Alumni Ventures, one of the most active venture capital firms, with about 1,400 portfolio companies and $1.4 billion in assets under management, has created a program to teach startup investing to future leaders of family offices.
The program, called NextGen Family Office, is designed to help younger generations of ultrawealthy families learn and build confidence in venture investing by doing it. Participants will attend regular seminars on topics such as analyzing product and service markets, evaluating companies, and cap tables, and will sit in on and engage with Alumni Ventures as the firm conducts due diligence on potential investments.
The first cohort is set to begin early this year. It has about 20 members, but the firm is open to including others before it starts.
Since its founding in 2014, Alumni Ventures has been intent on making venture capital more accessible to smaller investors. More than other firms, it leans heavily on broad networks to source investment opportunities and capital. In addition to traditional fund structures and institutional limited partners, Alumni Ventures has over 850,000 community members and 15,000 individual investors and syndicate members who can review and participate in investments. It considers roughly 7,000 deals a year and completes about 250, or 4%.
The wide net has caught winners, including Oura, the company behind the popular high-tech ring, Groq, the artificial intelligence hardware and cloud computing company, and Circle, the digital asset company that went public last year.
Alumni Ventures, which has over 120 employees across seven offices, intentionally doesn’t compete with other large, established firms like Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, and Kleiner Perkins to lead early-stage funding rounds. Instead, while still engaging directly with founders and maintaining its own relationships, the firm has co-invested hundreds of times alongside those top competitors and others. “That is an incredibly powerful thing,” Ludwig Pierre Schulze, a managing partner at Alumni Ventures, told Modus. “Those folks consistently are the ones that generate the profits in the industry, and they are also quite consistent in terms of repeatedly getting access to the best deals and delivering profits.”
As a result, Alumni Ventures’ allocations tend to be smaller — and a better fit for many family offices.
While some large family offices have access to top funds and opportunities, most do not. “We still want to focus on people who are dissatisfied with what their access points are. That $500 million, $1 billion, or even $2 billion family office? There's a high likelihood, I think, that there could be something interesting [via Alumni Ventures],” Schulze said.
On average, the largest family offices allocate 22% of their investment portfolios to private equity, with only a portion of that allocation dedicated to venture. Take that venture allocation and divide it effectively amongst funds and investments directly in companies, and the check sizes, even at big family offices, start to get relatively small. If offices do that thoughtfully across vintages, they get even smaller.
Scale and access are only part of the venture puzzle. Last year, Alumni Ventures began engaging more family offices and offering high-touch support to the prolific investors. While doing that, it recognized a multitude of future family-office leaders interested in venture but lacking sufficient experience with the asset class to confidently create a venture investment program for their office. NextGen Family Office will help them take another step toward that.
Anushka Jain, whose family has a successful business in India, is participating in Alumni Ventures’ first NextGen Family Office cohort, although she is no stranger to venture capital. She previously worked at Prologis Ventures, the corporate venture arm of the global industrial real estate firm, and the venture portfolio of a family office in Texas. Now, she’s a senior associate at Wingspan Legacy Partners, a family business and family office consultancy.
Jain is involved in her family’s business, but it’s not what she wants to do long-term. The Alumni Ventures program, she said, was the perfect opportunity to continue exploring and considering what she'll do next.
“I've done venture, I've worked with family offices, and now I'm really thinking about: What does the future look like for my family enterprise? And if we ever were to have a family office one day, what would that look like?”
Other asset managers have programs akin to the new one at Alumni Ventures, but they are reserved for limited partners. If that means a family office, it probably already has an investment portfolio with enough scale and staff to support a venture program, Jain said.
“My family business has never done any venture investing. We don't have a fully institutionalized family office, so this is a way for us to really learn…to understand how to get allocation, and how to evaluate these deals, without having to put in a huge multimillion-dollar check into the fund itself,” Jain said.
The program’s focus on education and community was also appealing to Jain. While pursuing her M.B.A. at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, she served as president of the Family Enterprise Club. The club “was the first time that I had that ability to have those conversations, had a community of people who'd been through a lot of the similar things I had.” The prospect of joining a group with similar benefits also attracted her to the Alumni Ventures program.
Scott Saslow, whose family office, One World Investments, deploys only its own capital through a venture fund but advises other family offices on their venture programs, knows of asset managers who have gathered groups of their investors and even their children. But the effort by Alumni Ventures to formalize a program for future leaders of family offices and scale it is worth noting, he told Modus.
“I’ve spent much of my career in the family office VC space, advising families on venture strategy and fund formation, and earlier this year, I hosted a webinar series on building a family office venture fund. In my experience, direct venture investing can be a powerful way for principals, especially next-gen investors, to build real agency in their portfolios and engage deeply with themes they care about. It certainly has been for me through my own impact venture fund,” Saslow said.
In 2024, Matt Krna, a former partner at Softbank Capital and other VC firms, founded Two Meter Capital, a venture fund services and advisory firm. Family offices are among the clients it helps track, report on, audit, and value venture investments. It also serves as a subadvisor to portfolios that need to be analyzed, adjusted, or, in some cases, dissolved.
“Conceptually, I like the spirit of what Alumni is looking to do. As family offices become more sophisticated and look to deploy more capital into direct deals, the involvement of the next generation is, on the whole, a great idea,” Krna said.
Along with serious interest, access and operations, successful investing requires expertise, patience and experience, he added. For future leaders of family offices, there aren’t many places to find that.
“Sometimes people look at venture and go, ‘It's all art. It's all people throwing darts, right?’ And we would argue that it's actually a beautiful mixture of art and science. Yes, there is understanding people, understanding founder risk. That's more art than it is science. But there is also a deep financial evaluation that has to be done," Schulze said.
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