And so you increasingly see VCs investing in other more angel-like funds (think AngelList syndicates or other scout funds) and giving cash to their portfolio companies to find the next big thing.
The latest in this list is Creator Fund, a UK-based, student-led venture capital fund targeting entrepreneurs coming out of European universities and backed by the Founders Factory accelerator cofounded by serial entrepreneur Brent Hoberman and Henry Lane Fox.
Inspired by Dorm Room Fund in the US as well as Entrepreneur First in the UK, the Financial Times said Hoberman had recruited students at 13 universities as venture capitalists and given them money to invest up to £30,000 for each startup founded by their peers. Anna Briggs, a Creator Fund student investor in her second year of an MBA at London Business School, was involved in its first deal for Refund Giant, a smartphone app that automates payment of VAT refunds to people visiting the UK, co-founded by three Imperial College students. (You can see more of the university spinouts and startups at the GCV Symposium on 3-4 June in partnership with SetSquared, Future Planet Capital and Oxford Science Innovation as well as Cambridge, MIT and Imperial and read more at our sister title, Global University Venturing.)
Jamie Macfarlane, Creator Fund’s chief executive, told the FT: “The UK has some of the world’s best universities and the same potential for students founders to be creating great businesses.”
This is less corporate venturing than pipeline development of course but the speed of innovation and desire to encourage and find the next Google or Facebook developed on campus is a positive intention as well as looking to back more experienced workers leaving corporations or serial entrepreneurs.
And these entrepreneurs are quickly using their venture experiences to help inform their own nascent corporate venturing programmes.
In part over the past decade or so it was because the speed of innovation meant even as a private company had a good idea that it was being effectively replicated globally from China especially or other so-called cloning factories.
The Brownian motion of capital, ideas and startups seems to be speeding up.
