Launching the RippleX Fellowship Course
Hey, I’m Dom from the RippleX Fellowship team. I’m really excited to announce the formal launch of the RippleX Fellowship Course that I’ve been working on over the past few years!
The goal of this online course is to democratize access to learning frameworks for building and investing in venture-backable companies. You can access it here for free (choose the public one).
In this course, you’ll be able to learn about markets, customer interviews, product-market fit, startup evaluation frameworks, deal structures, term sheets, cap tables, and so much more.
At the beginning of 2019, I was just starting to find my groove at Ripple Ventures and reflected on my journey to get here.
I remembered all of the long hours I spent digging through Fred Wilson’s blog posts, watching old lectures, and parsing through TechCrunch articles to learn as much as possible about the startup and venture capital world. I remembered digging through our alumni base and finding the three people from my program that were in VC to network with. I remembered how hard it was to convince someone to trust a student to work with them and learn along the way. I remembered finally landing a few freelance roles with emerging managers and founders that agreed to take on my volunteer work. I remembered landing the only venture capital internship that hired from my program because it was the off-cycle in the fall. I remembered how lonely it was being the only one in my friend group that wanted to dive into this crazy world of venture capital.
I started this program for all the students who are in the same shoes that I was in. The students who don’t have resources and a large network to easily kickstart their journeys as founders or venture capitalists.
There were a few main problems that I was trying to solve after speaking with hundreds of students:
- Existing Programs Lacked: The majority of programs run by VCs focused on using students for deal sourcing (and that’s it). They didn’t give the students the time, resources, and coaching needed to succeed both in the short and long term.
- Founder Resource Gap: The majority of entrepreneurship programs enabled students to start projects, not venture-backable companies. Founders are particularly underserved on campus and rarely have a network to help them raise capital.
- Cross-School Pollination: Getting to know students from other schools, let alone another country was nearly impossible unless you went to high school with them or traveled for case competitions.
- Inequality of Opportunity: Only the top Ivy League schools received the funding, resources, and network to give students a chance at breaking into the ecosystem as a VC or venture-backed founder. If you were a founder from a non-target school, you had a much lower chance of raising capital than if you went to a target school. Likewise for VCs getting into internships and full-time roles.
My solution was to create a student-first experience that brought together a group of founders and aspiring VCs to learn about company building and investing no matter what background or school they came from. We didn’t ask the students to formally source deals for the fund, we were curating content to teach them about markets and term sheets. We ran these through bi-weekly calls with a small group of five students to start and the feedback was fantastic. I knew we were onto something and I wanted to continue scaling it.
We quickly grew the fellowship over the course of three years, running ten cohorts, graduating ~150 students as formal fellows from 50+ schools across North America. We grew our content library from a small subset of documents to a large array of materials for both founders and investors. While this was all great, I knew we still weren’t doing enough in the ecosystem.
There were still thousands of students that applied but didn’t get into our program because the limiting factor to increasing cohort sizes was me. I didn’t have the time to teach thousands of students at once. The alternative for most of these students? Not much. That didn’t sit well with me.
Knowing that the demand for content and mentorship in this industry will always be higher than the supply, we had to think of ways to scale what we’ve done so far. Our vision was always to democratize education in this opaque and walled-off industry. So, we decided to spend the holidays freshening up our content library, recording short lectures on top of each lesson and putting it all on an online course platform. We made it completely free, and it includes all of the core materials that we have in the formal fellowship program to make sure everyone has a chance to learn.
I look back at what we’ve done with the program so far and I’m extremely proud of our students and team. Our alumni have gone on to become venture-backed founders by top-tier accelerators and venture funds. Some have gone on to work as full-time investors at leading firms. I could not have done this without the support of Matt, Arielle, Naz, and Turja.
This is just the beginning though. We’re always improving the program for every cohort, adding in new materials, implementing new ideas, and empowering students to their full potential.
We’re looking for partners to help us continue scaling our program and achieve our mission. If you’re interested in partnering with us as a service provider, product partner, guest speaker, sponsor, or anything else, please reach out to Dom (dom@rippleventures.com).
Check out the course here: https://ripplexfellowship.thinkific.com/
