INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
In 2016, we profiled a then-24-year-old named Jeremy Fiance who had managed to pool together $6 million for a fund focused on his alma
mater, UC Berkeley, where as a student he&d brought to campus Kairos Society, an organization for budding entrepreneurs, as well as created
a student accelerator called Free Ventures.
Fiance wasn&t waiting on someone to give him a job in venture; he wanted to create his own
vehicle — dubbed The House Fund — with the support of the school to invest in its talented students, alums and professors, and
eventually channel some of its gains back into the university system
To his mind, regional VCs were too focused on Stanford, creating a funding vacuum — and an opportunity
Why not address it himself?
Fast-forward two years and it apparent that investors give Fiance high marks
To wit, The House Fund is today announcing a second fund with $44 million in capital commitments, including backing from University of
California (which oversees a $126 billion endowment) and the Berkeley Endowment Management Company, which provides stewardship of endowment
gifts given expressly to UC Berkeley
Other investors include funds of funds, including Ahoy Capital; unnamed family offices; Berkeley alums; and tech execs.
The specific pitch
these investors are buying ties partly to the school size, says Fiance
UC Berkeley has 500,000 alums in the world and another 60,000 students on campus
Some of those graduates have also built some very valuable, still-private companies, including Flexport, Nextdoor, Warby Parker, Databricks
and DoorDash (all are so-called &unicorn& companies)
Others have taken their companies public (think Redfin, Coupa and Cloudera, among others)
Naturally, some percentage of UC Berkeley alums have also sold their companies, including Caviar, which was acquired bySquare (and then by
DoorDash), and PillPack, which sold to Amazon.
Investors are also betting on Fiance developing track record
Though The House Fund debut vehicle was relatively small, it managed to get checks into the logistics firm Flexport, the email service
Superhuman, the teen app Tbh (acquired by Facebook) and Dyndrite, a maker of additive manufacturing software that we first encountered back
The House Fund second fund already holds some promising stakes, too
Among its bets so far is the blockchain gaming company Forte, founded by esports veteran Kevin Chou, who previously founded (and sold)
Kabam; Oasis Labs, a cryptographic project whose founder previously sold an earlier startup, Ensighta, to FireEye; and Placement.com, a
seven-month-old company that aims to help people find better jobs in new cities
(Its co-founders, Sean Linehan and Katie Kent, came out of Flexport.)
Most of all, perhaps, they&re counting on Fiance ability to continue
growing a network that has already allowed The House Fund to meet with more than 3,000 startups with ties to UC Berkeley
(It has funded 50 in total.)
He has help
Though The House Fund remains a capital pool with just one general partner, Fiance is quick to acknowledge the team he has built
Among these members is Cameron Baradar, who was the third engineer at the mapping visualization startup Mapsense before it was acquired by
Apple and who is now a partner at the firm; Brett Wilson, who founded the ad tech startup TubeMogul and sold it to Adobe in 2017 and is a
venture partner; Annie Tsai, a former CMO at the marketing automation company Demandforce who is a part-time partner; and Arjun Arora, who
founded and sold an ad tech startup, worked as an investor for both Expa and 500 Startups, and is now also a part-time partner.
As for the
size checks the team is writing, Fiance says the firm &sized the fund in such a way that we were right-sizing to the opportunity in front of
us.& What that means: while The House Fund once wrote checks of $50,000 to $100,000, it now investing up to $1 million in seed rounds, with
an undisclosed amount of money targeted for reserves.
It also dives in before a lot of venture funds will, insists Fiance
&There are actually very few funds that are willing to take a first leap,& he says
But we put together pre-seed syndicates
We help companies fundraise by putting together a personalized demo day for them with 20 to 30 investors& who might conceivably be
interested in the startup.
&We have a very strong sense of the market and other funds and where and how they&re investing,& adds Fiance
The suggestion, seemingly, is that like the university on which it so focused, The House Fund does its research.
