The Washington University Venture Network (WVN) is an invitation-only group designed to connect alumni and friends of the University who are part of the investment community with the next generation of founders and startups emerging from our ecosystem. The Skandalaris Center holds Startup Showcase events throughout the year where ventures present updates on their progress, traction, and runway, along with capital raised and additional funding/investments needed to advance their venture.
“It became very apparent to us that we need to do more when it came to helping our startups raise money and financial capital,” said II Luscri, Managing Director of the Skandalaris Center and Assistant Vice Provost for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. “At the same time, as the center’s grown, we’ve gotten to know a lot of VC funds and WashU alumni who are investors themselves, and who have an interest in helping grow WashU startups and startups in St. Louis in general,” said Luscri.
Luscri sits at the conference table in the Skandalaris Center’s meeting room presiding over the WashU Venture Network’s weekly meeting. The group is comprised of students who have some experience with investments or startup backgrounds and currently includes 1st and 2nd-year MBAs as well as undergrads. The Skandalaris Center National Council is also involved. The organization has hosted five virtual pitch days so far with two companies each time.
“The WashU Venture Network puts us in a position where we can stay an honest broker, remain an open space for startups and investors to come, and allows us to create a shorter distance between investors and startups,” Luscri continues.
“This is something that’s always been on top of II’s mind and just a natural progression of the WashU experience as they start out, learning about entrepreneurship more academically, that develops into the ideation and the launch of real companies,” added Cliff Holekamp, Co-founder, Managing Director, & General Partner of Cultivation Capital.
Holekamp has attended three WashU Venture Network pitch days as an investor and has long been a friend of the Skandalaris Center. He also was key in building up the Entrepreneurship Platform for Olin’s MBA program to its nationally ranked status.
It is hard for the WashU Venture Network to quantify the monetary success of the start-ups’ pitches so far because the network stays completely out of the investment process. It connects investors who want further communication with the start-ups post-pitch and then steps back. However, based on the feedback Luscri has received from start-ups and investors, the WashU Venture Network feels confident that all ten start-ups who have pitched so far received good quality connections and conversations from the investors, and several secured investments.
“I take pitches for a living, a large part of my job, and the pitches that I am seeing coming out of WashU and particularly at this event are absolutely professional quality. They’re prepared and sophisticated and just as savvy as the pitches we get from experienced entrepreneurs,” said Holekamp.
“In the last four years that I’ve been here we’ve been much more oriented towards starting, launching, and growing companies at the Skandalaris Center,” said Luscri. With that focus, the WashU Venture Network “really fills a gap that our startups and investors are experiencing because they want access to good quality deals.”
The group is planning for the future at a natural inflection point. Several MBA second-years are graduating and the group has now hosted enough pitch events to establish some best practices and develop more structure moving forward.
The first requirement for pitching in the WashU Venture Network is that the company must have either a founder who is a WashU student, faculty member, or alumnus or be founded off of WashU intellectual property.
The WashU Venture Network is also hoping they can provide a meaningful enough experience to investors so that they are encouraged to become involved in the Skandalaris Center in other ways. To that end, the group is developing a due-diligence-influenced process that startups must agree to go through before they can pitch in a WashU Venture Network event.
“It really is every bit as professional, as well reasoned, as promising as pitches that you’ll get in professional environments,” said Holekamp. “That’s not the case at every school. That wasn’t always the case at WashU, so alumni who graduated many years ago, may not know how far the entrepreneurship program has come, and how good these young people have become. This is not a student academic exercise. These are very promising entrepreneurs who are launching very exciting companies.”