Campus Partners

The smell of fresh textbooks and old beer. The joy of reuniting with friends and the anxiety of finding your classrooms. The confidence from one more year of experience and the uncertainty from being one year closer to real life. College is back in session.

Now that the students have had some time to get settled back on campus, David and I are excited to announce the launch of our Campus Partners initiative. Prior to the start of this academic year, we selected 30 rock star Campus Partners to represent us at campuses throughout the U.S. (coming soon to Israel). These students are our eyes, ears, brains and mouths on the ground: helping us source deals, do research and expand the marketing reach of our portfolio companies.

One of the keys to building a successful venture capital firm is discovering quality, proprietary deal flow. This is particularly difficult as a seed-stage investor when many of the companies we would want to back are in stealth mode with no online presence or are still dormant in the minds of their creators. It is no secret that college campuses are one place where interesting under-the-radar companies are being started (and not just in the Ivy League and Stanford), and we could never reach these dorm room founders on our own. The students we have chosen as Campus Partners are high achievers who are embedded within the entrepreneurial communities on their respective campuses, and we believe that they can be one effective channel for discovering investment opportunities not yet seen by other institutional investors.

One of the things I’m most excited for is the different ideas and perspectives around companies and trending topics such a diverse group can bring. We’ve created a Slack team where we are already engaging in discussions around companies and industry trends. We hope it will create learning opportunities and fun debate for everyone, including for David and me.

Our presence across a large number of geographically diverse campuses also provides our relevant portfolio companies with boots on the ground for marketing to Millennials. We meet startups all the time who would benefit from the type of early exposure that a team of campus evangelists could generate. Our Campus Partners are passionate about new tech, have deep campus networks and are determined to have an impact.

The program is designed with three goals for the students: to be educational, to assist in career development with hands-on experience and to provide an invaluable networking opportunity.

• Education: We have planned monthly group calls with David and I to discuss topics related to startup investing and technology. These calls are in addition to the ongoing discussion taking place on Slack about specific investment opportunities and overall market trends.
• Career Development: Being a Campus Partner demonstrates a passion for investing and entrepreneurship that should give our students a leg up when looking for summer internships or post graduation employment. We even hope that we will be able to convince some of the exceptional talent to come join Ground Up portfolio companies.
• Networking: The relationships that they will form with each other and with us will serve us all well in the future as they go on to start or join companies or enter the world of investing. Hopefully these are relationships that they will maintain, and with each successive cohort, the value of the Campus Partner alumni network will grow.

I look forward to updating you on the continued progress of the program. If you’re interested in becoming a CP next semester, please send me an email: Cory@Groundup.vc

— Cory