Interview #4 — Sakina Tinwala

Dedicated, empathetic, and passionate

are three traits Sakina Tinwala , a junior at the University of Michigan studying Industrial Operations Engineering, uses to describe herself. She currently serves as the president of Upround.

Given that you study Industrial Operations Engineering, tell me where your interest in venture capital and investing stems from

So I’ve always been interested in finance. When I first came to college, I started off an an economics major and then I realized that I wanted more of a technical exposure and something not as theoretical, which made me switch to industrial operations engineering.

So I saw that Michigan just placed 2nd in the Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC)! Can you tell me a little about that experience?

So the structure of the competition was that they first held a mock competition at Michigan. At this stage, we had to write investment theses on startups that came from the Michigan Business Challenge (which is another competition where startups compete for seed funding), and evaluate them for investing.

Once we won the Michigan competition, we went to the regional competition at NYU’s Stern School of Business. At this stage, it was very similar to the Michigan level competition — there were three entrepreneurs and we had their pitch deck prior to the day of the competition. We basically followed by doing our own analysis and industry analysis.

On the day of the competition, each of the entrepreneurs pitched to us, and we had about 15 minutes to ask them questions, and we were evaluated based on the questions we asked, final investment thesis, and term sheet that we presented to judges.

Okay, that being said, how do they gauge a good thesis over a not so good one?

So you have to understand the upside and evaluate whether the company has a 10 or 20x potential, while at the same time acknowledging the risks associated with the investment. Second, you have the validate all of the entrepreneurs’ claims — for example, if they say a certain market is worth $100 Million, you have to verify that it’s actually accurate. Finally, the term sheet has to make sense for both the investor and the entrepreneur.

One of the challenges for a competition like this is the limited time you have to conduct due diligence. How did your team approach this?

The mock competition at Michigan really helped us understand the format of everything, and they gave us a general structure to follow which made it easier as well.

You are also currently the president of Upround VC at the University of Michigan. Can you tell me about the growth of the organization since you first joined as an analyst?

The organization actually started as the Michigan regional competition for VCIC. The founder, after participating realized that he didn’t want to limit such an endeavor so only business school students, so he brought it to the campus as a whole.

When I first joined, my role was education- teaching others in the organization and the campus as a whole about venture capital. At this time, we realized that the teams at Upround were very siloed off, and we wanted a more holistic approach to venture capital. As a result, we just restructured Upround to be centered around deal flow in the Midwest area, and provide value to both VC firms and startups in the area. Since then, we’ve been sourcing roughly 20 startups a week by keeping our eyes and ears open across campus and attending other entrepreneurial events, such as launch parties, demo days and pitch competitions.

What accomplishment are you most proud of as president?

I’ve been president for the past semester so it’s been about three months so far. I’m really excited for our events in the future, but one thing we worked on this semester was a VC panel, where we invited 3 VCs to come speak to students and created a huge event around that. Students at Michigan got the opportunity to learn about the ins and outs of venture capital and get advice on how to break into the space.

What sort of advice would you give to maybe a freshman who is interested in the space, but may be a bit intimidated?

If they’re a freshman at Michigan, I would strongly encourage them to apply to Upround, as we provide all the training necessary to get the students up to speed! In fact, we really like freshmen because they’re very eager and determine to learn as much as they can and get their hands dirty with sourcing companies.

If not, I’d encourage that they attend as many VC related events as possible and speak to as many people in the field as possible, especially entrepreneurs. When you talk to entrepreneurs, it’s not only a lot of fun, but you get to learn about their passions and it’s really invigorating.

If you ran your own VC fund, what stage companies and industries would you focus on?

I think I would be interested in sourcing Series A for the most part, as seed stage is a bit too risky for me. For me, there’s a lot of uncertainty with seed stage, but with Series A, you have a little bit more certainty which is what I prefer.

As for sectors and industries, I would be really interested in both B2B SAAS because of its enormous growth potential right now, as well as direct to consumer startups — an interest I developed through my previous internship at Floyd.

Learn more about Sakina!