Sky Fernandes 3:02
Well, yeah, got that. Thank you. Yeah, so we launched VU venture partners about four years ago, with a goal really of how to disrupt the overall venture capital asset class and allow ourselves to really be a helpful center of the ecosystem for the entire industry. So the fund itself is a kind of seed series, a focus fund, where we make investments of about 200,000 to a million dollars, we’re pretty actively investing. So we do about 20 investments a year, we now have a little over 70 portfolio companies. We are a generalist fund. So we invest in everything from consumer to the more frontier oriented things. Internally, we have six deal sourcing teams. So each of them have their own vertical expertise. We have our consumer team and our enterprise team, which are super generalist teams. And then we have our FinTech team, our frontier team, our healthcare team, and our real estate prop tech team. So really pretty much cover everything unique about kind of our fund, really is the scale that we’ve built. So we probably have the largest investment fund by number of investors and the number of deals that we source and evaluate. So we operate in three core locations. With headquarters, we have San Francisco, New York and Hong Kong, we have 70 investors on our team, and we source and evaluate about 20,000 companies a year, so about a 10 times larger seed series, a fund by number of investors and about the average VC sources about two to 3000 years. So we’re about 20,000. So our goal is to really be building out the top quality venture portfolio. In the we’re hyper picking, we only invest in about point 1% versus the average Fund invests in about 1% of deals. And we’re really leveraging the experience that myself my two partners have about 45 years of venture experience where we’ve been some of the earliest and largest investors now and about 17 unicorns, where we’re coming in at the very early stages for those companies.
Jeremy Weisz 4:58
Yeah, when I was on Your site, the other day view ventures, venture partners that come, you know, looking at your team page and it kept scrolling like you have all these different teams and same thing on the portfolio. Usually the sites I go to they’ll have like a section. But when I go to the site, there’s consumer and you have like law champs and fan controlled Football League, and then you have, you know, enterprise and then you have, you know, the the FinTech and blockchain. So you cover a lot of categories here. Talk about starting the company, how’d you know your partner? And what made you decide to start the company?
Sky Fernandes 5:35
Yeah, great, great question. So really, I’ve been doing venture capital now for close to 15 years. And the goal is, if I if I wanted to go and launch my own fund, I really wanted to do something that was differentiated for the ecosystem, but also really benefiting the ecosystem. So the idea of the view itself comes from Venture University. So we created an investor accelerator, tied with a venture fund to give us this scalability. So people do venture University for three to 12 months. And so the idea to get about five years ago was could we do something that would disrupt education plus disrupt the venture industry, as I pitched the concept to my partner, Andrew, who Andrew has been doing venture for about 25 years, he was one of the original partners at rd ventures, one of the top performing venture funds on the East Coast. And people have been wanting Andrew to launch another fund for a while. And so I met up with him in San Francisco on Market Street at a cafe and pitching the concept. I said, if we execute this, we will become a really helpful industry player and it will be helping to create the top talent for the industry. And we’ll also be creating a way to create consistent and outperformance on financial returns for our investors with this really kind of innovative approach of merging an investor accelerator concept with a venture fund. And he loved it and his wife actually tells the story best when he went home, he had a little smirk on his face and she goes why you smile like that. He goes, I think I found that thing I want to do for the rest of my life. And And so really, it was like it was amazing to get Andrew onto the team Andrews obviously background is notable, has, you know 100% plus net IRR for the last like 25 years early investor in companies like Facebook, Uber, Twitter Venmo. And then about two years later, looking to expand internationally. We then launched our Hong Kong office and ended up meeting up with James James amazing background as well previously at Coachella ventures, and then at soft banks China Fund and then was a co founder of formation eight now ABC, notably kind of created by Joe Lonsdale who’s early kind of incubator of Palantir and wish. And again, Gideon, who’s the former CFO of YouTube and Facebook. And so, so James, awesome background experience, early investors and companies like Oculus, which Palantir Oscar. And so it’s amazing having really strong partners, for each of our core geographies, you know, for Hong Kong being James, me and Andrew doing the US is just really amazing to have partners, each of us kind of having our own solid experiences where we’ve been investors where every fun we’ve ever done, we’ve at least been able to get one or more companies that have returned the entire fund. And, and just being able to also learn from those case studies, we bring a lot of those case studies into the venture university curriculum that we’ve created as well. And probably the thing that is looking back just in the last four years now, probably the thing I’m the most happy about is that we’ve achieved, really a view family, the fact that the view of family now extends to 500 plus alumni, and a really tight knit community of people working in other funds, launching other funds, and that’d be your family has probably been the most special thing where we really created something bigger than ourselves and something that’s helping others pursue their future careers, as well as helping the overall industry finding great talent,
Jeremy Weisz 9:02
sky, you know, I want to just say this genius, and any any company listening to this should think about how do you create an education and training program that has built in it, you know, helps the ecosystem but it also, there’s a built in staffing that you’re training up to contact you. Right? And that’s, that’s really smart. It’s very meta, that you were pitching a VC about starting a VC fund. I’m wondering, you know, you’ve heard 1000s, maybe 10s of 1000s of pitches via email or in person, and then you were giving one, what did you do incorporate into that when you were telling about it? And then I’m also wondering, what do you look for in when someone’s pitching you?
Sky Fernandes 9:51
Yeah, I think what, I guess looking back on the last 15 years of doing VC, I would have to say that it’s largely weighted And towards market size, opportunity, and how extraordinary The opportunity is in terms of magnitude of improvements. I think, you know, now I’ve done now close about 160 170. Investments, the bar for me of what I get excited about consistently goes up. And we do a lot of fireside chats at fire at VU. And a consistent question I asked is like, what would you also tell like your younger self as a VC? Consistently? The answer is, I’d have a higher bar of what extraordinary is when I make investments. And I think that’s very true. So I certainly don’t have an itch to scratch to like, make another investment, I do have a passion for just going after the largest possible disruptive market opportunities. So something that we actually spend a lot of time teaching at VA disability and investment thesis is, is how do you actually go after something where the market size is truly large. And understanding that spectrum, like high level numbers, the difference between a company worth 100 million, and a trillion, which we now have a handful of companies worth over a trillion is about a 10,000 times difference being worth 100 million versus a trillion. And that is a huge spectrum of potential exit valuations. And that’s largely driven by the actual market size of the opportunity you can go after. So having a higher bar for what actually is a big market size is a big one that we that we focus on. Team also matters. And I think team is certainly the the NBA answer that many people often have. I think team is probably a really good answer, if you’re in private equity, where the company is already doing great. And, and basically, it’s like, don’t screw up, when it’s a situation like don’t screw up. I think team matters a lot. But when you’re actually on the venture side and startup side, I think you need a solid team. But I think the the people that execute really, really well, while they execute well, I don’t think the difference in humans execution capabilities is 10,000 times different. And so I think the weight for me actually goes a lot more towards market size opportunity than team you want to have, you know, in a team and a market. But there’s enough I think data now that I’ve been supported by that shows that you can even have a big team going after a market and end up with a much, much bigger exit than if you had an A team going after a B market where you just you can’t grow into a big enough market to get a venture return.
Jeremy Weisz 12:17
It’s got to you know, I think of it kind of in the in the baseball realm like if you are batting 300, you you get three hits out of 10. You’re a Hall of Famer, a insane thing in your world that you can’t be right 100% of the time. Where’s something that you underestimated the market size where you said, Oh, they came in? And you know, you’ve hit a lot of home runs. But there’s also singles are also out there. What was something that looking back like? Yeah, the market size is bigger than I suspected.
Sky Fernandes 12:49
There’s a smaller smaller than you expected? Yeah, I would say,
Jeremy Weisz 12:54
I mean, either or someone came in, like that’s not a good one. And they actually ended up being bigger or
Sky Fernandes 12:59
being bigger than I thought interesting. I’m not sure I have any good examples of where the market was a lot bigger than I expected it to be. I think what I’ve learned earlier in my career was where I overestimated the ability of having really high market penetration in smaller markets and thinking that I could win that way. It was almost trading like to fight against my general just going after a really big market. But sometimes, if you do go after smaller markets, you hope that you can get a greater than a 1% market penetration and, and that obviously can obviously not be true. Good example, I have theirs I invested in a company that rents bridesmaid dresses. We idea that, you know with people, men can rent tuxedos, why can’t you rent bridesmaid dresses because they’re not usually the best looking, they’re expensive and you were the ones you should totally be overrun bridesmaid dresses. And when you do the market size calculation, there’s about 2.2 million weddings a year, relatively stable number of weddings, there’s not like a significant increase or decrease in the number of weddings traditionally. Except maybe COVID actually curious to see how much the number of weddings decreased maybe during COVID. But they they may be continued to happen virtually. But roughly 2.2 million weddings a year average is about five to six bridesmaids per wedding, which gives you a market size of about 11 or so million bridesmaids to sell to and the thinking there was if you you know selling renting a dress for you know $120 You can get to a market size of you know about 100 million or so, which is 70, which is not big enough to really get to really our target is usually a minimum of a $10 billion market size. And so we we definitely had hopes that maybe they had like a 10% or 20% market penetration and because the market wasn’t actually significantly big being able to just generated initially large amount of revenues was top. And I guess that’s really I guess the big driver of why market size is so important is the bigger the market, the easier it is to start getting to, you know, bigger revenues sooner rather than just hoping for big market penetration. But looking back on that one that was I really liked the concept. And I think I might have been more passionate about the concept than I was should have been on rationalizing the the opportunities lives,
Jeremy Weisz 15:25
do some of those, of course like that, when you say that everyone’s like, Oh, yeah, that’s, that’s, of course, that makes perfect sense. Do any of those type of companies that maybe do they go into other markets to expand like, you know, and that like prom dress, I mean, I’m just thinking of things, what’s right,
Sky Fernandes 15:44
company, they were planning to expand more into the wedding category of doing wedding gifts and, you know, other props that you can have at weddings, to have incremental revenue. But though, because that’s another fly, I would say an adventure is, you should be investing in what the company can execute today, if you have too much faith that you’re betting on what the future the company will eventually develop into. I’d rather invest in a company that’s actually gotten the business model now that can be successful and not require could be a cherry on top and not require the future business model to actually happen to make it a success.
Jeremy Weisz 16:20
Yeah, yeah, totally. Talk about Bear Flag robotics. And from the beginning, what you you know, what was the the pitch or what you saw, and then what happened?
Sky Fernandes 16:32
That’s a little used to level senators background on what Bear Flag robotics is. So it’s an autonomous driving tractor that doesn’t have a human driving the tractor, so basically allows it to drive significantly longer at all hours. But can the overall increase the number of turnover of crops. And so we had looked into the robotics space for autonomous driving for a while, I was actually early friends with Kyle, the founder of cruise automation. And it actually ended up being a very similar story to Cruz and in many respects, on outcome. But we looked at the fact that the future is becoming autonomous, and we look for, the things that will probably get replaced by autonomy are going to be the lowest skills of labor first, and it’ll kind of move upstream to more and more higher skills. And driving is certainly one of the lowest skill sets that the one can have a car, probably the next hardest one would be like cleaning. Because you have to be a little more detailed and finessed in what you’re actually cleaning. If you had like a robot cleaning like hotel bathrooms, probably orders of magnitude more complicated than just driving around the streets. Tractors are great, because they go slow. There were nobody is walking, there’s no other vehicles. So it’s actually an easier commercialization problem to solve for than even cruise automation, self driving cars. So we liked the opportunity we were not expecting for as early of an exit. As that happened, we ended up investing in about 14 months later, Bear Bear flags was required by John Deere, the big tractor company, for about 250 million, we came in at about a $27 million dollar valuation. So we made just shy of a 10x. There’s a little red around a 9x. For us, obviously, phenomenal opportunity. But from a from a key study perspective, I guess it’s a really insightful one because it shows also why again, market can matter even more than traction. At that time, Bear Flag robotics, had no revenue, they were pre revenue, they were basically just in pilot mode of doing a few pilots. And they were going out to raise their Series A, which was going to be a 25 million series A and roughly a 125. Post. And John Deere basically said hey, how about we just acquire you for two times your upcoming series a valuation that we just call it a deal from an opportunity cost? That’s usually the clearing price. It’s actually a very good data point for founders to remember is that oftentimes if you are looking to sell yourself and you’re going after big market, oftentimes to x, your upcoming like post money valuation is frequently a clearing price. The previous investors would be happy with in our case, we’re getting a 9x within 14 months, and nobody said no to that acquisition, and the founders had to contemplate is it worth going after a $500 billion exit? Are we really happy with 250 and was actually great about that deal with venture University. Our cohort eight invested in venture University, as our accordion invested in in verified robotics. And we have a profit sharing agreement for those that participate in v where they get upside in the deals that we do, and bear flags and of returning about a third of the program cost of doing venture University which is awesome, and they still have all the other deals in their portfolio to get upside from. But that story pretty much panned out very similar to how cruise automation panned out. have crews had, you know, been around for about 1824 months, was going out to raise 100 million series A at about a 500 foreign and fit was 14 7500 post, GM came in and said how about we value for $1,000,000,000.02 times the upcoming series a valuation. And ultimately, that’s the reason why cruise and bear flags got acquired for what they did had nothing to do with revenue traction. I’m sure the teams are certainly amazing Kylie cruises amazing, the founder of bear flags is amazing. But if it wasn’t actually going after such as super large market opportunity, those exits would have been a lot smaller, they would have been more like Acme hires for you know, $10 million, or something at best. And so again, really focusing on going after truly disruptive market opportunities that get you a magnitude of provement. That’s more than just an iteration but truly actually leapfrogging ahead when it comes to cost savings. And and optionality.
Jeremy Weisz 20:55
There’s two questions I have Skye. And obviously that’s, that’s pretty remarkable that people who are involved in venture debt university can participate in that. So I want you to talk about that. And, and who’s a fit for that? And how do they they join that? But how does a company like Bear Flag robotics? How did they come up with that $25 million valuation? And even when they come up with a valuation, you have to, you know, investors have to say, oh, yeah, that’s good. Right. And this is, especially before they this is pre revenue. So how did they come up? Or what do you look at to assess? Yeah, that’s fair, because they have no revenue.
Sky Fernandes 21:34
And we certainly teach this in greater detail at VU as well. Really, when you’re when you’re talking about how financing valuations are done, in general, is initially anchored based on the investors target ownership of what what do they feel, is an ownership that they need to get their required return for doing the investment, that’s ultimately what it comes down to, it does not have to do necessarily with any current traction, nor market size. In the beginning, it really is just from what I think I could make on this investment overall, I back into what I think the valuation should be. And so typically, we’re looking for a 10x return as a minimum. And I stress that as a truly, as a minimum, most of our investments are between about a 10x 100x return. And so from basic math, if you’re going to say, hey, I want to raise $2 million, for my seed round, well, if I come in at a $10 million post, with a, you know, for 20% ownership, then in order for me to get a 10x. Initially, you might think that that’s $100 million exit to go from 10 million to 100 million. But that’s only true if you never have to raise capital. Again, assuming that there’s going to be multiple rounds of financing as you need more and more capital to grow bigger, we assume that there’s probably going to be at least two to three more rounds of financing before an exit depending on the stage or we’re coming at the seed stage, we assume that there’s going to be three more rounds of financing at least, if we’re coming at the Series A round, we assume there’s at least going to be two more rounds of financing before an exit. And so assuming that each round, on average, historically, kind of precede seed and Series A, they average at around 20% ownership for companies that are raising 18 month runways, if you’re raising like 24 month runway is oftentimes ownership can be like 25%, or 30%. But the average then, like Series car ownership historically has been around 15%. Series D is kind of that 10%. And so we factor all that in to say, Okay, if we’re coming in for a $2 million seed, if we come in at a $10 million POST and GET 20%, the company doesn’t need to exit 100 million, they really need to exit at 200 million. Because after three rounds of dilution, after your initial round, your ownership is divided in half, which is another good bullet point to kind of our golden point to remember three rounds of dilution, basically, Hatcher ownership. So if we’re starting off at 10%, ownership, three rounds of dilution at 20%, we have 5%. And we need you know, then double the exit size to get a 10x. So from that, that logic, you can see that, you know, 10 actually needs a $200 million exit with bear flags. Same example, when we initially invested, we came into the $27 million valuation. Knowing that from if the company never raised any other round of capital, we’d get a 10x at around $250 million valuation. But the market size was big enough to be able to support potentially an exit significantly greater that if they raise more money and continue to grow. And so you know, fast forward a $250 million exits Ltd what happened in 14 months, but had they gone out to raise a $25 million round, which which actually they were they’re already out in the market raising 25 million at 125. Post again, a 20% ownership even for the series A that that point, the company would then have to exit north of about 500 million for probably those initial investors to be hitting the initial target of what they’re looking for.
Jeremy Weisz 25:00
Yeah, you really have to be a numbers person with this. Because when you you’re looking at the market size and then kind of backing into those numbers, you’re not even saying Oh, John Deere might acquire them someday you’re looking at the full market size. And then you know, if the market size is there, then those companies acquire them will be there to
Sky Fernandes 25:19
actually a good point on that. Yeah. So you’re looking at certainly what is the total market size of like tractors that can be used by bear flags, we’re also we are looking at who the potential acquirers could be. And we’re looking at their market valuation. So I think John Deere is worth about 40 billion or so. So if you’re worth 40 billion, could you buy a company for a billion dollars for 1/40 100%, because you buy it for two or $3 billion, I’d say it’s such a huge point, you know, importance to John Deere is future, you could probably pay 5 billion 10 billion. You just look what happened with cruise automation with GM buying it Cruise is now worth about a third of GM is valuation. So extremely important to future companies like that. And so we kind of you benchmark, what you think is realistic, if if the biggest company in the industry was only worth, you know, 10 billion, my outcome of what could is possible might differ really kind of them saying this might require an IPO and there might not be a lot of great potential acquires and so you really have to go for something that has IPO potential that can be ultimately the company that acquires other companies and gets so big that no other company can acquire it.
Jeremy Weisz 26:25
Yeah, yeah, I think of poker when you’re talking about this, which is like, if you have, you know, 789, you have two outs, or 789. You know, you have two outs, maybe you have like all clubs and seven, eight nines, you could get a flush, and you could also get a straight. So you’re looking at both things here is like, how the highest percentage of of odds of success here. And there’s a couple of different pathways to that. And I have two last questions, Scott, I don’t know if you have to jump off right at the hour, respectful of your time, but I do you, I do want to go into venture dot University, and how that works. Because, you know, people can get into venture University, if you allow them in and they can participate in these things. It’s pretty remarkable. So talk about venture that university and who’s a fit to go there and and how’s it worked.
Sky Fernandes 27:17
So far, it’s really designed for people that are interested in learning more about venture capital and private equity. And even more so people that want to pursue that as a career. If you were to go to a top business school, like Harvard Business School, or Stanford or Wharton, your probability of breaking into VC NP is probably better than if you went to a lower ranked MBA program. But even if you went to a top MBA program, you’re not guaranteed work experience, you’re still praying during the summer that you get a job. And so I think what we’ve now proven out with our model, is we have a really high success rate for people that have graduated within 12 months about a 64% of our alumni have now gone into venture capital and private equity. So a much higher success than even going into a top MBA program. The real if you think about the target demographic, it’s relatively broad, you have people that are looking to break into VC, NP, from the analyst, associate principal and partner level, you have people that are looking to launch their own fund. So emerging fund managers, you have family offices, and Angel investors that are looking at professionalizing, their direct investment strategies, or becoming LPs and funds. And so it really is a on on kind of stage of life is pretty broad. Every cohort, which is roughly about 50 people in the US and Europe, we have a goal of really hitting around 25% for every 10 years of age, so people that are in their 20s 30s 40s and 50s. So it’s not a program just for people that are coming out of college or MBA, that’s actually the minority of people. It really is a full spectrum of, you know, covering about four decades of life. And people bring a lot of, you know, people that have been working for 20 years, they bring a big network and a big amount of expertise and being able to source deals do due diligence. And and that’s what you’re looking for, obviously, when you’re when you’re trying to make great investments. The other thing I would say is that we have a big focus on diversity. So are one of our recent cohorts. We had about 40% of the court were women, and about a third were underrepresented minorities. So we’re also significantly moving the needle when it comes to what the face looks like of of the venture capital private equity industry. And we’re creating a pool of talent that is successfully being hired by the industry as well. And that’s creating this network effect of the kind of the view family where people are now working in other funds as an example just last week, one of our alumni is now working at Sony’s Innovation Fund, and another person is a partner at a fund backed by a large Asian corporate system. only being an Asian background. And in this big Asian corporate, I was able to connect to people across two different cohorts that are now working in the industry. And there was a big value in doing that. So there’s a huge long tail value that people have from being part of the EU, we also just started really taking off alumni events, where every quarter we do an alumni event, bringing together we’d have little over 500 alumni. And so that quarterly events, getting to cut the touch base with your cohort members, previous go have members, incoming cohort members, builds this really wonderful long tail of helping to find future job opportunities, future investments to make sure that you can stay top of your game and performing really strong within your within your career overall.
Jeremy Weisz 30:44
And people can go to venture dot University, check it out, and you have to apply and there’s different dates of cohorts. What’s the most common questions you get with it? Is it you know, do people ask about time commitment?
Sky Fernandes 30:58
Often people are curious about is this like an internship. And I’d kind of share that it’s completely unlike an internship in so many ways. The real goal of Venture University was to build a very structured academic curriculum. So you have a master class and advanced modules, you wouldn’t typically have kind of a really robust academic curriculum with an internship and to, from the working experience that you’re getting is a much more senior elevated and intense experience. With an internship, you might be doing a lot of kind of BS work of filling out PowerPoints and excel sheets, your probability as an intern to bring a deal to a partner’s meeting is pretty low, your probability of bringing a deal to like the Investment Committee also extremely low, and VU, you take a much more senior role. So you get to decide what deals are brought to the partner meetings, what deals are ultimately brought to the Investment Committee and then voting on the Investment Committee, and you get a piece of the upside. And so it’s again, a much more, you know, intense experience, where you get a much higher quality investment experience out of it. And outcome, I would also say as a lot higher as well, given the stats that we’ve had over the last four years. So the the apprenticeship is definitely one where we spend a lot of time working with everyone on developing them. So you have a people that are really dedicated the rest of your life to making sure that you’re successful in your career. I guess another another common question we get is whether they can do it part time or full time. You know, given the future of how COVID is affected things, people can join in virtually people can do it in person in our San Francisco office or in person in our Hong Kong office. And we have a growing number of people that are now coming back doing it in person. And you can also do it part time and full time. The program is designed where it can it can take over your entire life and you get a ton of out of it. You can also do it part time and get a lot out of it as well. But the more you can put in the greater value, anything will usually be. But we did design it for flexibility for both part time and full time individuals.
Jeremy Weisz 32:59
Nice. Thank you. Yeah, that’s adventure that university. Sky constantly
Sky Fernandes 33:05
talk about that. But yeah, fine when we have it, Constantine is coming up. For another follow on round for us. The this will you know, we’ve already been invested in the company for the last, I think now three years. Contra line is a male birth control, which is a fun and controversial topic, but one that is very much supported by if we really do want equality, it’s hard to argue against male birth control. And it’s one where there’s a lot of different approaches that companies have have looked at doing. We’re a big fan of the Contra line approach. It’s a non hormonal option. So we’re women have the pill, obviously doing a pill for men. There’s a hormonal aspect, which would take way longer to go through FDA approval, who knows the effects that would happen 510 years down the road with any kind of effects to your hormones. So we in general, when we were looking at the market, we didn’t want to go after anything that was a hormonal solution. The other options that men currently have are abstinence, which isn’t all that much fun. You have condoms, and you have the SEC dummies and vasectomy is or snipping doesn’t have a great visualization either, but it seems a
Jeremy Weisz 34:20
permanent lazing your vas deferens does not sound pleasurable.
Sky Fernandes 34:23
Oh Exactly. So the idea that you can have a reversible vasectomy is is quite novel. And if you take a step back and just look at the the market size for for Concha line right now, the SEC Dummies is about a 500,000 market, which is actually not very big 500,000 men and it’s very narrowly on men usually in their late 30s, early 40s After having two kids I think maybe I should get a vasectomy. But, but the idea of a reversible vasectomy. You open up the market significantly to people that are in their late teens, you know 70 80 his old, the market size, just as acute, hugely expanded with a reversible option. And the way that it works is it’s an injection of a hydrogel takes about 1520 minutes, and it hardens, and it basically blocks sperm coming out of the vast difference. And the nice thing about it too, from a, an approval perspective, the sector knees have been long approved for a long time. This is just a reversible version of that. So we think that the FDA approval will go relatively smoothly and fast. And hopefully, we’ll get to market relatively soon I have, I have two young boys that are three, you know, two and three, five and six years old. And they are, I’m hoping in the future, by the time they go to college, this becomes an option for them. It would be nice to have that. But again, it all goes back to them providing additional responsibility for men, not just women to to be responsible for the reproductive future of humans, and really, really excited about that opportunity. And we do have that one coming up. It’s one of my more favorite portfolio companies. Given I think there’s a real a social, big benefit that comes out of it, but also just a massive market opportunity as well.
Jeremy Weisz 36:11
Yeah, that’s fascinating sky and I don’t want to get too deep into science. If you don’t know this. I’m just curious when you say that I picture, you know, it hardens around it blocks it. Is there like an antidote? Or they inject an antidote and like the gel dissolves or something?
Sky Fernandes 36:28
Yeah. So yeah, great, great question. So it’s similar to an IUD for women. So women have the other option than a pill is they can have an IUD that lasts a year, two years, three years, four years. This is designed the hydrogel that’s able to dissolve over time. And it kind of has a rapid dissolving mechanism after a certain period of time. So same thing, if guys want to have don’t want to have the worry of having a kid for a while, you can go for 1234 years, but it can be reversed as well.
Jeremy Weisz 36:57
So maybe automatically reverses and then you’ll have to get another injection at some point in the future. So
Sky Fernandes 37:02
exactly if I got time, but it’s very much kind of the equivalent for almost an IUD for men who have got it.
Jeremy Weisz 37:08
So Skye, last question here. And thank you. First of all, I want to point everyone to Vuventurepartners.com, check out more Venture.university learn more. And we’ve talked about founder Fitz and some of the things you look for who’s a fit, we talked about, you know, venture at university, some of the training you’re doing, but we haven’t talked about it, there’s so many moving pieces with your business. And one of the things you do is you are also raising funds alongside this as you get more opportunities. So talk about that, who’s a fit? And what do you look for as far as raising funds? So yeah,
Sky Fernandes 37:43
thank you for asking that. Yeah, so so we have both our investor syndicate and we have our committed fund. Our investor Syndicate is for angel investors that want to invest $5,000 is a minimum into companies. And so people can go to Vuventurepartners.com and sign up, there’s no cost to joining, it’s completely free. And you’ll start receiving the deals that we’re investing in on a quarterly basis, we do a you’ll receive probably about five to seven or so deals a quarter, knowing that we’ve vetted them out of you know, 1000s of opportunities about 20,000 a year that we look at, and their deals that we’re putting our own capital into as well. So we only share deals that were put to investing our own capital. Really high quality deals, co investing with a lot of other top tier funds, always shooting for that kind of 10x 200x return. So for angel investors, you know, they’re accredited investors, family offices, definitely a good fit for them if they’re looking to, to find a platform where they can invest on a deal by deal basis. And then we also just kicked off raising fun to which we just did our first close on a few weeks ago, and we’re continuing to go out to to raise the remaining of it, there’ll be $100 million fund that’s really targeted for for investors that are looking to put a deploy large amount of capital minimum checks of at 500,000. And so it really depends on deal by deal or if you’re looking for a committed fund approach. We certainly have both of those. And we also train everyone that goes to view kind of the the way that to grow their own Syndicate is the way this to grow their own committed funds. We use those as two great case studies in the approach for how we’re going about that. Really impressed our our results so far have been fantastic. We were actually just doing a an IRR update for ourselves, but a 72% IRR so far for our funds, which puts us in roughly top decile when you look at the overall asset class, especially for our kind of 2018 Vintage when we started. So really, really proud of the proving out that the model itself is working. We’ve proven that we can have a model that that scales is able to really achieve something that no one has ever done before and be able to evaluate a much larger part of the market to narrow down to truly the best investments happening in the venture asset. Class
Jeremy Weisz 40:00
no Sky I want to be the first one to thank you I could talk to you all day in your company by company portfolio because it’s really fascinating everyone can check out Vuventurepartners.com Venture.University and more episodes of inspiredinsider.com and Sky thank you so much. Thank you Thanks everyone.
