![]() So far, Rough Draft has "backed over 50 teams, who have gone on to over $130 million of follow-on capital," Boyce says. Rough Draft originally focused just on colleges in Boston, but Boyce has recently expanded to New York and now spends his time flying between the two cities, hearing pitches. ![]() Often students use it to help them get their idea far enough along to get into an accelerator like Y Combinator, Boyce says. "It's not a crazy priced round and it's not a commitment to drop out of school," he says, referring to the pressure student founders often feel to work full time on the company once a VC funds them. What it isn't? A financing round that will get a young founder all stressed out. Those terms get worked out at a later round of funding. This is most lightweight way to do it," Boyce says, referring to a type of investment that doesn't stipulate ownership of a percentage of the company at a particular valuation. "We do uncapped convertible notes, up to $25,000. The idea is to help college kids "go from idea to products to seed and series A that are real ventures." "Not everyone has a rich uncle," Boyce jokes.įor instance, students might use it to buy a new computer, to hire a contract designer, to cover business travel expenses. They dish out small sums, up to $25,000, to help cover costs a poor student or their families can't. It often indicates a user profile.Ī meeting of the original Rough Draft Ventures crew. “I’m not thinking about metrics at this stage, I want to make sure it’s a great experience for the students, the goal is to have the students learning a ton.Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. Measuring the success of the students’ investments isn’t something Treccani is particularly concerned about. This includes things like greentech solutions to plastic waste, new energy technologies and quantum computing. “Firstly, your typical software startup, where students code an enterprise SaaS or a marketplace,” he says, “but you also have great deeptech spinning out of the labs of these universities, even though these have longer cycles, we’d like to fund them.” The industries the students will invest into are broad, Treccani says, though they’ll probably fall into two categories. ![]() “The growth of Creator Fund, who encourages students to invest in their peers’ innovations, clearly shows us a way to get early-stage funding and support to a more diverse range of founders and ideas, beyond the Oxbridge campuses where VCs so often focus,” says Henry Lane Fox, chairman of Creator Fund. This year, it plans to launch an initiative to support Black founders, as well as launching in Eastern Europe too. To date, it has trained more than 40 student investors, invested in eight startups and deploys £1m - £2m each year. It now trains student investors across 28 universities in the UK and Sweden. This is also one of the aims of the £1.5m Creator Fund, which launched in 2020 with backing from London-based company builder Founders Factory and now Eric Schmidt's Schmidt Future. “Those are criteria we’re selecting based upon.” “What we want is motivation, diversity and a sense of community and fellowship,” he says. ![]()
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