Inside the Harvard Organization That’s Changing How Students Create Startups
This is the final part of a 3 part series with Peter Boyce II, Investor at General Catalyst Partners and Co-Founder of Rough Draft Ventures (check out Part 1 and Part 2, too). We chatted with Peter to learn about the topics that he knows best — student entrepreneurship, and East Coast venture capital. You can listen to the entire conversation on the ‘What I Know Best’ podcast, be sure to subscribe to learn from other experts across the Quibb network in coming weeks.
Peter Boyce co-founded Rough Draft Ventures (RDV) while he was a student at Harvard. We chatted with him about how university-supported startups get off the ground, and his perspective on the next wave of startups founded by students. But the devil’s in the details — how exactly has Rough Draft Ventures managed to support and build a powerful organization across many of the top tier universities along the East Coast?
Choosing the Best Young Founders and Companies
Many venture firms and investors speak to the importance of being ‘founder first’ in how they choose which companies to invest in. Rough Draft Ventures is a strong believer in this approach too, in how they select founders and companies they want to invest in and work with. They looked at and learned from the process that angels and early-stage investors use to select their companies. This means that the impact of RDV across the campuses where their founders study has had an influences on how people with RDV interact with students they may invest in, similar to how it works in cities with existing investor networks and norms. It’s common for students to try to ‘get on the radar’ of fellow students on the RDV selection committee and team well before they actually pitch. Grabbing coffee, getting intros from founders in the RDV portfolio, meeting with other portfolio founders — all the activities that non-student founders are familiar with exist on a much smaller scale.
Structure, Partnerships, and Cash
While RDV started at Harvard, the organization recognized early that they were in a part of the country that’s densely populated with colleges and students. They now have over 60 affiliated colleges, and are actively working with others — like Stanford’s StartX program — across the country. Peter and the RDV team are also thinking about how they can increase the pace of investing, working to support all creative students across the US that want access to resources to build a startup. Across the current network of students RDV funds anywhere from 20 to 30 companies each school year, there have been 58 investments across the lifespan of the organization, with cheques ranging anywhere between $5,000 to $25,000. Their roster of mentors also spans across alumni from a wide swath of East Coast colleges, and includes some notable founders from companies like RunKeeper, Warby Parker, iRobot, and Hubspot. It’s an impressive and bold model, still in it’s infancy — RDV started just over 3 years ago.
One of the important partnerships has been with General Catalyst. The venture firm, which now manages almost $3B across 8 funds, itself started in Harvard Square. They’d been very supportive of the student ecosystem locally, and were excited to partner with Peter and RDV to help fund the companies that were coming out of East Coast colleges. They had already had great experiences working with young, early-stage teams going to and coming out of Y Combinator, so had also built up relevant experience around how to best support and work with that type of founder.
“Love this set of colleagues that I now work alongside at GC that are really dedicated to empowering young people. There’s a certain excitement about that, and it’s not about the progress today or tomorrow, necessarily, but a commitment to that, so we work together.”
Pre-Seed for Students
As the early-stage funding models mature, Peter has found that RDV is filling the need that non-student founders are accessing via pre-seed financing. Not everyone has angels in their network, a wealthy family member to turn to for a friends-and-family round. RDV give access to students via an investment they might not otherwise be able to get:
“…this is the kind of capital to get off the ground and validate whether this is something that is worth hunkering down on, working on full time, turning down job opportunities. Sometimes folks will take a leave of absence, but there should be some more validation in front of folks doing that than just grabbing a term sheet and deciding to take the leap before they know where the idea can lead.”
It’s similar to pre-seed also in that the funding often leads to companies which then go on to Y Combinator and raise a full seed round.
As colleges across the US try to understand how to better integrate entrepreneurship into their classes and campuses, Rough Draft Ventures has shown that modeling a program after the real world can work. Student don’t need courses on ‘How to start a company’, necessarily. As long as they’re learning skills and continue to generate amazing ideas, access to a network and resources so they can test and validate their vision is a novel, forward-thinking way to build real companies straight out of dorm rooms.