On a Monday evening in mid-March, Toni Oloko walked into the Harvard Square offices of General Catalyst Partners, a venture capital firm that has put up millions to back companies like Kayak, Snapchat, and Rue La La.
The 18-year-old entrepreneur and his cofounder, Harvard freshman Matt Neary, fiddled with their MacBook as they prepared to pitch PracticeGigs, a smartphone app that finds tennis partners for players seeking to improve their game. If they seemed oddly calm, it was because they weren’t seeking millions from the fund’s partners. Instead, they were pitching to a panel of their peers — in search of cash, yes, but also access to a growing network supportive of Boston’s student startups.
Every Monday throughout the academic year, General Catalyst opens its doors to Greater Boston college entrepreneurs who are hoping to find funding for their nascent ideas. But the firm’s partners aren’t the ones doling out the dollars. Instead, General Catalyst has created a minor league offshoot, Rough Draft Ventures, and recruited students to serve as talent scouts, determining whether a company has promise.
Student team members, from left, Frank Wang, Alex Freeman, Lisa Wang, Merrill Lutsky and Jennifer Zhang review a pitch at the weekly Rough Draft Ventures meeting. (Photo: Erik Jacobs for the Boston Globe)
While startup incubators and accelerators now seemingly abound around town — there are more than 20 offering training grounds for burgeoning businesses — most require or strongly suggest that student teams commit fully to their programs, leaving campus in the dust.
Rough Draft’s model is different.
Its founders, 25-year-old Peter Boyce II and 29-year-old Nitesh Banta, who both work for the firm, have a two-pronged mission: They want to identify student entrepreneurs and help them hone their ideas as they work their way through school, because they believe if you provide students with the funding and the guidance they need to build their companies here, they’ll probably stay and set up shop in Boston, helping to strengthen the city’s startup ecosystem.
Rough Draft Ventures co-founders, from left, Peter Boyce and Nitesh Banta. (Photo: Erik Jacobs for The Boston Globe)
At the same time, Boyce and Banta hope to create a diverse pipeline of young people to feed the venture community, which is often chastened for its insularity and homogeneity.
Currently, Rough Draft is one of two student-centered funds in Boston. The Dorm Room Fund, backed by First Round Capital, offers a similar model in this and several other cities.
Area universities have also jumped on the trend, with on-campus venture projects like Harvard’s Xfund and Northeastern’s IDEA Venture accelerator providing funding for student startups. The result is a shift in how students plan their summers: As the end of the semester approaches, these would-be entrepreneurs are increasingly scrambling to secure funding for their startups instead of securing jobs or internships.
Boyce began working with startups while an undergraduate at Harvard University, which is how he connected with Banta, a fellow alumnus who was working at General Catalyst. Together, they saw the stress that student teams would face, so they pitched Rough Draft to the firm as an opportunity to offer guidance to young teams and to get a first look at products that can be relevant to the lucrative college market. (Facebook, after all, was built on Harvard’s campus.)
“If you want to think about investing in companies that are relevant to millennials or serving millennials, it might not be too crazy to have millennials be part of that dialogue,” Boyce said.
Since it was launched in spring 2013, Rough Draft has funded more than 30 companies, typically awarding between $10,000 and $20,000 to a handful of teams each semester. In total, these early-stage companies have gone on to raise $75 million from venture firms (General Catalyst has invested in two of them so far), and several have been accepted into high-profile accelerator programs like Y-Combinator and Techstars.
Presenters, from left, Toni Oloko and Matt Neary pitch their business “PracticeGigs” to the weekly Rough Draft Ventures meeting at the offices of General Catalyst Partners. (Photo: Erik Jacobs for The Boston Globe)
Rough Draft’s funds are drawn from General Catalyst’s coffers, and in the scope of the firm’s $3 billion portfolio, the money is chump change. But Rough Draft Ventures has a bigger mission, said David Fialkow, a cofounder and managing director at General Catalyst.
“Boston lacks a significant amount of mentorship and role models, relative to other cities,” he said. The city still hasn’t hit critical mass when it comes to having a deep pool of company founders to turn to for advice, he says.
“And the way we wanted to bridge that gap,” he said, “was to form a group that focuses on peer support, peer evaluations, and peer decisions. And what better role could we play than to build an ecosystem around young people starting businesses?”
“The privilege we have with Rough Draft,” Banta said, “is that we can take some of these amazing young people and be the first people to ever tell them yes, you’re amazing, your idea is amazing, we want to support you.”
For Slater Victoroff, the 20-year-old cofounder of Indico, a startup that uses machine learning to identify trends within huge data sets, Rough Draft was unique in its willingness to let him build his company at a pace that fit his life as a college student.
“We talked to people like Techstars and incubators and accelerators and they were like, ‘Hey, that sounds like a cool company but if you really want to make it happen you need to drop out,’ ” he said.
When Victoroff and his cofounder, Alec Radford, came up with the idea for Indico while juniors at Olin College, they weren’t quite ready to leave school behind. “Rough Draft was really the only organization that said, ‘Look, we love student entrepreneurs and we would love to help you out, and the fact that you’re doing it while you’re in school looks great.’ ”
For young companies like Indico, Rough Draft is often the first pitch and the first acknowledgment that their company has traction.
“It can be really intimidating to pitch, especially when you’re so early in your idea,” Banta said. To help ease the process, each of the student panelists works to build relationships with the startup teams, meeting with them regularly.
Yet even then, the sessions themselves operate in fits and starts. PowerPoints can fail or apps won’t load. Voices crack. Nervous energy abounds.
And the panelists themselves can be tough. The group evaluates the entrepreneurs throughout the pitches, weighing things like market share and pricing models. After each team leaves the room, the panelists determine whether it fits the Rough Draft profile, in that it would benefit not only from funding, but also from the mentorship, resources, and guidance the fund provides.
Student team members, from left, Lisa Wang a junior at Harvard, Merrill Lutsky a senior at Harvard, and Jennifer Zhang, a sophomore at MIT review at pitch at a weekly Rough Draft Ventures meeting. (Photo: Erik Jacobs for The Boston Globe)
During one recent session, a trio of Harvard Business School students gave a high-polish presentation for a financial app yet walked away empty-handed because they lacked a technical partner and didn’t seem to have a real grasp of their demographic. But an MIT doctoral student received $10,000 because the team could see the promise in the big-data Web application he had created.
On the night Toni Oloko and Matt Neary presented PracticeGigs, they demonstrated the app by passing an iPhone around to the panelists and took home $20,000.
“I’ve been so impressed with what the students our age have been able come in and do,” said Alex Freeman, a Babson senior and panelist. “It’s a smaller scale but a mirror image of what happens in venture, and find your way of looking at a team.”
For the teams themselves, the opportunity can be invaluable.
After pitching Rough Draft less than two years ago, Victoroff and Radoff received $20,000. “This helped us get in the mind-set that we weren’t just a couple kids playing around but we had a shot of being legitimate,” Victoroff said.
They used the funds to open their bank account, which they used sparingly through the first few months. (“Upwards of the 80 percent of our corporate expenditures for the first six months were Dominos pizza and bread bites,” Victoroff said.) Boyce and Banta offered them guidance when a company offered to acquire them. (They didn’t take the bid.) The Rough Draft team helped them assemble their pitch to Techstars, one of the most competitive accelerators in the country. (They got in.)
This fall, Victoroff took the stage at the House of Blues on Techstars Demo Day and announced that Indico had received $3 million in seed funding, a portion of which came from General Catalyst. The crowd erupted.
“We wouldn’t exist without Rough Draft,” Victoroff said recently. “We’d still be hacking around on an open-source project in a dorm.”
