A student managed investment fund is a pool of money which business students invest as a learning experience. As of 2008, more than 200 universities in the United States have student-run funds, which vary in size from several hundred thousand dollars to millions of dollars. [1]
The funds to be managed come from various sources, such as gifts from private individuals and corporations, gifts from foundations, and from university endowment or foundation assets. Some student managed investment funds such as the University of Texas at Austin manage funds for private clients, who are accredited investors under U.S. securities laws. Another source is the loan that supplies the funds at Cameron University. [2]
Some student managed investment funds are organized by function (accounting, public relations, etc.), while others such as the Lemma Senbet Fund are organized by economic sectors (Consumer Products, Energy Industry, Information technology, etc.).
The business students managing the fund typically take a for-credit course in conjunction with their management duties. Many of these programs belong to the Association of Student Managed Investment Programs.
In addition to managing a portfolio, these classes provide related experiences relevant to being a professional fund manager. For example, the CFA Society of Orange County Foundation (CFAOCF) conducts an annual request for proposals competition which allows student teams from local universities to experience first-hand the process that fund managers must go through in order to be allowed to manage institutional funds. [3]
Outside the United States there is Protege Ventures, a student managed investment fund programme that only invests in companies founded by students. [4] The programme was launched in 2017 by Singapore Management University Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship [5] and Entrepreneurship community Kairos Asean, and is currently the only student managed investment fund operating in Southeast Asia. In 2023 it announced the launch of Fund II, a S$500,000 fund for trained student investors to invest in early-stage technology startups. [6]
Trinity College Dublin established the first European student managed fund in 2011. [7]
A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship includes all new businesses including self-employment and businesses that do not intend to go public, startups are new businesses that intend to grow large beyond the solo-founder. During the beginning, startups face high uncertainty and have high rates of failure, but a minority of them do go on to become successful and influential, such as unicorns.
Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in terms of number of employees, annual revenue, scale of operations, etc. Venture capital firms or funds invest in these early-stage companies in exchange for equity, or an ownership stake. Venture capitalists take on the risk of financing start-ups in the hopes that some of the companies they support will become successful. Because startups face high uncertainty, VC investments have high rates of failure. Start-ups are usually based on an innovative technology or business model and they are often from high technology industries, such as information technology (IT), clean technology or biotechnology.
An investor is a person who allocates financial capital with the expectation of a future return (profit) or to gain an advantage (interest). Through this allocated capital the investor usually purchases some species of property. Types of investments include equity, debt, securities, real estate, infrastructure, currency, commodity, token, derivatives such as put and call options, futures, forwards, etc. This definition makes no distinction between the investors in the primary and secondary markets. That is, someone who provides a business with capital and someone who buys a stock are both investors. An investor who owns stock is a shareholder.
Seed money, also known as seed funding or seed capital, is a form of securities offering in which an investor puts capital in a startup company in exchange for an equity stake or convertible note stake in the company. The term seed suggests that this is a very early investment, meant to support the business until it can generate cash of its own, or until it is ready for further investments. Seed money options include friends and family funding, seed venture capital funds, angel funding, and crowdfunding.
Funding is the act of providing resources to finance a need, program, or project. While this is usually in the form of money, it can also take the form of effort or time from an organization or company. Generally, this word is used when a firm uses its internal reserves to satisfy its necessity for cash, while the term financing is used when the firm acquires capital from external sources.
The Singapore Management University (SMU) is a publicly-funded private university in Singapore. Founded in 2000, SMU is the third oldest autonomous university in the country, modelling its education after the Wharton School. The university is triple accredited by AACSB, EQUIS and AMBA. In 2024, SMU was ranked 44th in the world for Business and Management Studies, while also placing in the top 100 for Economics and Finance by QS.
Sevin Rosen Funds (SRF) is a Texas-based venture capital firm credited with pioneering the personal computing revolution in the 1980s and also venture investing in Dallas. It was established in 1981 by L. J. Sevin, a former Texas Instruments engineer, and Ben Rosen, and was one of the leading investors on the US West Coast.
The Weinert Center is the home of entrepreneurship education in the School of Business at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW). The center is dedicated to teaching, research, and service related to entrepreneurial management and enterprise development across the entire UW campus.
An angel investor is an individual who provides capital to a business or businesses, including startups, usually in exchange for convertible debt or ownership equity. Angel investors often provide support to startups at a very early stage, once or in a consecutive manner, and when most investors are not prepared to back them. In a survey of 150 founders conducted by Wilbur Labs, about 70% of entrepreneurs will face potential business failure, and nearly 66% will face this potential failure within 25 months of launching their company. A small but increasing number of angel investors invest online through equity crowdfunding or organize themselves into angel groups or angel networks to share investment capital and provide advice to their portfolio companies. The number of angel investors has greatly increased since the mid-20th century.
DFJ Frontier is an American venture capital firm with offices in Los Angeles, Sacramento, and Santa Barbara, California as well as Portland, Oregon. The firm invests in seed and early-stage technology companies on the West Coast, initially funding companies with between $100,000 and $1 million. The firm has approximately $80 million under management in two funds, DFJ Frontier Fund I, LP and DFJ Frontier Fund II, LP. DFJ Frontier typically leads the first round of investment, with one of its partners serving on the board of the portfolio company.
Morgenthaler is one of the oldest private equity investment firms in the US investing through both venture capital and leverage buyout transactions. Morgenthaler operates two connected private equity businesses:
Corporate venture capital (CVC) is the investment of corporate funds directly in external startup companies. CVC is defined by the Business Dictionary as the "practice where a large firm takes an equity stake in a small but innovative or specialist firm, to which it may also provide management and marketing expertise; the objective is to gain a specific competitive advantage." Examples of CVCs include GV and Intel Capital.
Super angel was a term used in the early 2010s to describe venture capital investors who had once been angel investors and subsequently raised small venture capital funds.
Trish Costello is a Silicon Valley–based entrepreneur and investor. She is the Founder and CEO of Portfolia, a collaborative equity investing platform. She was named as one of the 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs of 2014 by Goldman Sachs and Top Ten Women to Watch in Tech in 2015 by Inc magazine. She is recognized internationally for her pioneering work in educating and preparing venture capital investment partners, through the Kauffman Fellows Program. As the founding CEO and CEO Emeritus of the Center for Venture Education, she led the Kauffman Fellows Program for its first ten years. Costello was on the start-up team of the Kauffman Foundation's entrepreneurship center, where for eight years she directed its efforts in venture capital, angel investing, entrepreneur support programs, and programming to accelerate high potential women entrepreneurs. She played a leading role nationally in obtaining greater financial equity investments in women's businesses and in funding initiatives supporting high-growth women entrepreneurs.
Tembusu Partners is a Singapore-based private equity firm which invests into growth stage companies in technology, education and healthcare sectors. The firm also previously facilitated the Singapore Valley Awards - an entrepreneurship initiative to award local university students with internships at leading innovation companies in China.
MicroVentures is an equity crowdfunding website that offers investments in early stage companies. It connects accredited investors with startups, businesses and services looking to raise funds or participate in select secondary market opportunities.
CDH Investments is a major Chinese alternative asset management firm based in Beijing, China. It specializes in private equity, venture capital and credit products. CDH invests across a range of sectors and regions. As of March 2015, CDH manages over RMB 100 billion of investor capital across its various investment platforms.
Quest Ventures is a venture capital firm founded in 2011 by James Tan and Wang Yunming in Beijing, China. The firm mainly focuses on digital commerce investments and has an office in Singapore. The firm deploys funds across Asia in countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Quest Ventures is also the largest anchor tenant at JTC Launchpad.
Venture capital in Poland is a segment of the private equity market that finances early-stage high-risk companies based in Poland, with the potential for fast growth. As of March 2019, there is a total of 130 active VC firms in Poland, including local offices of international VC firms, and VC firms with mainly Polish management teams. Between 2009–2019, these entities have invested locally in over 750 companies, which gives an average of around 9 companies per portfolio. The Polish venture market accounts for 3% of the entire European ecosystem of VC investments, mainly in the digital space.
Icehouse Ventures is a New Zealand-based venture capital firm. The firm is headquartered in Auckland and mainly focuses on the technology industry and has backed 200 companies. The firm also operates a variety of angel groups networks such as Ice Angels and Arc Angels. Icehouse Ventures was formally founded in 2019 as a separate company but had operated as part of the Icehouse group since 2001. In 2019, the founding CEO of the Icehouse stepped down as CEO and joined the board of directors of Icehouse Ventures.
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