By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: Do the partners participate in your conference calls with entrepreneurs? Lewis: It depends on the situation. Typically, if we’re working just for the entrepreneur and helping him, it’s just with the entrepreneur. If it’s working with one of the funding organizations, a lot of times the
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: So, what’s your return target? Dave: I think 10x to 20x is the ideal target. Obviously, if we get more than that, that’s great. But that’s probably not the typical scenario. In most cases things don’t work and usually we get zero. I think we have
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: Have you made any investments already? Lewis: No, we have not made any investments, yet, out of the University Impact Fund. Irina: If an entrepreneur heard about your program and want to get in touch with you, what is the best way to reach you? Lewis:
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Irina: Do you hold any events for entrepreneurs? Dave: Actually, I put on a decent-sized 300- to 500-person conference on a quarterly basis. I also run a lot of user groups and events, meetings, and dinners. We’re running one called Warm Gun, a conference about design and
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Lewis: Going forward, our model is that we will continue to have students. We are a student program and will be for as long as we’re around. We do that same type of project work but typically we will end up working more with the investment funds
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Dave: We are a little bit different from many other programs where the advisors are primarily coming from the investor category. In our world, those are mostly coming from the operational field category. Most of our mentors are coming from engineering, marketing, or design backgrounds, maybe product
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
By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold This is the thirty-first interview in our series on financing for entrepreneurs. I am talking to Lewis Hower, executive director of University Impact Fund, which bills itself as the first student-run social impact seed financing organization for entrepreneurs that intends to deliver a return to its investors.