Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Lewis Hower, Executive Director, University Impact Fund (Part 2)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: How many employees do you have?

Lewis: We have one principal; his name is Patrick Mullen. The beauty of our model is that the rest of our employees are actually university students whom we bring into our program.

So, our system and structure is very similar to what you’d see at an existing venture firm in that we bring you on as an analyst or intern – using the words interchangeably – and we put you through a boot camp series of trainings and really drive home our model.

And [our model] is best learned by our instantly staffing you to deal teams, where you’re working with associates and senior associates who are, again, students who have been with program for at least about a year. In some cases, [it’s] up to as much as two years or more when they’re senior associates leading deal teams. So, we staff the deal teams with a wide variety of experience levels as well as expertise in different sectors, depending on what it is that we’re working on.

Other than me and the one principal, all the other “employees” are students.

Irina: Do they get paid?

Lewis: No, they do not. We do offer some fellowship and scholarship support, but it is technically an unpaid internship.

Irina: Do they get academic credit for that?

Lewis: No. They can go through a special program if they want to get academic credit, but most of them do not. They see this as a better learning opportunity than they’re going to get anywhere else, and they see the value in being a part of our program.

So, we get students – undergrad and graduate level – ranging from juniors, on the undergraduate level, all the way up to second-year MBAs.

We’ve had folks who have come through the program who have been in medical school, who are getting their PhDs in science and economics.

We are both major and degree-level agnostic, and really what we look for are students who have not only the ability but the desire to be a part of a program where it’s not just another classroom-based situation.

Irina: How many students, at any given time, get involved?

Lewis: Right now we’re in the early stages. We have about eight students involved in the University Impact Fund. Once it gets to full size, at any given time, there are usually about 25-30 students who are on staff.

Irina: What is your affiliation with the universities?

Lewis: Our affiliation with the universities is that we are a sponsored program of the university. We work closely with the Eccles School of Business and their its, Taylor Randall, who is a member of our board and a strong supporter of what we’re doing.

We also use resources, again, from the other institutions that are involved in this collaboration. We do trainings for the students. Occasionally we’ll use university resources, such as research and things of that nature if it’s relevant to a specific project. But really, it’s seen that we are an opportunity [to learn] for all the students involved as long as they can qualify and we select them for the program.

We also have initial grant funding from the universities just to get us off the ground. But then we will we will be a sustainable and fully self-sufficient organization.

We work with two main categories. First are entrepreneurs who are in the social and environmental space; these are highly qualified entrepreneurs who usually get recommended or referred to us by some of the folks within our network or some of the other strategic partners that we have, whether they be some of these investment funds or other organizations.

We work with the entrepreneur and facilitate things such as market research, competitive analysis, and financial modeling to help that entrepreneur’s business to become better.

We facilitate that, again, with teams of students working closely with that entrepreneur to help develop some current element of his or her business model.

The other group of organizations that we work with are funders in the impact investing space, some of the different investment funds, foundations, family offices, and high net worth individuals.

Predominantly what happens is we end up doing a lot of the due diligence on certain deals that they’re looking at or certain elements of due diligence that they need help with or need assistance with heavy lifting. We provide those services to them to facilitate the flow of capital into the space.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Lewis Hower, Executive Director, University Impact Fund
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