A team of CU Boulder graduate students brought back the second place prize from an international VC competition in North Carolina last weekend. Their secret sauce? Months of working closely with members of the Colorado startup community.
The 17th annual Venture Capital Investment Competition included picking one of four participating companies to invest in, justifying the pick to judges and then negotiating term sheets. Luckily, the CU students had already worked with about a dozen CEOs of local companies such as Uvize, Simple Energy and Rapt Media to play out these situations.
This setup of practicing with local startups was a win-win for the students and for the companies: “they get to practice their investor pitch and we get to practice due diligence for VCIC,” Adam Block, an MBA candidate on the team, said. “But it also helps expand our networks within the community.”
Many of the CU students on the team are hoping to work in the Colorado startup scene after graduation - and some already are.
“The Colorado startup ecosystem is as vibrant as anywhere in the world,” Block, who also works at Simple Energy as manager of regulatory affairs, said. “Boulder in particular rests on an open and collaborative environment where entrepreneurs are just as concerned about helping out the community as they are in getting their business up and running.”
Boulder’s very own Foundry Group played a huge role in the team’s success: managing director and co-founder Jason Mendelson directly mentored and coached the team, “helping us better understand the nuances of the industry,” Block said.
Mendelson and CU Law professor Brad Bernthal, who also is the director at Silicon Flatirons Center’s Entrepreneurship Initiative, taught a VC Law class at CU which turned out to be the biggest “differentiator” between the CU students and those from other participating schools like Yale and UC Berkeley.
Twelve university teams, all which qualified regionally throughout the winter, traveled to Chapel Hill last weekend to show off their VC chops. Saturday was the most grueling day for the CU team. It started out with the team defending its pick via a 20-minute “aggressive” Q&A with judges. A few hours after that, the CU team was told they didn’t make the cut.
“We were devastated and on our way to the bar when we got a call saying there was a mistake and we were actually tied for sixth and could advance to the final term sheet negotiation round,” Block said. “Of course we obliged.”
The team ended up placing second only to a team from Columbia Business School, giving CU its second best finish in the decade that the school has participated.