S8EP10 - Ron Levin, Managing Partner @ Alumni Ventures

Ron Levin is the Managing Partner at Alumni Ventures, the most active venture capital firm in the US. Hector spoke to Ron to discuss his journey from entrepreneur to investor and his insights on scaling ventures and building impactful companies.

Ron shares his fascinating career story, from organising trading card shows as a teenager to founding the travel-tech unicorn TravelPerk and eventually joining Alumni Ventures, where he leads their dedicated Seed Fund. The conversation dives into:

• Ron’s unique career trajectory, blending tech, travel, and entrepreneurship
• Founding TravelPerk and the lessons learned from pivoting early
• Alumni Ventures' innovative model and how they empower founders while co-investing
• The importance of serendipity, curiosity, and acting on opportunities in building a career
• His philosophy on investing for impact and solving big societal problems

This episode is packed with wisdom and actionable advice for founders, investors, and anyone interested in venture capital and entrepreneurship.

Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and follow The Riding Unicorns podcast on your favourite platform and stay connected with us on social media for more inspiring episodes! 🎙️🦄

Transcript

  Welcome to the riding unicorns podcast. This is a podcast, all about venture capsule and fast-growing startups.  On Jane Springle. My co-host is Hector Mason. 

We're both VCs based in London. Whether you're a founder VC angel investor, or just curious about the startup ecosystem. There's something here for you. Every episode dives into unique topics related to tech and venture capital, offering valuable takeaways and actionable insights. We hope you enjoy the show and find something useful in each discussion. 

Let's get started. 

  Hey Ron, great to have you here on Riding Unicorns. Thanks so much for joining us. 

Yeah. Hi Hector. So thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.  

It's our pleasure. so yeah, just, just me today. James, James is, is out unable to join. so looking forward to the conversation and,  I wonder, I mean, the best place to start is probably just you introducing yourself and sort of talking us through your, your career a little bit up until, up until now.

Yeah, I'll try to give you the reasonably short story, but we've got time. All right. I can give you a little hour version. Then,  so, you know, I, I grew up in, in, in greater Boston, very entrepreneurial as a kid. I, my, my mom was a small business owner and worked with a lot of small businesses. And so I don't know, just got driven by entrepreneurship from, from my early years, started my first business at age 11.

and that kind of carried on through, through high school and even into college. And by the time I was looking at college, I kind of. Knew that that's what I wanted to focus on, to kind of be an entrepreneur, at least study business and see where that goes. so I went to Babson College, which, you may know is, is very well regarded for its entrepreneurial studies program.

It kind of pioneered that as a field of academia and graduated in, in 2000, which was kind of the height, or maybe that should say the tail end of the first. com kind of bubble wave. and, was very interested in, in working. Somehow taking advantage of that going going into the space. and, I, I joined Lycos.

It was one of the early search engine web portals kind of pre Google. It was kind of one of the competitors alongside Yahoo and InfoSeek and AltaVista and Dogpile and a whole host of other names that, Probably other than Yahoo, no one even remembers anymore. but it was once, actually for, for one month it was actually the biggest Internet property in the world.

and I joined their in house M& A team, which was a great experience for, for a junior professional to get, you know, really absorbed into, into tech and startups and, and business models and what was viable, what was not, what scaled and, and what didn't. and, and learned a lot from that. also had the opportunity to work abroad as part of that job.

 Lycos actually was acquired at one point by a Spanish, telco, Telefonica, through their internet arm. And, I got to go work in Madrid and, and that really  lit a fire under me to kind of see if I could be more international in my career as well. You know, things did not go very well at Lycos after a certain point, and it kind of was time to leave.

as that whole sort of early dot com wave was crashing, and Google was eating everyone else's lunch that was in our space. rightly so. They had a better product, so why not?  But my other sort of interest since I was a kid, aside from sort of entrepreneurship, was actually the aviation and travel industry, having traveled a lot as a kid, and gotten exposed to that.

and my father had done some doctoral research around airline scheduling. So I kind of got interested in that. So I did it kind of an unusual pivot. while I had looked for jobs in VC coming out of Lycos, it wasn't a great time to get hired in that market. So I went to work for an airline instead, of all things.

but I got an analyst role doing route planning, at an airline that was  called America West at the time and has since merged its way into American Airlines. actually my first boss who hired me is now the CFO of American, so props to him.  That was kind of my first two sort of career moves, which seemed very different, but later would make a lot of sense in, in how they would come together.

 then went to business school, so went to HBS, in, in Boston, and then, decided to move to Europe after that.  Sort of a combination of personal and professional interests and living abroad went to Amsterdam joined McKinsey Actually worked in their airline practice. So focused on that for a while  stayed in Amsterdam for a good bit actually about seven years altogether and Led to me to actually booking.

com where I really wanted to combine my dual competing interests of travel And tech.  well, that was the perfect place to go because booking is obviously an incredible market leader, a very strong company in terms of product development, in terms of commercialization, and, and leadership and,  learned a lot while at booking just for a couple of years, in their headquarters in Amsterdam.

 and there I met a couple of guys who also shared my sort of entrepreneurial interests. And, we subsequently each decided to leave booking for. various reasons, but within sort of a short period of time of each other and we kind of put our heads together and we saw an opportunity around solving business travel.

We knew how many people were using booking dot com to make business bookings, even though the platform was really built. Primarily for consumers. and we saw a lot of other opportunities within that business travel space. so we decided to come together and start a company called travel perk. that was around end of 2014 beginning of 2015.

we did it from Barcelona. One of my co founders of the mayor. had sold his prior company called Hotel Ninjas to Booking, which is how I got to know him. and he basically agreed to join us if we would start the company in Barcelona. Our third co founder, Javier, was ready to pack his bags and move to Barcelona anyway.

so I, I decided to join them and start the company there. our initial model was not, What it is today. it was actually a model around helping companies incentivize their employees to save money when traveling for business. we did kind of a first MVP that was built around that. We spent a lot of time and effort building an algorithm for how to determine how much money someone should be spending based on company policies on their flights and hotels and everything.

and we took that to customers. it was based on another model of a startup company in the U. S. that had, had been doing something similar. but we were in Europe and this model was a little bit maybe too avant garde for the European market.  just, there were concerns of over gamification and, and, and other things.

And, but having taken that product to market, we learned a lot from the potential customers that we talked to, who said, this is interesting, but what we really need is, It's a better dashboard, better integration with our expense system. We need the ability of an office manager or PA to, to manage the, you know, the staff travel of their, of our employees.

and so we learned a lot about what the company, what companies do really need within a business travel, particularly for SMEs, at least as our go to market. And we decided that we would build something bigger, really a full on solution for business travel. and so that. Evolve Travel Park.  I was really only there in the early, early days, the first year and change, raised the first kind of seed round.

We raised about a million, dollars from, Local Globe was our primary institutional investor, but we had a number of great angel investors from the US, Europe, and Israel. and we sort of You know, pivoted early days with less than the first year,  realizing what we needed to do. then I stepped down.

I had some family issues. I needed to basically move back to the States. Avi, who had been the CTO, took over the CEO role. and, Javier continued, to be our, our CPO, and I left things in their hands. And, very shortly after I left, one of the initial conversations I developed with, with one of our investors, turned into a Series A, so Spark Capital from Boston.

Led our series a and things really kind of took off from there. so that was kind of a little bit of the, the travel perk journey, at least my part of, of the journey. but I, I resettled in Boston and took a little bit of time off. I started to explore some angel investing as well as some income investing, but basically doing my own thing.

and in that journey of, of, of travel. Personal investing. I discovered alumni ventures, which I had learned about was basically a venture capital firm for individual accredited investors rather than for institutional investors like, like pensions and endowments and traditional kind of LPs of venture capital firms.

So that was a more interesting entry point for me as a personal investor. And also I knew would give me a much more access and diversification than I could have just as a personal angel investor with my own, just kind of limited network and access. So I invested through one of the funds, the yard ventures fund, which is marketed toward the Harvard alumni community.

and within the first year there were two positive exits in the portfolio, which kind of raised my eyebrow like, well, this is something interesting here because that was, A lot faster than I was seeing returns on my own personal investments.  and so I got to know the team better. I joined the investment committee and that eventually led to an offer to come work at alumni.

so that was in 2019. think June of 19 is when I joined, originally part of that yard ventures team. And, subsequently over the years have, have kind of grown and, and now, managing partner leading our seed fund, which is a dedicated seed fund that we have, which is not marketed to any specific alumni community.

It's really just a fund for any individually accredited investor who's looking for a seed venture portfolio. And obviously happy, happy to talk more about what we're doing at alumni and the strategy of the fund and all that. But, I think that's kind of a brief overview. The only other thing I would add to that is, I've developed a really strong interest in, in investing.

for impact, meaning solving really big societal problems.  Everyone has their own definition of impact. Some people view it in a negative connotation, which I hope to overcome because I think everyone at their core believes there's something that's impactful that they would invest in. But, we don't specifically have an impact mandate, but I do very much believe in that type of investing, thinking about big problems.

and, and put that in a book that I published myself last year called Higher Purpose Venture Capital, which is really more of the story of 50 venture backed startups that are solving problems that, that relate to, social and wealth inequality and those types of large societal issues, but all backed by, by BC firms.

So, yeah, that, that's a little bit of a, maybe a little more than I wanted, intended to say, but hopefully that gives you an idea of who I am.  

It's a, it's a fantastic story. You've done world cramming. Such a colorful, and successful career into,  where are we probably, probably six minutes, but we're going to dive into a lot of the different things that you mentioned, throughout the rest of the podcast.

And, I mean, so, so let's just rewind all the way. So you were 11, you started your own business, and it actually continued for quite a few years. It wasn't just sort of selling apples to people who walked past, tell us about that early sort of, entrepreneurial journey.  

Yeah, so, like a lot of kids in the U.

S., I kind of got interested in baseball cards from a young age, I was interested in making money, not just trading cards for friends, so I, I sort of started that, but I never wanted to just do what everyone else was doing, so I actually organized like a show, like a, a trading card show for collectors to come and meet other vendors and, and buy and sell and, and all of that, and as I got into that business, where I discovered the, the real money making opportunity was actually to, to develop a niche in non sports trading cards.

cards of, of, you know, today it would be like Pokemon cards, but back then Pokemon wasn't a thing. This was like trading cards of, of TV shows and, characters and, you know, anything that's just not sports. And, and so non sports cards is a field in, in and of itself. I started buying and selling through mail order.

This was like pre internet, so I was doing mail order, I was going to shows, that sort of thing. And then I was organizing shows, so I organized the first ever non sport trading card show that was ever held in New England. of only a few that were ever done in the entire country, in fact. and so I realized I could actually make money doing that, both selling cards, because it was more of a niche  and organizing these shows.

And so I did that basically until my third year in college.  so probably 10 years altogether before it kind of ran its course for me in terms of what I was learning from it and how much I could really grow that kind of business. and things were evolving to by that point, eBay had come around and the market was changing and I was sort of.

Partially keeping up with that, but also partially kind of ready to move on to other things at that. 

Yeah, it's, but it's awesome. I mean, you know, it's, I want to explore the reasons behind the early,  sort of enterprising nature. And you said something that, stood out to me, which is that. You didn't just want to do what everyone else was doing.

And  I think about this a lot. And we,  at episode one, which is where I'm a partner, which is, seed and pre seed fund here in the UK, which, you know, we've, we've talked about previously, on other calls, but, We, we look a lot at people who've had very, sort of unusual career paths to being founder and who've,  you know, perhaps they've been,  you know, a professional musician or a professional sports man or woman, and then they've  gone into banking for some reason, and then they've become a startup founder and they like to jump out of planes in their free time, you know, and they've lived all around the world.

They've worked in different industries, you know, these kinds of things, and you clearly are. like that to some extent, and you talked about wanting to become more international, and I think it's, you know, we think of it as a really, well, we've discovered that it is.  this sort of iconoclast score, which is how we score people, that's what we call it, is highly correlated with success, among startup founders.

and I think it's, you know, people like this have proven that they  perhaps are open minded to different opportunities. They want to learn. Curious about the world and how things work. and they've proven, that no matter what they direct their energy at, they, they excel at.  and so I think it's a really strong signal of a great founder.

But I want, does, does any of that kind of resonate with you? Do you see that and listen to that and think that sort of represents you or perhaps the people that you back? 

Yeah, I really like the way you frame that.  I've sort of had those thoughts and, and didn't, haven't really articulated in quite that way, but, but I, I really respect and agree with that.

I mean, in myself, I obviously, You know, I'm one unique person. We're all unique and we all have interesting things about ourselves that we can share. I mean, I've, I've done things like travel to North Korea and Iran and, you know, places where, where most people would never think of taking a vacation. and I've flown on like 50 year old Soviet airplanes, as a hobby, as a passenger for, for fun and doing like, that, that's kind of my weird thing.

Like, like, so I, I kind of. 

Why? 

Yeah, that's what I was doing in North Korea. I was flying on 50 year old Tupolevs and  Ilyushin airplanes and things like that that aren't basically available anywhere else in the world, even in the former Soviet Union at this point for the most part. So,  you know, it's just kind of an interest. 

Yeah, what inspired you to do that? Yeah, I mean, it's kind 

of my aviation interest that goes back to childhood.  and it's like, what, what's the holy grail? Like what's really interesting for a real aviation enthusiast? Like, like anything else, there's a group of people who are like commercial aviation enthusiasts.

They don't necessarily work in the industry. They don't just love travel. They actually like the airplanes themselves, the history, the whole anthropology of the aviation industry, you name it. so there's a, you know, group of people for all these crazy interests. like that, and that's kind of one of mine, and there are organized tours for, for people like us that go in small groups of like 20 people to places like Iran, North Korea, Belarus, other places, where you can fly on these really old, rare Soviet planes, just because it's something very unusual that none of us have really done before, or we really appreciate how different it is from modern commercial travel and, and so forth.

So, yeah, kind of a neurosis, I guess, but, but that was kind of in me. So, you know. Anyway, that's just not, I'm not saying like I'm special. I'm great. I think we all kind of have that, but some of us are able to, I think, channel it more and actually put it to use. So some people just have ideas in their heads and other people act on them.

And I've always kind of been the person that acts on my crazy ideas. And I don't like jumping out of planes like that. That's the kind of risk taking I don't like to take. if it's like a physical body thing. but the experience of going somewhere to do something unusual, different, different, like. So that's part of the international thing.

I've been to 140 countries. I've been, when I lived in Europe, I was obsessed with visiting every European country and including all the tiny ones.  so that's kind of what's in me. And so, yeah, I, I think I do see that where when you really get to know entrepreneurs, you know, I find that a lot of them have something that really drives them some either very, very narrow area of expertise or some hobby or something that really. 

And it's not just like a thought, but it's, it's an action that they take. And, and the people that really act on it, you need to see people that, that put ideas into action. And I think that's kind of something that I recognize in what you're saying. 

 I wonder what, I want to explore a little bit more about what the difference is between  the people who have these curiosities and thoughts and the people who act on them, because, and I think like, There's a certain courage and a certain confidence that plays its part, but I wonder whether, you know,  the courage and confidence isn't the root cause, you know, the confidence and courage comes from somewhere.

So is it, do you think it comes from parents or, you know, people? formative early experiences or is it in your DNA or is it the people you found yourself hanging out with or is it something else I wonder have you ever kind of thought about thought about that 

yeah it's a really interesting question so it's that nature versus nurture and I think it's honestly a combination of all those things I mean I wouldn't have been a traveler if my Mom hadn't worked at a travel agency and my parents like traveling internationally and, you know, all those things that gave me exposure, to that.

So that's one thing. I mean, we're, we're very grateful those of us kind of in the West and, you know, more or less wealthy societies that have the opportunity to actually go places. We have to remember that most of the world doesn't even have the means to, to leave their own country at any point in their entire lifetime.

So we're, we're very fortunate. but we've been exposed to great things. I, I received, you know, a good quality education. Throughout my life. So I've learned about things and then I've I've been inspired by people. I'm I'm  You know, if I read books or watch movies, I like, I really like biopics and documentaries.

Like, I like understanding the psyche of people, what drives particularly successful people, be them, you know, political leaders or business leaders or, people who've done really interesting and innovative and unusual things, with their life.  though those stories always fascinate me and I gravitate toward them.

and I also always wonder what, what really drives them. And, and, It's very individual. I mean, you can have a group of siblings that grew up in the same house and have very, you know, wildly different personalities and interests and some people will be people who do stuff and others won't. So there's a little bit of it that that is, I think, really in the DNA.

And then that's, I think, complimented by what you get exposed to in life. And for me, like being, sort of getting interested in like the commercial aviation and learning about avgeeks and, you know, social media people and who are influencers in this field. And you, you see what other people are doing, like, Oh, they actually organize trips to North Korea.

So you can fly on these ancient Soviet planes. That's actually a thing. I want to do that. so, you know, I'm just, I'm just going to do it. And so, yeah,  

it's like, I mean, life's just this thing. Insanely complex web of cause and effect. And it's like, you know, trying to unpick any, any of it is, is really difficult.

And like, with the example of five siblings, some of whom go and be incredibly successful in their career. Other who, others who are successful in other areas. And, you know, what, what, what are the determining factors in each of those different successes or, or lacks of success are hard to unpick, but probably, you know, they could even, it doesn't have to be down to. 

single big life events. It can be a sort of accumulation of, micro factors that add together to just make someone so incredibly different from the next person who perceptibly had a similar start to life. You 

know, there's, there's so much serendipity in life. I mean, I could go back through my career and say like, if this one little thing hadn't happened, that wouldn't have led to this big thing in my life, you know, getting a certain job or You know, the timing had to be just right, or, you know, I happened to meet this person at this point point in time.

And it's sometimes a matter of just, you got to put yourself out there, do stuff, expose yourself. And when, someone knocks on the door with an opportunity, you need to listen and sometimes take advantage, even if it wasn't part of your life plan. I've had a little bit of career ADD.  To be honest, I mean, up until my current role at Alumni Ventures, I'd never been in any job for longer than two or three years.

and this is the first time I've actually been in a role longer because, you know, we can get into the reasons why I, I, I've stayed here longer and plan to stay longer. but I've, I've always had a need to kind of explore and take opportunities as they come up to, to grow and learn and do something new.

so that's what drives me, but a lot of other people are. You know, I would rather have the security of staying in the same job for a lifetime and never leave their hometown and all of that.  that's what makes the world tick, right? Everyone's a bit different. 

100%. Can you put your finger on,  single most important bit of serendipity you've experienced in your career? 

Yeah, that's,  a really interesting, question.   I would say  probably when I was looking to leave the M& A team at Lycos, that was around 2003. I really wanted to work in VC at that point. I kind of knew like this would, would be a really good fit for me. And I had a couple of interviews. They didn't work out for one reason or another.

and I went to work for an airline instead. And that was  great on so many levels. One, it scratched another, my other like competing curiosity, both personally and professionally.  Two, it gave me exposure to a whole different industry, a whole different type of work environment, other types of people.

And I can see that not everyone works like they do in a dot com company. There are also people that work in, you know, larger industries. And then three, like, eventually, it would merge together as I became kind of interested in travel technology and going into that field. And having had worked in both travel and tech in those silos, and then coming, Coming, bringing them together.

Like who has those kinds of experiences that seem totally disparate and make no sense in one way. But then eventually they, they come together and. I think people who've had those kinds of journeys that are able to bring together very different experiences, but, but then they make, like, a single story and make a lot of sense.

that's really lucky that, that I was able to do that. 

Yeah. You can always make the, you know, retrospectively, you can always make the story seem sort of coherent, but it's, it just, what blows my mind is the number of sliding doors moments. And  I think there's a strong argument that a successful person will be successful in one way or another, you know.

No matter which sliding, pretty much no matter which sliding doors slid and closed,  but just how different the range of outcomes could have been, I think, is, is, is crazy, but exactly,  you know, going back to the, this is when you're 11. I mean, you,  there's definitely an 11th extreme, right?

But, you know, when you're young, maybe even you're in your teens or your 20s, like that sort of youthful naivety is quite valuable as, as you kind of venture on into the world. And,  You know, even if you're a founder or whatever it is that you're doing,  so that, that accounts for something, but then also, you know, you know, a lot more now than you knew then through life experiences.

What, what would you, what advice would you give to your former self, based on what you now know?  

Yeah, that's a great question. I was kind of chuckling when you talked about night naivety, because yeah, I mean, everything I was doing back then, I, I kind of cringe at, if I look back, but I was, you know, even then I was taking advantage of opportunities.

Like there was like, A non sports card magazine, price guide, whatever at the time. And, you know, I wanted to get my, build my name, even when I was like 12 or 13 years old or whatever it was. And so I, I. Reached out to the editors of the magazine if I can contribute and they're like sure why don't you send us an article and if we like it, we'll, we'll use it and we'll pay you for it and then before I knew it I had like a monthly column in this magazine like I didn't even meet these like the editors of this magazine until like a couple years later while I was like clearly like probably 14 or 15 by then and And they're like, holy cow, how old are you?

And I'm like, we had no idea. We thought you were an adult. And, you know, so, you kind of, have to take advantage of these things. but, you know, in a way, I'm, I'm, I'm glad I can't, like, look back and give, give my younger self advice. I, I think in general, what, what I would, would have done is,  I had a lot of ideas in the early internet.

So I was around for, like, the early internet when things were just starting and people were just initiating the first, The first eBay, the first Amazon, the first, this, the first, that, and like, I had a lot of ideas too. And a lot of them were great and kind of ahead of their time. but you just don't know what you don't know.

Like, I wish I had maybe a little bit more in the way of technical skills because I never studied computer science or even really programming at any level. I was just very business and entrepreneurial oriented and figure well, I can partner with the tech people. But, if your plan is to do like a venture backable kind of tech scalable kind of business, I, I think just the main advice is just to really focus on, on the technology.

I wish I could have gone back because I could have invested or started, you know, a lot of these companies that did emerge as big companies, because we knew it was nascent and there was a big thing happening. And it's just a matter of taking advantage of it. but yeah, probably just honing in on, on, on sort of the tech skills from an earlier age would have done me well in life.

Yeah. I think about this a lot because through each kind of new wave of technology, you know, if it's the internet or now, perhaps if it's AI, then you get what, with hindsight look like such obvious ideas being built and executed on really well. And you have eBay and  some amazing companies being built. 

Airbnbs was a sort of marketplace, social, social networks, you know, and,  in hindsight, they are really, really obvious ideas and everyone's like, Hey, you know, I thought of that. Yeah. Do did those ideas seem really obvious to the founders of those kinds of businesses? And did it kind of seem inevitable that they'd be successful?

Because, you know, venture capital has always been a game of lots of losses. Like there are very rarely surefire bets. And so I wonder what that sort of mismatches of how obvious it seems in, in, in hindsight versus, you know, what it's like when you're actually there at the time of a new technology. 

Yeah, I think if you survey the founders of unicorns, IPOs, all of those things, to them, it was obvious.

But what about the 20 or 50 or 100 other people that were trying to do the same thing? Was it not obvious? Like, so I think the opportunity was obvious. And like everything, it comes down to execution, right? and, you know, there were a lot of competitors to Airbnb, a great example where, yeah, the idea does seem obvious.

And, but there were a lot of other people doing it too. But Airbnb was the one that was able to move fastest and build a name and eventually kind of absorb competitors or at least their markets. And, so, yeah, in some cases there's room for for more than one. sometimes it is obvious. But for us, like looking at travel, percolate, I mean, honestly, like, Our first idea seemed obvious, like why wouldn't you incentivize employees to, you know,  save money on business travel?

That seemed obvious to us, but, was not really what the market was ready for. So a lot of things are also mismatched with time. I still think that idea could work for, for many companies that we had it in the early days. but it, but it wasn't, Right for the timing. And so, you know, building a better business travel platform that was then the obvious move.

On the other hand, there are a lot of other people who have gone and tried and haven't done it for whatever reason. They just haven't built a good product. They haven't gone to market in a smart way. They didn't raise enough venture capital or funding in order to scale quickly. A lot of reasons why things go wrong.

But ultimately, it's, you know, there is a bit of a disconnect between the idea and the execution. And 

just a little bit further along. So take TravelPerk. It's the best example we can use. And it's an immensely successful company. I think it was valued at almost one and a half billion dollars in the last round, which was quite recent.

 at what point, if any, did it become obvious that it was going to be a roaring success? Like, did the flywheel just start spinning so fast it seemed unstoppable? Or is it an inherent successful founder trait that they always think the wheels are about to fly off and that it's about to break and it's fixing?

Each of those things and building, all the time that, that you find the real success. 

Yeah, it's great question. I mean, obviously it was our dream as three co founders that we would build this huge successful company addressing this big market. You know, it has the potential to be a unicorn and IPO.

Yeah. Whatever you want, you want to call it. We came from booking, which had an ethos of being a very successful market leader and, you know, excellence and kind of,  everything they were doing. So we had the expectations for ourselves, that it would be huge and successful and that it would eventually take off.

however, in the first year there was a lot of trial and error and MVP and getting the product right. and our first go to market plan was not the right plan. So we had to pivot early and then get our investors and advisors to buy in and, and set a new course. so I'd love to take a lot of credit for that, but honestly, I think I left the company before, it was really obvious that it would.

Take off as it has. and so I've been more observing, my co founders kind of, and their journey. and I did go back and visit a couple of times just to kind of see it. I haven't been back in a while to Barcelona, but, but had kind of watched it as it was, sort of starting to be on that journey.

but you could see like, it was so obvious that the, the market was huge. It just needed the right product and it needed to be marketed in the right way. And. and then there's plenty of market to be had. so, but yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's, it's an evolution. I'm not sure there's ever one single moment when you just know.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's easy. I think from the outside, it's easy to  look in and think, Oh, well, it's so obvious. And, you know, of course they were destined for success. But when you're on the inside, it's  Whether it's the case or not, it's almost never perceived by the founders to be the case. Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, it's interesting sort of mismatch there of perceptions.

And,  I want to,  move on to alumni, ventures because you now run,  I think it's the most active VC fund in the US. At the moment, and you do hundreds of deals each year and,  you know, do, do you still feel like a founder? I know you didn't fund Alumni Ventures, but you run it and you, it's run as a pretty entrepreneurial, operation.

So how does kind of, running a VC firm differ from founding and running a kind of more of a software company. 

Yeah, yeah. So, Alumni Ventures was started by our CEO, Mike Collins, who's had a long career as an entrepreneur and idea generator. has sold a company in the past. and, indeed, we sort of think of ourselves as a cross between a fintech and a money manager.

So, we are. Very entrepreneurial. we are always in growth mode. We are constantly experimenting trying new things. we are generating all kinds of ideas of how we can kind of grow our own business and serve different markets and what our own investment strategy should look like. And how do we do things efficiently?

but, you know, on the other hand, we're not per se a startup. We're sort of Funded. We do have external investors, as well, but we're not a traditional startup in terms of the kinds of companies that we fund in that sense. But we have grown quickly in our 10 years got started around 2014. I joined as an investor, I think around 2017.

And then as an employee, I think in 2019, you know, we've seen a lot of growth. We've seen a lot of Evolution, what we're doing started out is really a collection of funds that catered to university alumni communities. because there, there's a lot of value in the ecosystems of, of, university networks in the U.

S. from, from sort of top Ivy league schools to some larger state universities and so forth. But really, the mission is to work with any individual accredited investor. We don't mean to be exclusive in any way. It's sort of a a vehicle for us to get to market. and, yeah, indeed, I mean, in our years, we've evolved now for a couple years running.

PitchBook has ranked us the most active VC firm in North America, doing something around 250 deals every year. we also do follow on investments. we do that through something, we're very different from a lot of other VC firms. in that we are many micro funds under one umbrella. So think about a mutual fund family like a fidelity that has lots of unique funds under one umbrella that all have a unique portfolio, but within the same firm.

And so we all work together, even though some of us work on different funds, and some of the funds now are focused on sector strategy, healthcare, deep tech. AI, blockchain, et cetera. In my case, it's a stage focused fund with seed, but sector agnostic. and so different, different funds for different appetites.

we kind of are able to work at the volume that we do because we're only a co investor. we generally will. co invest. If there's a traditional well established VC firm that's leading the round, then we can look at joining as a co investor. So we're never looking to lead. We're also not taking board seats.

so that frees up the time for us to, you know, help work with individual investors that are looking to get into the VC asset class by building them well diversified venture portfolios. So we have many funds at any given time that are open for new investors. our seed fund closes at the end of this year, and then we'll have a new fund next year.

and then we have different funds that are on different cycles. so that's kind of how we work. It's a bit of a different flavor of venture capital, I guess. 

Yeah. Yeah. No, for sure. It's, it's a great model. And  I mean, I'm interested. So as a, as a follower fund, you know, there's a lot of competition for, for all funds out there.

Now there's a lot of funds who want to invest in the best companies. and only only so much allocation in each of those companies. So, it gets incredibly competitive.  how do you guys have you guys sort of continued to, Increase your value add or think about how you can get the allocation that you want and how you can help the companies that you back in that kind of very targeted, targeted, light touch way without having to be on the board or anything else like that.

Yeah, that that's important question and we have to do that. I mean, Our goal is to fight our way into the best deals possible. and you know, I, I sometimes use a quote from Groucho Marx who said, I wouldn't want to be a member of any club that would have someone like me as a member. So we, we want to get into the deals that we have to fight our way into, and that's really like the value for our investors.

and so. The question is, how do we do that? And of course, we build relationships directly with founders.  Every deal is a direct investment. We source ourselves. and a lot of things come on referral too, but we also have to build our network with other VCs and angel investors. And we have a super angel partner program.

We have Scout programs, et cetera, to try and have our tentacles out  as much as we can to as many opportunities as we can. And then hopefully cherry pick the best ones and fight our way into them. So our, our, our goal is really to be the world's most impactful co investor. So we will tell you upfront, we're not going to be on your board.

We'll tell you that on our first call. but we can add value in other ways and what we offer that's really unique and I think. differentiated is that we have this very large community because of particularly these university networks that we've tapped into. We have something around 650, 000 people that have opted into our community, that get our newsletters, that follow us on social media.

We publish a lot of content, we're constantly publishing blogs, doing webinars, that are informative. yeah, it's to get our name out there for sure, but it's also to inform people who may have never invested in the asset class before, who are interested in startups and innovation. Maybe they're not accredited today, but they hope to be, you know, next year or something.

and they're interested in eventually investing in venture capital. so we're, we put out a lot of content just to help educate folks on this space, and what our latest thoughts are on tech, on innovation, on startups, on venture funding and all of that. and really just. get our brand out.

But, but in terms of what value do we really bring to our portfolio companies? we've invested now in about 1400 companies.  we do have a CEO services arm. that's our, our way of offering support to our companies. It's our platform team. we have three dedicated people in our New York office, and they're here to help.

We have a whole menu of different offerings that we offer. of ways that we can be helpful from a portal that helps our CEOs connect with one another, to, facilitating warm introductions, always opt in, you know, double opt in kind of form introductions. We have an expert community that we can tap into.

So sometimes people aren't necessarily just looking for a sales lead, but they want expertise. They're looking to hire people, maybe an independent board member. we help with creating and distributing content. we do practice pitches for our founders that are maybe going from seed to series a, and they'll want to.

Do a practice pitch. so a whole bunch of things that we think are complimentary and don't overlap or get in the way of, of what the lead investor is doing. because we're, we're not part of those discussions, but we're, we're just, we're, we're kind of the, the, the happy uncle who's just kind of here to help.

That's our strategy. 

I like that. That's, that's, that's a good pitch to the happy uncle. but no, I mean, there's, you know, it's, it's a fantastic proposition and The great thing with the scale that you have is that all of these benefits accrue around sort of community and platform side that founders can take advantage of.

So it's great to see that we're, we're pretty much getting towards the end of  time. And so,  I want to, we have a couple of sort of standardized questions that we always like to ask. And,  one of them is, a future unicorn prediction. So ideally, something that's a pre seed or seed, that you think that you're really excited about, that you think  has great prospects.

Sure. Yeah. so, what we do in our seed fund is we tend to write a high volume of small checks. Our specific fund does like about a deal a week. and most of them are kind of flyer or scout type checks, 25, 50, sometimes a hundred K. Every once in a while, we get really deep conviction on something and we go all in.

We'll, we'll run a syndication, we'll use our opportunity fund that we have in alumni, and we just try to, like this one, This is the one. so for, for the, in the last year, so we did one investment in the last year that, that was actually over, you, you put in over two and a half million into as, as a late seed deal.

it's a company called LinCode, which uses AI, for quality inspection in, manufacturing. so it's,  a Michigan slash California based company, backed by Excel as the lead investor. where, they basically replaced traditional visual inspection systems for things like automotive, aerospace, even, even apparel, other industries where you, you really want to put out a product that's 100 percent to your quality, specifications, and the human eye doesn't always catch these things and, and current visual inspection technology, has not necessarily kept pace with, with the abilities of A.

I. and that's what they're doing. And they're working with some very big brand name companies. when we got involved, it was on the later end of seed, but still pre series a, where they had some, some already big, big name companies that they were, that they were working with, technology that was really compelling and, and, you know, backed by other terrific investors.

and this one was like, okay, now  this one is special. so I don't know if you, if you ask me today, one of my recent bets for, for a future unicorn, I'll, I'll, I'll go with the wind code.  

Awesome. Yeah. I mean when you get that instinct, which only comes around every so often, you have to, you have to listen to it.

 and the, the other question I want to ask you is, if you could have invite three people to dinner, dead or alive, who would they be? 

Yeah, well, probably won't be much fun having dinner with someone who's dead. So I'll, I'll, I'll 

bring them back,  

but,  yeah, so my, I guess I would, I would probably pick,  an investor I admire an entrepreneur that I admire and, and, and maybe a politician or a political leader.

That I admire and think I could have a really interesting conversation with and so these are all going to be, you know, well known names so probably no big shock on any of them and I think they probably all three of them know each other actually, but it would be Warren Buffett, Richard Branson and Barack Obama, so I just think.

Buffett at the end of the day, his whole life has been a master class in investing, regardless of what the asset is or what stage early, late. I happen to own Berkshire Hathaway stock and I have for a number of years and just really admire the man. And I also think he has great values. And I'd also love to have lunch with him because.

If there's any, any critique that I have, it's that I would, would like to see him do more on the philanthropic side, given his capabilities, and I think his family has done a lot, but, I think he's kind of delegated and outsourced a lot of that, but with his brain, I think he could, he, and he's still got good years left, as far as I know, even at, at his age, would, would love to talk to him about, about how to, how to put that, To good work.

Richard Branson, similar a man of great character, who's been an entrepreneur in many different industries, including aviation, as we talked about and consumer and using technology. And I just admire how he's been. kind of a renaissance entrepreneur, guy. and I've seen him speak but I've never met him in person.

you know, I, I think I, I learn a lot from him. And then finally, you know, Obama just is, I think it's just a worldly intellectual guy. I'm not, not saying I, I agree with, with everything he, he did as president or whatever. But, I think I would love to just pick his brain on so many different topics about the future of our country and the world and international affairs.

And I just think I'd have, I'd be thrilled to have a conversation with someone like that. 

That'd be an amazing dinner. I think it'd be a really, it'd be quite a wholesome dinner. I don't feel like anyone there's trying to be the loudest voice in the room.  everyone's going to be good listeners as well as have a lot, a lot of interesting stuff to say.

So I think it's amazing dinner and, hopefully some great food to go with.  Ron, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on. We've, we've covered, so much ground and, we've gone deep in a few areas and sort of found a psyche stuff and talking about your experiences as founder and as an investor, you know, such success in both areas.

So it's been a real privilege to chat. 

Yeah, thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity. It's been a fun conversation. I think we've gone a little bit deeper than I sometimes do on my personal background on, on this conversation, but it's been fun and I hope it's been interesting and informative for your listeners.

And, know, if anyone wants to reach out, you know, please feel free. You can always find me on LinkedIn or wherever else.  Thanks. All right. Take care. 

    That's it for this week Thanks very much for listening To stay up to date with the latest episodes, please follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform We also have a newsletter called reading unicorns which is another great way to get every episode direct to your inbox Please tell your friends about it and engage with us on social media