Rocket Fuel Launches Undergraduate Venture Summit
By Brian Li
Starting in the beginning of 2020, Rocket Fuel Ventures’s Brian Li noticed a trend amongst college students interested in VC across the country: every VC student organization worked in a vacuum.
There was little collaboration amongst VC student organizations as they targeted similar speakers and aspired to learn similar VC concepts and ideas. Brian decided to change this idea. While brainstorming with Lux Capital’s Rahul Rana and Happy Valley Capital’s Leonardo Girlando, they came up with the idea of a venture summit bringing together like-minded VC student organizations from around the country. The group’s core leadership grew to over 20 schools with Stevens, Rutgers, Penn State, Lehigh, and Utah leading the intiative.
This initiative quickly caught fire as Lux Capital’s Sujude Dalieh and GSV’s Jonathan Chang were quick in joining the speaker list. In total 11 speakers signed on to speak at the summit from firms such as Bessemer, Revolution, Advance Venture Partners, Lerer Hippeau, Dynamo Ventures, Human Capital, and VU Venture Partners.
Following a tweet by Lerer Hippeau’s Meagan Loyst, the tweet received over 100+ likes and Brian was contacted by over 15 schools in a 24 hour time span. The list of schools grew as schools like Michigan, Boston College, Santa Clara, Virginia, and James Madison joined the initiative.
Sponsored by Startup Tree, the conference took place on Run the World video platform and took place on April 23rd and April 24th. Over 433 registered attendees from over 25 different countries attended the event. We are so grateful for all of the attendees and extremely thankful for all of the hosts and the support team who made this conference a reality.
We are pleased to announce that a smaller event involving the schools participating in the conference will take place this fall and the second annual Undergraduate Venture Summit will take place next April!
