When venture capital fund Royal Street Ventures expanded from Utah to Kansas City, it wanted to find a unique way to contribute to the local entrepreneurial ecosystem.
That quest led to launching the Kansas City University Venture Fund program, now called UVF-Crossroads, that’s modeled after the Utah University Venture Fund program. The private scholarship and experiential learning program teaches college students from multiple regional universities the ins and outs of venture capital and exposes them to local and regional startups. The 12-week program has grown to 20 students a year and covers topics such as how to evaluate early-stage companies, source deals and conduct due diligence.
“Venture capital is not something that’s really taught in schools,” said Maggie Kenefake, a venture partner at Royal Street Ventures who helps lead UVF-Crossroads. “It’s sort of like this black box – this unknown thing that happens.”
Royal Street Ventures Managing Partner Jeff Stowell wanted to give students a deep look into that black box. He had connections to the Utah program, which later partnered with UVF-Crossroads on a grant from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. Thanks to the partnership, UVF-Crossroads could learn best practices from the Utah program and avoid past mistakes.
Stowell’s early experience as an entrepreneur in Lawrence, Kansas stoked his interest in the program. At 22, he co-founded Community Systems Group, a startup that offered consulting and technology to help nonprofits in the grant-making process and collect data from their grantees.
No one taught him now to be an entrepreneur, he said.
“I have to say that it was a pretty lonely experience,” he said. “If there were other students or people my age starting companies, I didn’t know who they were and had no mechanism to find them. The one resource at the time was the SBA office in downtown Lawrence, and that wasn’t what I needed. So I sort of live with these now 20-plus-year-old scars of what it was like for me as a young entrepreneur on that journey.”
A goal of the program is to build a network of the next generation of young professionals who understand how venture capital works and its oftentimes confusing vocabulary. Stowell hopes they pursue entrepreneurial careers, whether it’s launching a startup or working in one.
“As a venture capitalist, we rely almost exclusively on great entrepreneurs and the ecosystem in which we work. … The world doesn’t need a bunch more venture capitalists,” he said.
Most of Royal Street Venture’s grads have moved on to work for startups. Others have joined venture capital firms and law firms or have landed jobs at large corporations.
Michael Svoren, who joined the program as a sophomore, has always had a fascination with starting and growing companies and raising funding, he said. Venture capital, however, was an abstract concept. Now a senior, he likes how the program has helped him meet others with similar interests in early-stage companies. Although the software engineer major is joining a large company next year, he eventually plans to work for a startup.
“I want to be able to vet that early-stage company and evaluate it before I join. I think approaching it from an investor lens is going to be really helpful,” said Svoren, now an associate in the program who helps manage student projects. “I think it’s exciting to build something from scratch or to build something that’s small and try to grow it. It’s just a high energy that I haven’t found elsewhere.”
In addition to weekly curriculum, Royal Street Ventures also brings in investors and startup founders as guest speakers, including founders who chose to bootstrap their companies, Kenefake said. Students also are assigned hands-on projects, from prescreening applications for Techstars Kansas City to vetting companies for Royal Street Ventures and other area funds. They’ve been paired with companies in the Brush Creek Partners Insurtech Accelerator to help founders with specific needs, such as market and customer research.
Another facet is organizing the Founders Lab event, now in its second year. The virtual event in March brought together 20 investors and 40 female and minority-led companies. The allocation of venture capital to that demographic is abysmal, Svoren said.
“It’s just not really acceptable, so we wanted to help do what we can to contribute to changing the story in venture,” he said.
In addition to one-on-one breakouts with investors, the entrepreneurs also listened to C2FO founder Sandy Kemper talk about his entrepreneurial experience. His talk was followed with a Q&A session.
“We want to give students a new lens to look through when they think about what entrepreneurship means and what starting companies means,” Kenefake said of UVF-Crossroads. “To me, it’s another really important piece of the puzzle of how we elevate Kansas City in the entrepreneurship landscape.”
To date, UVF-Crossroads has worked with 100 students, and over the next five years, it aims to train 500 students, Stowell said.
Although Kansas City has the right foundation in place, from local investment funds to MBA programs to a plethora of research divisions in biotech and health, it hasn't spun out as many startups as it should, he said.
“I think part of that is we simply don’t expose our young professionals enough to what’s possible. … That’s a void we try to fill as much as we can,” Stowell said.
