Learn More About Venture Capital

In this video, Meera Oak shares why investing at the seed stage can be both exciting and high-impact. She explains how this early phase often signals the first signs of transformative change — where investors back on a vision of the future. Often with low entry valuations and high potential for growth, seed investing offers the chance to back the next breakout companies. Meera also touches on the power law dynamic in venture, highlighting why diversification across ~30-50 investments helps maximize the potential for capturing outsized returns.

Learn why venture capital can be a compelling addition to your portfolio. In this video, we discuss the rising demand for alternative investments, with a particular focus on the dynamic domain of VC. Our team explores the unique characteristics that differentiate VC from traditional asset classes, the long-term nature of the asset class, and its potential for generating exceptional returns and value creation.

In this episode, we delve into this asset class’s intricate dynamics, unraveling the power law’s importance and impact on potential returns. In this video, we provide insights into how Alumni Ventures strategically ensures fund diversification, building a well-balanced portfolio designed to mitigate risk and maximize returns for our investors.

What does “Run Rate” even mean? And what in the world is a SPAC? Whether you’re brand-new to investing or have a few deals under your belt, you may be puzzled by certain terms commonly used to describe venture companies and deals. To help, we’ve compiled this handy guide.

This curated selection of 100 ventures from AV’s portfolio of over 1,600+ current and historical investments represents the names our 10 venture teams are most excited to spotlight. These companies were selected for their variety, innovative impact, performance, and upside potential.

How do venture capitalists select the companies they invest in? What do they evaluate—and how? Welcome to our four-part Masterclass blog series. We’ll walk you through how we evaluate deals at Alumni Ventures. This first installment delves into the Deal Dynamics that shape our investment decisions.

In the second part of our Masterclass on The Art of Evaluating a Deal, we evaluate the lead investor in a venture round. In VC, a select group of firms consistently outperforms market indices — so as a value-add co-investor, we’re looking to invest alongside those leaders. Our checklist includes the firm’s quality, the lead partner’s sector, stage experience, and their conviction. We use a case study to bring the example to life and discuss the challenges in separating a firm’s performance from a lead partner’s.

We’re continuing our blogs on how AV teams typically evaluate a deal. As part of our Masterclass series, this addresses some of the basic questions our investors have about venture.

In the final installment of our Masterclass series on The Art of Evaluating a Deal focuses on the importance of assessing CEOs and their teams. Key points include emphasizing “founder-market fit” and scrutinizing team dynamics.

The foundational bottlenecks of technology have shifted from software layers to physical constraints like energy, critical minerals, and manufacturing capacity — now the true rate-limiters to AI and reindustrialization. As megawatts and metals become the new protocols of progress, venture-scale opportunities lie in upgrading power infrastructure, securing domestic mineral supply chains, and accelerating extraction, refining, and recycling. The Energy & Strategic Minerals Syndicate is backing the founders building solutions for this new industrial frontier, where power availability and resource resilience define the future of innovation.

For decades, America’s defense industrial base was built for scale, stability, and long development cycles. That model is breaking down as modern conflict demands speed, adaptability, and industrial execution at a pace legacy structures were never designed to sustain.

AI doesn’t just change interfaces — it rewrites cognition. The companies that embed into daily routines and earn behavioral lock-in will become the next category-defining platforms. This is our thesis on why experience ↔ behavior fit creates the modern moat.

For as long as humans have been human, we have been investors — not in the financial sense, but in the way we allocate our time, attention, belief, and collective effort. Before capital markets existed, we poured resources into the experiences that mattered most: temples to sport and skill, theaters to story and song, forums to gather and debate, libraries to learn and preserve, gardens to restore and delight. These were not just cultural institutions. They were the earliest marketplaces of human experience. Across every culture and era, the same instincts have shaped human progress: the desire to move, to express, to belong, to grow, and to savor life. Technology evolves. Capital evolves. Human nature does not.

U.S. competitiveness in energy, AI, and defense may hinge not just on advances in software or finished products, but on rebuilding domestic capabilities to extract, refine, and manufacture critical materials at industrial scale. As global competition intensifies, the strength of America’s industrial base could prove as decisive as its technological innovation.

If you use modern technology, healthcare, or consumer platforms, you are already living inside the Harvard startup ecosystem. This post explores how a single university has quietly built one of the most powerful founder networks in the world — and why that system continues to produce category-defining companies at scale.

Why Supply Chain Our 21st-century American lives — accustomed to a seemingly endless and instantaneously accessible consumerism — are powered by an often-forgotten, rarely disrupted mega-network of transportation and logistics. Only when our packages begin to show up late do we remember. Shaken from our bliss, we watched when the Ports of LA/Long Beach ground to a halt during COVID, the Suez Canal was blocked for six days in March 2021, and US shipping was brought to a standstill last October by once-in-a-generation dockworker strikes. All of these bring back the nightmare of a world where the things we need (or want) don’t show up, even when we select “Next Day” or “Priority Shipping.”

Why old VC signals fail for GenAI & agentic AI startups. Discover a new framework prioritizing user behavior, engagement & workflow adoption to scale AI ventures.

If you opened Google, scrolled on Instagram, streamed a YouTube video or a Netflix show last night, or ordered lunch on DoorDash, you’ve touched the Stanford ecosystem. The world knows the legend of the “PayPal Mafia.” Early PayPal employees went on to found generational companies like Tesla, LinkedIn, YouTube, Yelp, and Palantir. But there’s a deeper pattern at work. The most prolific “mafia” in tech history didn’t emerge from a single company. It emerged from a single campus: Stanford University.

What does it mean to be T-shaped in a venture-driven, entrepreneurial team? In this video, Keaton Nankivil breaks it down. He explains how the best team members balance broad curiosity with deep focus — like switching between a spotlight and a laser. At AV, if you’ve got a strong point of view that aligns with the mission, you’re encouraged to chase it. But success comes from knowing where to direct your energy — whether it’s a market, theme, or community. It’s all about owning your focus and driving impact.