Once a year, the fund organizes a pitch competition at Stanford, Harvard and Wharton, where the judges pick winners that get awarded a certain amount of money to pursue their companies. The pitching competition money is separate from the fund, and comes from the judges at the competition .a $45 million Series B round led by Sequoia.
Tien says that this year they received over 300 applications for the pitching contest, but they narrowed all the applications down to the finalists or about 12 from each school. Ultimately, about 15 split the $1.3 million among them this year. Tien says that they dug up past 10 years of data for business school founders at Stanford, Wharton and HBS and every single year they saw at least one major success story coming out of each of these schools.
According to Tien, with the seed bar raising and the Series A raising and the amounts getting bigger and bigger, there is a vacuum in that space where people are filling in the pre-seed void. “When we came to business school we left our companies to search for new adventures, and we realized that a lot of our classmates look like the future DoorDash and future SoFi, but right now they had no idea how to go about fundraising or first go to market,” Tien says. “They are smart people, they will figure it out in six months or less, but they need the support, they need the mentorship and that's the main problem we are solving for founders coming from these schools.
Just babies.
wow