Founder Story: Mike Collins on Building America’s Largest VC for Individual Investors

Uh, let you know when you're rolling. One second.

Huh. This is Mike Collins, and the story you're about to hear didn't start with a pitch deck. It started with a problem that no one else was solving.

Remember to look at Jeannie.

Yeah.

When you're answering.

Okay.

Okay. Good to go.

So I'll prompt you with one question and then you go.

Okay.

Okay. So, Your company. Tell us how we got here.

All right, so I'm Mike Collins. I'm the founder and CEO of Alumni Ventures.

Like a crisp—

So to kick this off, the AV production team sat down with Mike at the AV office in Manchester, New Hampshire. We were surrounded by old mill brick and river views, and we asked him to take us back before the hundreds of startups, before the billion-dollar deal flow, before Alumni Ventures became what it is today. And for that, let's take it back to 2014.

I started the company in 2014 with the idea to democratize venture capital. There was some interest in thinking about bringing this asset class to retail investors, and I wrote a white paper, and that's where the origins of Alumni Ventures happened, that a group of people working together in a community could do better in this asset class than any of us could do on our own. People thought I was crazy, right? Why would anybody want to bother with retail investors? But I felt it could be a real asset. The obvious place to start was alumni groups, huge nexus of entrepreneurship and technology and venture capital. Dartmouth is a place where people are super passionate about their, their school, their class, their fellow alumni. And I said to myself, if a bunch of us Dartmouth alums got together, we could do better in this asset class than any of us could do on our own.

To understand Alumni Ventures, it helps to see it. The energy, the history, the little things that don't come through in an interview.

So we stepped out of the chair and followed Mike through the world that he's built.

We had the mics rolling and Mike himself had a few stories to tell. So we took a walk.

And memories. And so what we do is have our people, when they join the company, pick an album that was meaningful to them, either because of the songs or the times of their life or the COVID arts. So at the very beginning, we were a small group of people and it was just a lot of hand-to-hand combat. So I think to raise Green D1, which was like a million-dollar fund, I probably had to have 100 meetings driving around pitching in living rooms. It's the story of every entrepreneur trying to get a business off the ground. It is a lot of hustle. Again, I'm just looking myself and these are, you know, these are a lot of the albums and bands that, you know, kind of influenced my life and I enjoyed listening to. You know, the— my choice was Rumours album by Fleetwood Mac. But, you know, I was from the Midwest, so I was a big Prince fan early on as well. Now, we also had people that said, hey, this will work with Dartmouth alums, but it won't work anywhere else. So just the second time they called us crazy is when we went to do a Harvard fund. Well, that worked. And then we were off to the races.

Mike tells us that the growth was immediate. What began as a small, maybe even scrappy fund quickly gained traction, first with Dartmouth, then Harvard, onto Yale, MIT. Fund after fund, school after school, the model scaled. The numbers got bigger, and so did the team.

What was your elbow?

Uh, the Trop Belt Quest right there.

There you go. What would yours be?

Honestly, it's up there. Born to Run.

Born to Run.

Bruce Springsteen.

But again, I, I also believe that the music that you grow up with is the music of your life, right? It kind of gets hardwired in your brain. It 14 to 18 or something like that. So I think that's kind of true, that it's like, what were you listening to at 15 will be what you're listening to at 55 kind of thing. And I know that's true for me.

But to understand how this all came together, to really get why he believed in this from the beginning, we've gotta go back, back to before the pitch decks and portfolio reviews, All the way back to Madison, Wisconsin.

Back in black here, but AC/DC was basically my high school basketball team's road boombox play every time. So, uh, can't get by without that. I grew up in the Midwest. I— my parents were school teachers. I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin in the '60s and '70s. I went to public school. But my outlet was sports, and I was competitive, and I enjoyed it, and I became a pretty good basketball player. Although Madison's a fantastic place, I wanted to stretch and see the world, and, you know, basketball afforded me that opportunity. And so I was fortunate enough to get into Dartmouth College, and it really changed my life. I, you know, played basketball there. I met amazing people. I learned so, so much. Dartmouth was transformative to me. Worked really hard, studied engineering. I did get to play against Michael Jordan, who dropped 30 on me. So if you want to check it out, it's probably in some deep cut on ESPN about, you know, him dunking in my face.

And yeah, He wasn't kidding about the Michael Jordan thing. And yes, we found the tape.

And the tap. Michael Jordan. Great defense. Michael Jordan will take it. Michael Jordan, 6'6 junior from Wilmington, North Carolina. 6 points in the game for Jordan. Carolina leads 12 to 5. He pops and telegraphed his intentions on that one. Here comes Darko. Brian Burke, he's there. Well, there's no real true pivot man, no center on this team. Jordan pulls one up.

Then Mike began to tell us a bit more about his Dartmouth experience and how he got into VC from there. So at first he was thinking he was going to be an engineer, but then something within him shifted. He started spending more time at the Tuck Business School, auditing classes, talking to professors, and slowly realizing that business, not necessarily engineering, was where he felt at home.

But I was hanging out in my dorm one day and got a call, like in the hall. Those are the days where the phone was payphone in the hall. And there was a guy that was working at a venture capital firm that said, hey, I talked to a professor. He said I should talk to you because we're looking to hire an analyst. And I was like, yeah, that sounds neat. What's a venture capitalist do? So I interviewed, sounded like a cool opportunity, and I went to work at a venture capital firm called TA Associates. I got to meet entrepreneurs. I had incredibly good mentors and really found what I wanted to do my entire life in that first job. TA was kind of a normal venture capital firm at that time. They were doing VC. They were making million, $2 million investments. It was 20 people. So at TA, you know, I really learned a lot about evaluating businesses and what we're There were good opportunities, and I really loved it. I was really lucky that I had good mentors. I really was lucky in that early— a job early in my career really kind of caught my attention.

After 4 years of venture capital, Mike stayed in Boston and went to Harvard Business School. That's where he crossed paths with Clayton Christensen, the legendary professor who coined the term disruption. And fundamentally shaped how Mike would think about innovation and systems change. Christensen's thinking stuck with him. And as Mike moved through the venture world, one problem kept coming up. When he wasn't in a firm, it was really hard to get access to good deals. It didn't matter how much experience he had or how deep his Rolodex went. Venture capital was still closed off. So he started asking a new kind of question. What if it didn't have to be?

So what I set out to do in founding this company was solve a problem for myself. How, as an individual, can I build the right kind of venture portfolio? And for me, that was, I want access to really good deals. I want access to a lot of them so I can build a big diversified portfolio. And I want to do this in a way that gives me access to things on the East Coast and the West Coast and early stage. And late stage. So that's what I set out to do when I founded the company. But when you truly have a disruptive idea, there's no playbook. Part of being an entrepreneur is identifying when you're onto something and then just going for it. And I think that's maybe one of the proudest moments that I've had professionally is instead of hedging, instead of this, that, or the other thing, When I was getting this positive feedback for the Green D1 fund, we went all in and we've never looked back.

And from that moment on, they didn't. But what's maybe just as surprising as the company's growth is where it all happens. Because while Alumni Ventures is focused on the future, its home is deeply steeped into the past.

What are some of your favorite parts of the office?

Oh, I think the— my favorite part of the office is just the history of it. The fact that this was 150 years ago, this was a textile mill, and people would come in sometimes really young and work 12-hour days, 6 days a week making linen. And you can still see to this day You know, you have remnants of that with staples and marks and burn marks and, you know, just the history and the people who worked here. And it was hot and it was noisy and it was sweaty and there was no air conditioning. And, and that was your best option. as a person for a career. And so I think the history of the space is really incredible to me. The fact that it's now kind of repurposed into technology and investing and kind of the cutting edge of, you know, science and innovation, I think is remarkable. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, we spend a lot of time at work. We spend a lot of time working really hard. And you want a place where you want to come that's pleasant and enjoyable and open. And we wanted a place that had high ceilings and a lot of light and access to nature. I'm a big believer in kind of having quiet workspaces where you can go and get stuff done in deep periods, but there would also be places where you could congregate And brings—

this is a big question, kind of loaded, but

yeah,

uh, how important is community to AB?

I mean, we— that's our story. That's our secret sauce. That's our niche. You know, I started this business with this idea that we could do better in this really important asset class together than we could do on our own. And so that's, that's the through line through our entire history. which is communities of investors, communities of portfolio companies. How can we take care of all of our stakeholders? The power of networks, the power of groups of people working together to accomplish things is really, really powerful. So community is everything to AVI.

And now we turn the page to the next chapter of this story. Always pushing forward, always evolving. So what's on deck for Alumni Ventures?

Yeah, so this may sound funny given we've accomplished a lot, but I really think that we're in the second or third inning of our story. The technology that we're looking at with AI, with robotics, with life sciences, changes taking place in education, The disruption that's coming to healthcare and longevity, energy, these things are just going to make life look very different in 10 or 20 years for all of us. And AV and our customers and our community are right in the center of that, investing in that future. We get up every day and try to get better, you know, working hard to get that message out there, to educate people about venture capital. How it works, how we work, how venture capitalists think. We're just trying to get people to learn about it, feel comfortable with it, but hopefully strongly considering investing in that kind of future. Really, our first 10 years was really a domestic story. Our next 10 is going to be a global story. The mission is really to back founders wherever they're starting great companies. So we want to be a global network. We've opened up an office in Tokyo. We're opening up an office in London. These are just the first steps, we think, in what is the next part of our journey. We understand it's a really big vision, but we're built for this moment. I'm super excited.