Investing in Tomorrow: The Seed Fund Overview

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• Where is the transcript for this webinar?

  Speaker 1:
  Great, and as folks continue to join, get started, just have to mention a quick little disclaimer here. This presentation is for information purposes only and is not intended as an offer to sell securities or the solicitation of an offer to buy securities. If you are interested in our full disclosures, please visit avfunds.com/disclosures.

  So, our agenda for today: our plan is to take about 45 minutes and give you a little bit of an introduction on who we are, tell you a little bit about venture capital as an asset class. Some of you may already be familiar or already investors in the asset class, but we’ll just do a quick recap and perhaps an introduction for those of you for whom this might be something new.

  We’ll give you an overview of Alumni Ventures and our firm, and then we’ll dive into the Seed Fund—specifically what we invest in, our strategy, some of the things we’ve invested in the past, and our plan for our current fund, which is actually going to be our eighth fund from the Alumni Ventures Seed team.

  So, we can go ahead and do a little bit of a personal introduction here so you know who the three of us are that you’re going to be seeing today. My name is Ron Levin. I’m Managing Partner, proud to be leading the Seed team here at Alumni Ventures. I’ve been with Alumni for about five and a half years, previously with our Yard Ventures team, which is a fund associated with the Harvard alumni community.

  Our Seed Fund, by the way, to preempt any questions, is not affiliated with any sort of alumni network. I know that’s largely what Alumni Ventures is known for, but we’re essentially a venture capital firm for all individual accredited investors regardless of any alumni affiliation, and the Seed Fund is agnostic toward any alumni connection specifically.

  When I joined the Yard team back in 2019, it was after having already been an investor myself personally with Alumni, having been in the funds going back to around 2017. I had some early success in the first portfolio that I invested in and got very interested in what we were doing.

  I started doing some of my own angel investing and discovered that Alumni Ventures was something a little bit above and beyond angel investing. I joined the investment committee, and that led to the opportunity to come work here full time.

  I joined Alumni having previously been Co-Founder and CEO of a travel technology company, an enterprise SaaS business based in Barcelona called TravelPerk, which I started with two of my colleagues that I had previously worked with at booking.com over in Europe. We saw an opportunity in the enterprise travel market and decided to go after it. I was there pretty early, helped raise the first capital for the fund to get the idea going through its initial phases of MVP (the first phase of our product and first customers), and then left somewhat early on due to some family reasons. I decided to move back from Europe to Boston, where I’m based now, and resettle here.

  TravelPerk today went from about 10 people when I left to 2,000 people today and is actually a unicorn valued at about a billion and a half. So, I’m proud to see one of my co-founders still leading the company now, but I really enjoy being a venture investor. The pivot for me made a lot of sense because I love working with entrepreneurs. I love learning about new ideas across many different sectors. So, transitioning into venture capital made a lot of sense for me personally.

  I’ve also previously been a consultant with McKinsey, so I’ve had that kind of corporate strategy experience. I’ve had a number of corporate roles and began my career in the first dot-com wave around 2000 when I was with Lycos, which was one of the early search engine portals before Google came along and kind of took over that whole market. I had the opportunity to work abroad as well, having lived in four European cities and traveled extensively.

  I’m very passionate about the intersection of venture capital, startups, and impact. While our fund does not specifically have an impact-focused mandate, I like investing in companies that are solving very large societal problems. I don’t believe that there’s any trade-off in doing well by doing good, but we can certainly talk more about that later.

  I authored a book last year called Higher Purpose Venture Capital, which is a little bit of a misnomer—it’s really a book about entrepreneurs and founders of companies that have raised venture capital, solving big problems and are also backed by VC.

  That’s a little bit on me—I don’t want to bore you too long, but let me hand it over. I’ll go from the East Coast to the West Coast. Mira is in Menlo Park—take it away.

  Speaker 2:
  Thanks, Ron. Yeah, it’s great to be here with everyone. My name is Mira Oak. As Ron mentioned, I’m based out in the San Francisco Bay Area and I’ve been with Alumni Ventures for a little over four years now, initially starting with our Green D team due to my Dartmouth Tuck affiliation. Several years ago, I transitioned to focusing on pre-seed and seed opportunities with the fund, so thrilled to be here.

  Prior to venture, I worked at Yale University for many years, initially in finance working with the endowment finance team and later transitioning to strategy and operations for the university. I led everything from M&A to broad-based tech implementations for the university, including a big ERP migration and a lot of business intelligence tooling.

  But the punchline is I saw a B2B SaaS wave coming for a 300-year-old institution, and I wanted to be a part of it. So, I transitioned toward a venture studio based in New York, where I had a chance to both incubate and invest in early-stage companies in the New York ecosystem, largely in enterprise SaaS.

  I joined Alumni Ventures shortly after business school to again focus on the early-stage ecosystem, especially in California. With that, I’ll pass it off to Jason.

  Speaker 3:
  Awesome, thank you. And thank you all for joining us today. My name is Jason Bird and I’m an Associate here on the Seed Fund at Alumni Ventures. I’ve been with AV for about two and a half years now. Before joining the Seed Fund, I was actually on the Harvard Fund alongside Ron, which is Yard Ventures. I got some good experience sourcing and investing in early-stage and growth startups while I was there.

  Prior to VC, I graduated from Babson College, where I studied entrepreneurship and finance. As a little extra bit on myself, some industries that I’m very passionate about are the gaming and real estate technology sectors. So, that’s me.

  Speaker 1:
  Thanks, Jason. Thanks, Mira.

  So, venture capital—venture capital is what’s called an alternative asset class. An alternative asset is essentially something that’s outside of, say, the stock market or something that most people are familiar with if not already invested in.

  Why an alternative asset? These are assets that are a little bit less known but tend to have a strong risk-return profile. Venture capital as an asset class has outperformed public market comparables over many different periods of time. If you look at 5-, 15-, 25-year periods, it’s an asset class that tends to do very well.

  It’s uncorrelated with public markets. That can be a good or a bad thing, but generally, it’s a way of diversifying a portfolio. A great deal of value is created in private markets. If I were given a choice, I’d prefer to invest in a company before it goes public. Once it’s public, all the information is out there, and it’s very easy for any investor who’s in the stock market to get in on something. But it’s a lot more difficult when you’re investing in the private markets, and that can be a good thing because you have access to invest in opportunities that have considerable upside.

  Companies like Facebook or Google already generated billions of dollars in value before they even went public. So, those early venture investors really saw some quite substantial returns as a result.

  We believe in a well-diversified venture portfolio. That’s what’s needed because it’s very difficult for an angel investor to just get a one-off. Of course, if you do one or two angel investments, you could always get extremely lucky, but this is a business that’s based on something called the power law. Out of a well-diversified portfolio of, call it, 50 investments, you might have two or three that actually end up returning the value of the entire portfolio—and then some—because they can get really significant multiples on the initial investment if you invest early enough at a low enough valuation.

  Sometimes those big winners will make up for what is inevitably the risk in the portfolio, because some of these companies will not end up succeeding or will generate only minimal returns. But there is the potential of at least a couple of the companies to generate something quite significant, and that’s typically how venture capital firms are able to generate these outsized returns through that sort of power law concept.

  If you’re interested in that, there’s actually a book called The Power Law which goes into that in detail.

  As far as Alumni Ventures is concerned, we’ve been around for about 10 years now. Over 10,000 individual accredited investors from largely the U.S. but also from across the world have invested with us into at least one of our funds.

  We are America’s largest venture firm for individual investors. We were also the most active venture capital firm in the country for the last two years. That’s according to PitchBook, which follows our industry probably more closely than anyone. They keep all the data on venture and private market investments and have seen that our level of activity has put us at the pinnacle of the industry.

  Since 2014, we have raised over $1.3 billion in capital and deployed capital across more than 1,400 companies. There are very few venture capital firms—certainly those that have been around for the time we have—that have deployed into that many companies. We are a substantial organization with a headquarters in Manchester, New Hampshire, investment teams in Boston, New York, Chicago, and Menlo Park, and 40 full-time investors backed up by 80 other teammates.

  Speaker 1:
  We were also privileged this year not just to be recognized for the volume of deals that we do, but for the quality of deals that we do. We’ve been ranked as one of the top 20 venture firms in the country by CB Insights, which is a very prominent, respected market research firm. They’ve looked across many categories of venture investments, examining venture performance and deal access. We’ll go into a little bit more detail on how we do this, but the headline is that we are among the top 20 venture firms.

  If you look at this list, you’d probably recognize many of these names and see that these really are the biggest names in our industry. And as we’ll explain, it’s not by accident that we’re performing among these top firms in terms of the deals we’re getting access to and the results we’re seeing.

  As a result, we are the only one of these 20 venture firms that specifically cater to individual accredited investors. For some of these other firms, if you would like to become an investor, you cannot, because they already have their investors and they limit the size of their funds, leaving no access to them. For others, you may be able to get access, but it is probably not with less than, call it, five, 10, or 15 million dollars. It could vary, of course, and be different for each fund, but many of these funds do have very significant requirements.

  They tend to raise money from large institutional limited partners, which are usually university endowments, large pension funds, corporations, or family offices of extremely high-net-worth individuals. So, it typically takes a very significant check to gain access to most of these funds.

  We are different. We are in the process of democratizing venture capital and ensuring that the asset class is available to any individual accredited investor who is interested in diversifying their portfolio through venture capital.

  As I mentioned, the asset class has typically outperformed benchmarks. The Russell 2000 is a good benchmark for small-cap companies, and the asset class has done very well compared to it. In particular, Alumni Ventures has performed in the top quartile across our historical vintages because, as we’ll explain further, our model is to co-invest alongside leading venture capital firms—those performing in this top quartile of investments within VC.

  We’ll certainly talk more about it, but the ultimate point of VC is that there is risk and uncertainty. Any particular company could fail, and it’s not always clear how long it will take to get a return on investment. Some companies could take a couple of years, others five, 10, or more years to reach a liquidity event and return capital to shareholders.

  So, there’s some uncertainty and a lack of liquidity—the money is tied up for a while. But what you get in return for that, historically, has been a return that outperforms other traditional investments such as public equities. That’s why we think it’s a worthwhile investment for at least part of your portfolio. We don’t argue that this should make up your entire portfolio of investments, but for some portion where you have a little more risk tolerance and a longer-term horizon, we think the venture capital asset class makes a lot of sense.

  With that, we can turn a little bit more into how we do things here, and I’ll turn it over to Mira.

  Speaker 2:
  Awesome, thanks Ron. Yeah, as Ron mentioned, we’ve again received praise for both the quantity and quality of our investments. So, of course, it begs the question of how we get access to these great investments.

  Ron already touched on how our 10,000-person LP base has trusted Alumni Ventures with their venture investing. That foundation has really enabled Alumni Ventures to grow materially. We now have over 750,000 community members and 120 employees across the U.S.

  Through that network and foundation, we’ve employed a network-driven approach to securing opportunities to invest in high-potential companies. This approach not only allows us to access really strong founders and companies but also ensures that we can support them with the capabilities our network offers.

  From all of our personal experiences working with our platform team, we’ve seen how the sheer scale of our community can support companies—from customer introductions to BD opportunities, hiring, and even more. This reinforces a virtuous cycle of not only investing in high-potential companies but also supporting them throughout their journey, ensuring we have opportunities to follow on in future rounds and maintain strong credibility in the ecosystem.

  This approach is how we’ve secured over 1,400 founders and companies in our portfolio, and we know we’re just getting started.

  With that, we can move on to how we vet these deals. Beyond Ron, Jason, and myself, we have about 40 investment professionals at Alumni Ventures, all of whom have broad networks and investing expertise. You’ve already heard some diversity on this stage alone, and that’s just a slice of our broader team.

  As a team, we receive an incredible amount of deal flow across all stages and sectors, and we use a highly rigorous and selective process to determine which companies come into the portfolio. By leveraging both our expertise and tapping into our broader community, we ensure we’re putting the best companies into a highly diversified portfolio for you all.

  Now, let’s move to a critical step of our diligence process, which, as Ron mentioned, is our co-investment strategy.

  When we evaluate a company, we spend time unpacking a founder’s background, the market opportunity, how differentiated the product is—and that’s just a short list of our full diligence process. A critical component of that process is understanding who the lead investor is and why that fund and partner, in particular, are best positioned to lead a company’s growth round or funding round.

  As part of the Seed team, I’m thrilled to share that we co-invest alongside many of the top-performing funds Ron mentioned earlier. These funds have been lauded for their historical performance, so we’re thrilled to be in such a great company.

  With that, we can turn to the next slide, which zooms out a bit to talk about the climate of venture investing.

  What you’re seeing on this graph illustrates a very attractive climate for venture investing. The data here is pulled from PitchBook, the most trusted source of private market intelligence. PitchBook leverages deal-level data to quantify how startup-friendly or investor-friendly the capital-raising environment is.

  That’s important because it incorporates deal terms, fundraising ease for founders, and other deal flow data markers to make that determination. Over the past year or so, we’ve entered a market that is much more favorable to investors than at any other time in the past decade.

  Speaker 2:
  When we look back historically, investing during periods like this has yielded incredibly attractive returns. That’s partly because valuations are coming down. We have the opportunity to invest in companies at a lower price point, which means the appreciation and opportunity are even larger than we could have anticipated.

  It’s something to bear in mind as you consider investing as part of this vintage. We always encourage investing with time diversification as well, so you can reap the benefits of this investor-friendly environment.

  With that, we can flip to the next slide, which touches on diversification. Within the Seed portfolio of about 35 to 55 deals, we bring you diversification by sector, geography, and lead investor. Many of our investors choose to reinvest in each fund vintage because this type of diversification helps minimize risk and maximize opportunities for return.

  This is also something we achieve through our geographic reach—with me in San Francisco and Ron and Jason in Boston, we’re able to span the U.S. This is further amplified by our Super Angel network, which we’ll delve into later with Jason. It’s a great way of surfacing the best opportunities across a broad spectrum of sectors that we pull into the portfolio.

  With that, I’ll officially hand it off to Jason to touch on our Seed Fund.

  Speaker 3:
  Awesome, thank you Mira. Diving a little deeper into what the Seed Fund is: it’s a fund here at Alumni Ventures that invests in pre-seed and seed-stage companies offering innovative technology or business models in growing markets.

  We typically invest in 35 to 55 deals over a span of 12 to 18 months. As mentioned before, these are diversified by sector, geography, and lead investors. We aim to secure pro-rata rights on all our investments and always reserve about 25% of each fund for follow-on opportunities. The minimum investment in this fund is about $25,000.

  In addition to this, we’ve offered access to syndication deals, which are individual opportunities for our LPs to invest directly into top-notch or high-potential deals that come across our plate at that time.

  Next slide, please.

  Why have a Seed Fund? These are real, difference-making opportunities. Ron touched on this earlier, but while many startups may not survive—and are not expected to survive—those that do succeed can provide significant returns.

  Early-stage venture averages actually have higher returns of about 22% compared to later-stage investments, which are around 12%. This can be a good complement to your portfolio. Seed funds offer high-risk, high-reward opportunities that fit well within an already diversified portfolio.

  This stage has lower capital requirements. You can afford to make many more investments since the minimums and valuations are at their lowest. There’s still continuous venture interest in this area. While venture funding overall has dipped in recent years, seed funding and valuations have been much more resilient.

  It also provides depth and breadth. Our fund is diversified across sectors, regions, and lead investors, investing in about 35 to 55 companies, providing wide exposure to potential opportunities. Ultimately, you’re getting more shots on goal—this broad diversification increases your chances of capturing top-performing companies.

  Next slide, please.

  Investing in the AV Seed Fund means backing innovative, scalable, early-stage tech ventures that solve big problems in large markets while partnering with promising founders and established pre-seed and seed VC firms.

  At this early stage, valuations are reasonable, and the potential upside is substantial. With large reserves, we’re well-positioned to invest additional capital into companies that show breakout potential.

  Ron mentioned earlier the concept of the power law, which states that a few winners in a large, diversified portfolio can return the entire fund. Because we’re getting in very early and are involved in so many opportunities, we’re positioned to capture those returns.

  Next slide, please.

  Shifting gears to something Mira mentioned earlier—one of the ways we source many of our deals is through our Super Angel Partner Program. We launched this back in 2023. It supports our Seed Fund by partnering with experienced angels to source early-stage deals.

  As always, we focus on pre-Series A companies with moonshot potential, strong founders, and innovative technology for large markets. Since launching this program, we’ve signed on about 40-plus Super Angels—actually closer to 50 now—and have completed over 30 investments referred by them.

  These deals span multiple industries such as FinTech, SaaS, digital health, biotech, and many geographies including North America and Europe. We continue to seek global opportunities.

  Next slide, please.

  Diving into some of the deals we’ve made, I’ll kick us off by highlighting Grata, which you’ll see all the way to the right.

  Grata is a B2B search engine that helps private equity, sales, and marketing teams find and target private companies. We invested in their seed round back in April of 2021, co-investing alongside Bling Capital, who led the round.

  At the time of investment, we were very impressed with the strong investment syndicate surrounding the company, the fact that the founders had already bootstrapped it up to about $1.4 million in revenue, and that their technology was extremely unique in the market.

  Grata has done very well since our original investment, raising a $25 million Series A led by Kraft Ventures, in which AV also participated. We’ll continue to track this one, putting more dollars to work as the company continues to grow.

  With that, I’ll pass it over to Ron to talk about MTech.

  Speaker 1:
  Sure, thanks Jason. I’ll mention one other company on this slide—MTech. This is a company we’ve gotten to know over a couple of years before deciding to invest.

  Sometimes it takes time to really understand a founder and their technology and get comfortable with it. MTech was one of those companies. We met them probably a year before we actually invested.

  It’s an impressive founder based in New York, but the company serves emerging markets. It provides financial technology infrastructure that helps central banks—primarily in emerging countries from Africa to the Caribbean and elsewhere—connect with emerging FinTech players like neobanks.

  If you follow this market, a neobank is essentially a new type of virtual bank that works with customers who have traditionally been underserved by capital and credit from traditional banks. In many of these countries, not everyone has credit or can get a credit card or borrow money when they need to.

  Speaker 1:
  These emerging FinTech companies are able to find creative, innovative ways of serving new customers—both individuals and small businesses. But these FinTech companies that are serving them need to have a way to connect to the central bank because of currency reasons, fund transfers, and all kinds of other reasons.

  There needs to be an infrastructure layer—APIs that connect between these government institutions and the banks that are actually operating in the market and providing capital to individuals and businesses at the grassroots level.

  MTech has made impressive progress, both in terms of developing product moats—a very strong, defensible product that has now been adopted by numerous governments of emerging market countries primarily. They’ve been backed by several venture capital firms, most notably Matrix Partners, which we consider to be one of the elite venture firms in our industry.

  They’ve made great strides. The company was even recently profiled in a Harvard Business School case study. It continues to do extraordinarily well and, in fact, very recently received some additional strategic capital from Accenture, which invested into the space. That gave us a nice uplift on our initial investment.

  So, we already have a return after just one year. It’s a theoretical return in that we haven’t sold any shares yet, but at least we know that the company is heading in the right direction, and we’re very confident and excited about the future prospects at MTech.

  That’s just one example out of obviously many, but I’ll let Mira talk about one more company as well.

  Speaker 2:
  Yeah, if you could switch to the next slide, Amanda, that’d be great. Awesome.

  Just for some diversity—but also a really exciting company in our portfolio—is Inspira Education on your far left. Inspira is a managed marketplace for higher education services, helping parents and students connect with leading education counselors around the world.

  I’m not sure how many parents or students are in the audience right now, but it’s probably no surprise that the U.S. market opportunity for admissions counseling and test preparation is, I think, north of $30 billion in the past year.

  What Inspira is positioned to do is ensure that parents and students—if they’re interested and willing—can connect with counselors to support their admissions process to undergrad, as well as graduate education. They’ll have the tools and personnel necessary to help smooth that process.

  What really impressed us—again, maybe like MTech, this was a long-game effort—we had known the founders for almost a year prior to investing. But what stood out was really strong, capital-efficient growth.

  The company secured almost $1.7 million in revenue with no capital raise and no marketing spend at all, which really speaks to the viral and sticky nature of the product. We were thrilled to invest in the company alongside Craft Ventures in 2022 and are really pleased to say that the company secured a Series A round earlier this year—that’s not yet public.

  So, we’re excited to see where this company goes from here. With that, we can flip to the next slide.

  Speaker 1:
  Great. Just on that last point—we didn’t want to go through too many companies, not to bore you. It was really just a matter of giving you some examples. But we are extremely diversified in the sectors that we cover.

  From traditional enterprise software, FinTech, and education tech, to consumer, marketplaces, deep technology like space technology, healthcare, and life sciences—really anything that venture touches.

  We are diversified by design. That’s our role.

  Just a couple of examples of testimonials on the investor side: I think our investors really appreciate access. Our job is to work our way into deals that are very hard to gain access to.

  There’s a quote from Groucho Marx, the old-time comedian—he said, “I wouldn’t want to be a member of any club that would have someone like me as a member.” I sometimes think that our goal is to get into deals where they don’t really even need our money, but we try to come in and prove our value, our worth, and our ability to gain access to the best deals—deals that individual investors very rarely have access to.

  The access we provide to investors is very powerful, as is our diversification. We’re able to cover so many different sectors because our network is so vast. I individually don’t necessarily need to be an expert in every sector, but we certainly have people within our team and broader community who can help us evaluate a deal in almost any sector you could imagine.

  We get all kinds of incredible insights that let us build a well-diversified portfolio.

  From the portfolio founder side—why they like having us involved—it’s the value we bring.

  A lot of that comes from our network and community. Actually, something like 650,000 people subscribe to our newsletters or follow us on social media. We publish a lot of content aimed at helping educate people about technology, innovation, startups, venture capital, and so forth.

  We also have thousands of experts in our community who can help work with our portfolio companies in many different ways.

  We have a dedicated team in our New York office—what’s called a “platform team” in our industry, or “CEO Services.” Their role is to add value and answer the requests of our founders.

  We don’t take board seats, so we’re not flying around the country serving on boards. We’re really appreciative and respectful of the VC firms that do that, but our role is to co-invest alongside those funds.

  That allows us to focus on sourcing and diligence to get into the best deals we can and also to provide value in many different ways. Our portfolio founders have been really impressed that we offer something quite differentiated from what most VC firms can do.

  We can go to the next one.

  Speaker 1:
  Just a little bit on investing with us: the range of investment starts with a minimum of $25,000. You can invest up to $3 million if you’re looking to put more money to work, or anything in between.

  We work with folks who can invest using cash or retirement funds. We also make it easy for international investors to invest with us, so you don’t have to worry about U.S. taxes if you are not a U.S. citizen or resident.

  Our management fee is a 2% annual fee for the 10-year life of the fund. I’ll cover a little more on fees later, but we do collect the entire amount upfront, just to be aware. So, if you are investing $50,000, the entire amount is called at once—one single capital call. We’re not going to come after you for additional fees later.

  It’s a 10-year fund—that’s our expected lifecycle. But there may be situations where not every company in the portfolio has had an exit event (such as an IPO or M&A activity) within those 10 years. In that case, we will continue managing the fund and the companies in the portfolio until they do have an exit event, however long that takes. There will be no additional fees charged beyond the initial 10-year period.

  We do distribute returns. When a company has liquidity—generally through an IPO or a sale—we will distribute the capital within 45 days. You’ll receive a check or an ACH payment from us after you’ve recovered your entire investment into the fund.

  There’s also something called carried interest. Our incentive fee for getting into the best possible deals is 20% carried interest. So, 80% of the profits—once you’ve received your entire initial investment back—goes to you, and the other 20% goes to us.

  As I mentioned, there’s just a single capital call and no further fees, even if it goes beyond 10 years.

  It’s also important to note that you may use a 401(k) retirement account. Our investor relations team will be happy to help you with that and answer any questions. We have partners who help facilitate that process.

  Next slide, please.

  Something you may not be aware of—which is really one of the incredible things about investing in venture capital—is something called QSBS (Qualified Small Business Stock).

  This is a law in the United States that allows for capital gains tax exemption from investing in private companies. Not every company qualifies, but most of them—at least most U.S.-registered companies that are Delaware C Corps, which is the vast majority—will be eligible for QSBS. This allows up to $10 million of capital gains to actually be exempt from taxes.

  This is a huge deal and not necessarily well known if you’ve never invested in this asset class before. But those of us who work in the industry are very well aware of it, and it’s absolutely a motivating factor for taking the risk of investing in early-stage startup companies. It just increases the upside significantly if you know that a substantial portion, if not all, of that return may be exempt from capital gains tax.

  We’re happy to provide more information—you’re welcome to Google it. It may sound too good to be true, but it is a reality and something many of our investors can take advantage of.

  One more note on fees: we do offer opportunities for administrative fee reductions.

  The first is based on committed capital. If you decide to invest at least $500,000 with us—which could be in one of our funds, multiple funds, or a combination of funds plus syndications—we apply fee reductions.

  We didn’t get too deep into our syndications, but we regularly share opportunities for investors to invest into a single deal that we find extremely attractive and where we’ve secured enough capital to share it. You’re under no obligation to invest in these deals, but if you find them appealing, you can put capital directly into a single company.

  You do need to invest in at least one of our funds before gaining access to syndications.

  In any case, the total amount of capital you invest with Alumni Ventures counts toward these fee-reduction tiers. Starting at $500,000 and progressively increasing at higher levels, we reduce our fees accordingly.

  In addition, we have some timely fee reductions specifically related to our Seed Fund. If you commit early, there’s an additional fee break:

  • First close (October 31): 10% reduction in admin fee

  • Commit by November 30: 5% reduction in admin fee

  • Final close: December 31

  You can fund the investment after these deadlines, but if you commit and sign documents by these dates, you receive the fee reduction.

  This helps us because we can better plan the fund and know how much capital we’ll have to deploy sooner, so we’re happy to pass along savings to investors who commit early.

  I should also mention that I personally, as head of the fund, invest my own personal capital on the same terms as every other investor. I believe it’s important to show I have my own skin in the game alongside you. That’s how I got started with Alumni Ventures—investing personally before I joined—and I continue to invest my own capital in the Alumni Ventures Seed Fund.

  Speaker 2:
  Awesome. To bring it home a bit, you’ve probably heard a recurring theme about time diversification.

  We believe that consistently allocating to venture capital can really help build long-term wealth through compounding returns. By reinvesting proceeds, investors and our broader LP base can achieve exponential growth from that building return base.

  Similar to dollar-cost averaging, making regular annual investments provides time diversification, reduces risk, and increases your chance of capturing periods of high growth.

  As I mentioned earlier, we’re currently in a very investor-friendly environment. Sticking to an annual investment plan can also lead to a self-sustaining venture portfolio over time, and Alumni Ventures is well-positioned to support you along that journey.

  If you could turn to the next slide—as part of that, we have a new investor onboarding process in which new investors at Alumni Ventures are assigned an account manager. This person serves as your first call for anything you might need as an investor.

  Speaker 2:
  They can assist you with any administrative questions or needs. And in collaboration with Ron, Jason, and myself, we can make sure you know what’s in your portfolio and how it’s performing.

  I’m thrilled to highlight our colleagues Stephanie and Hillary in that effort.

  And if you could turn to the last slide—last but certainly not least—we have our senior partners Stacy, Dan, and Darren here to assist you as you make the decision to invest in Seed Fund VIII.

  If you’re interested in viewing fund materials, please visit av.vc/seed or reach out to [email protected].

  I should also note our lovely investor relations colleague, Amanda, is here to support you all in that process.

  With that, I think this concludes our webinar for the day. Thank you so much for joining us, and we hope to hear from you soon.

  Thank you.

  Speaker 3:
  Thank—

  Speaker 2:
  You.