Ocrolus, the only automation platform that analyzes financial documents and digital data with over 99% accuracy, today announced that it was ranked the #28 fastest-growing company on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 list and the #1 fastest-growing software company in New York. This announcement follows recognition this summer as the #1 fastest-growing fintech on the 2020 Inc. 5000 list. The company has experienced nearly 8000% revenue growth, onboarding a diverse mix of fintechs and financial institutions as customers, including Brex, LendingClub, SoFi, and Sprout Mortgage.
SportsRecruits and IWLCA Announce the Launch of IWLCARecruits
SportsRecruits is excited to announce a strategic partnership with Intercollegiate Women's Lacrosse Coaches Association (IWLCA) and the creation of IWLCARecruits coming in 2021! IWLCA has entered into an exclusive long-term relationship with SportsRecruits to launch a suite of integrated technology products to coordinate and simplify the recruiting process for players, parents, club organizations, and college coaches.
Changing The Face of VC: Our Internship Program
Our application is now live! You can view the job description here and apply here.
Over the past few years, countless blogs have been written on the topic of “breaking into venture capital”. While these perspectives are undoubtedly helpful data points to those aspiring to join investor ranks, perhaps the more interesting question is, how can venture capital firms expand accessibility into this traditionally insular industry? To that end, we’re excited to share the playbook for one of our most successful tools for expanding the VC pipeline: our internship program. Hopefully this overview is helpful not just to aspiring VC investors wondering what an internship can be like, but also to other firms considering launching their own programs and wondering where to start.
At Laconia, we’ve had an internship program from day one. The goals of the program are increasing our investment team’s bandwidth, broadening Laconia’s network within the entrepreneurial ecosystem, and launching the careers of the next generation of operators and investors. By all measures, it’s working: our interns consistently support key parts of our investment process, from drafting investment memos for prospective deals to building waterfalls for portfolio companies. and even successfully sourcing new deals. They provide critical support on operations and marketing, enabling us to remain laser-focused on supporting our portfolio founders. With a diverse group that’s 50% women, 14% Black/Latinx, and 80%+ underrepresented* In some way, we couldn’t be more excited for the future face of our industry as our former colleagues find their full-time roles as VC investors, startup operators, and founders.
Let’s dig into the details …
Program structure
We typically have 2-3 interns at a time year-round, part-time during the fall and spring academic semesters, and full-time in the summer. Depending on their schedule/ availability, they usually stay on anywhere from 3 to 8 months.
Prior to their start, we run a structured onboarding process that allows us to align on goals/objectives as well as ensure that they are up to speed on early stage venture capital and Laconia’s specific investment approach.
Over the course of the program, our interns become a core part of our team and effectively operate like investment associates. They join all pitch meetings, due diligence sessions, and internal discussions, receiving full transparency into our investment process. They also provide operational support on things like deal pipeline management, diligence, collateral creation, and marketing initiatives. Many of them take the lead on rebuilding certain internal processes of ours, ultimately streamlining our workflows and making us a more effective team. We are also careful to curate projects that align with their personal areas of interest, thus optimizing their learning opportunities.
This past summer was the first time we ran a fully remote internship program. In addition to optimizing our internal communications with platforms like Slack, Asana, and Zoom, we’ve become much more intentional about creating digital “face time” opportunities to compensate for the absence of casual in-office chats. Though we certainly miss the in-person interactions, we’re excited to prove that it’s possible to have an engaging, rewarding and productive experience even entirely virtually.
Hiring process
We run a public application process that leverages both inbound applications and outbound partnerships, predominantly with student-run clubs at universities. Our website has information on our internship program and an interest signup form for those who come across us in between hiring cycles.
Our application is simple: contact information, a resume, a writing sample, a sample deck/presentation, and “Why are you interested in working at Laconia?” We have found that this information is more than sufficient to shortlist candidates who would thrive in this role. Once we review all submissions, we typically conduct two rounds of interviews with finalists before extending offers.
We explicitly do NOT do the following:
Rolling applications: We tried accepting applications on a rolling basis in response to ongoing interest in our roles; however, this setup made it incredibly difficult to stay on a hiring schedule and provide timely responses to candidates. Switching to an input form for those who would like to be notified once applications open up again has enabled us to continue capturing this interest while better managing expectations.
Free labor: We have never leveraged our application process in this way and never will. We don’t believe that candidates need to spend dozens of hours putting together extensive investment memos, lists of prospective Laconia portfolio companies, etc. in order to demonstrate their eligibility for a junior-level VC role, nor should their enthusiasm be exploited.
Unpaid internships: We firmly believe that unpaid roles (much like unpaid labor) lock out candidates who cannot afford to work for free, making it impossible to hire the best talent and further exacerbating industry-wide inequity. Paying interns also strengthens the mutual commitment between Laconia and our interns, garnering a more productive engagement.
For any firms interested in spinning up their own programs, please feel free to reach out to any of us directly -- we are happy to share our playbooks and process documents. After all, the worst part of this program is that we are unable to scale it beyond a handful of unbelievable interns per year.
For anyone interested in potentially working with us, we are opening applications for our spring and summer positions this Friday! You can view the full job description here and sign up here to be notified.
As always, please reach out with any thoughts, questions, and feedback. We’re excited to keep pushing the venture industry closer to its full potential.
*Underrepresented includes female/non-binary, LBGTQ+, and/or non-white
TripleLift Introduces Exchange Traded Deals
Introducing Exchange Traded Deals by TripleLift. ETDs are the smart way to buy, measure and optimize programmatic media. TripleLift has organized their most direct, effective and requested inventory to make your buys easy and effective.
Reflecting On Three Years Of Laconia Mentor Meetings...
One of the best parts of our job is meeting with entrepreneurs. We get an opportunity to collaborate with determined people who are willing to go up against the unknown and navigate the hurdles as they come, whether it’s creating a product from scratch, navigating a frustratingly opaque financial ecosystem (yes, venture capital, we’re talking about you!), or managing the morale of their employees through the inevitable ups & downs. These discussions are inspiring, energizing, and, in many cases, elucidating.
In our conversations with founders, perhaps the biggest perception discrepancy that we discovered between entrepreneurs and investors is VCs’ accessibility. While investors often feel they are relatively easy to find and reach, whether through warm introductions or cold emails, we heard from countless founders that their experiences couldn’t be further from this. Time and time again, entrepreneurs shared with us that it’s not only exceptionally difficult to get meetings with investors in the first place but also nearly impossible to get any candid, actionable feedback out of them once they meet.
In response to this pain point, we began holding open office hours in October of 2017. In addition to hosting these meetings at co-working spaces and incubators throughout NYC (thank you WeWork, Alley, Brooklyn Navy Yard, Future Labs, the Yard, and Galvanize!), we committed to blocking off two hours every week to create four 30-min slots for 1x1 “mentor meetings” with founders, originally in our own offices and now via Zoom.
For context, we treat these meetings not as formal investor pitches but instead as a safe environment for founders to broach any questions they might have about venture capital, startups, fundraising, sales, hiring, and everything in between. While we acknowledge that the founders always know their businesses best and encourage them to take any input with a grain of salt, our hope is that our birds’ eye view perspective can, at minimum, offer some insight into VCs’ perception, concerns, and frameworks, and, at best, provide founders with a foot in the door into a financial ecosystem that still remains opaque and exclusive. Though we don’t have the bandwidth to track results across the board, we do know that many of these initial meetings have resulted in introductions to accelerators, VCs, advisors, and vendors, and, subsequently, material investments and partnerships.
A big unknown when we started doing these meetings with no qualification/filter system whatsoever was whether this vehicle would attract exceptional entrepreneurs. Now that we’re 3 years into these meetings, there is no question. While it is impossible to highlight all of them, special shout-out to Ariel Lopez (co-founder, CEO of Knac), Madeleine Barr (founder & CEO of Piecewise), Lyonel Dougé (founder & CEO, Tipsnaps), Gabriela Trueba (co-founder & CEO, Womp) and Avi Goren (founder & CEO, Marqii), among countless others, who turned these one-off meetings into multi-year relationships -- we are so happy to have met you and blown away by what you’ve built.
We also can’t help but highlight that of the 700+ founders we’ve met through these open meetings, at least 45% have been of underrepresented backgrounds (based on gender, race/ethnicity, or both). Seeing the pre-seed founder landscape largely reflect the demographic composition of the broader US population strengthens our conviction that the next ten years of entrepreneurship will look nothing like the last ten and that the funding gap is not the result of a pipeline problem.
On our end, we’re excited to keep doing everything we can to make Laconia and the broader venture ecosystem as accessible as possible to entrepreneurs, no matter their background. If you are an early stage founder who’d like to chat, please grab some time on our calendars; we can’t wait to meet you!