t wait to see where Amanda and her team take the company. Read more about our conviction in the investment here!
👩🏫The VWV Course
This spring semester was the first time our VWV course, a long-time staple of our fund, was offered as a credit-bearing Group Independent Study Project (GISP)! We are immensely grateful to Professor Barrett Hazeltine for being our faculty sponsor, and to all our advisors and IC members who gave time to be a part of our classes.
As an experiential learning course without prerequisites, the course advances VWV’s educational mission, and it’s been well received by students — 50 applied for the 20 spots. We hope to continue offering the course in the coming years, and strongly encourage anyone interested to apply in the future!
🤸♀️VWV in the Community
This past April, we hosted StartupConnect III with our friends over at Contrary. The third edition of this annual event, we welcomed Tom Gardner, CEO of The Motley Fool, Claire Hughes Johnson, former COO of Stripe, and Tim Newell, COO of Aspiration as keynote speakers, as well as 27 founders and operators as guests in our virtual startup fair.
We had so much fun at this virtual event, and learnt even more from the speakers and founders that we got to meet. A massive thank you to everyone who participated in the event— we look forward to bringing it back next year, and we hope to see you there!
🎯Goals for the New Year
As we wrap up the spring semester and look to the year ahead, we’re excited to continue the terrific work done by the senior class and preserve the best parts of this community! Here are 4 goals that we will be focusing on.
📚Education. VWV’s north star is to democratize access to venture capital through education. We do this through our VWV course and events, but we want to make these experiences even more accessible to the wider Brown community in the year ahead.
🤝Hands-on experiences. As the only student-run venture fund on College Hill, our team is immensely blessed by the mentorship of our advisors and IC members throughout our sourcing, diligencing, and pitching process. Sourcing remains a priority of our fund, but we’ve also increasingly invested time in portfolio management, recruiting talent, and conducting deep-dive research as we recognize the value of these other endeavors.
💝Community. While VWV is a club, it’s also a community of people with shared interests and goals. With 24 student members, 10+ alums, 5 IC members, 25+ advisors currently, we want to continue being a space where our members feel supported, uplifted and welcome!
⛷️Outreach. In the new year, we want to engage with the broader Brown community through more events, such as StartupConnect, and *potentially* a pitch-off competition that would bring aspiring investors together. We also want to deepen our partnerships with both student-led and established VC funds. Finally, we hope to continue growing our advisory board and engage Brown alums in the VC space.
💖A Year of Fun
But enough with the serious stuff, here’s a highlight reel of the fun we’ve had as a team this year!
🥂 Farewell to our Seniors 😭
And finally, we would like to wish our senior class the very best for their future endeavours! You all have been absolute pillars of our fund, and we will miss you very much. Come back and visit, we’ll always be at the Nelson on Wednesdays! 🥺
Amanda, Casey, Luc, Kia, Ria and Zach— Thank you! 💖
Thanks for sticking around with us all semester! That’s it for this week, feel free to email me at zyn_yee_ang@brown.edu with any inquiries.
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