University Venture Fund (BUVF)

I spent a good portion of my college experience building an entrepreneurial pipeline on campus. When I arrived at BU, resources for aspiring student entrepreneurs were scattered and ineffective. So I created an accelerator and started community building. It was a great experience, learned a lot about starting lean and about what makes a startup successful. The community has grown exponentially and I am really excited to see how it will do in the future. It will be interesting to see from the perspective of an alumni how the community will grow and the direction it will take.

I intend on shaping the community and helping it grow, even though I now live in New York. For the past couple of months I thought about ways in which to do it, and I thought about creating a venture fund, which would be the next step in the pipeline. After drafting up few options and pitching them to faculty and the administration, here is what I came up with:

• An evergreen fund that would be part of the endowment fund
• The funds will be raised through alumni donations
• The investment thesis will be very founder friendly, based on YC’s Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE)
• Small organizational structure composed of a couple student upperclassmen, faculty and alumni
• $25-$50k seed funding in 15 startups over 3 years

The reason we made the decision to make the fund “evergreen”, meaning all profits will be re-injected into the fund, is to simplify the terms of our partnerships with alumni that donated.

We wanted to make investments cheap for the startups. A simple convertible note that wouldn’t appear as a liability on the balance sheet. Read more about it here.

We drafted a prospectus detailing the investment thesis, organization structure and executive summary. We are currently contacting alumni to get feedback on the prospectus and building the team. We hope to start fundraising before the end of the summer.

If you have prior experience and want to help out, please get in contact with me.