launching the Behind Genius Ventures winter break college essay contest! | Ep 83

You are the next generation of investors and founders, and I want to hear from you. I would love to hear your perspective as a college student about the problems or issues that you are personally passionate about. One winner from the selections will receive a cash prize of $500, a chance to record an episode of Seed to Harvest, which is the venture podcast I host, and get a week of shadowing me as a founding partner of a venture firm. Hey, happy holidays. I am really excited to be launching the Behind Genius Ventures Winter Break College Essay Contest today. I wanted to make a short video to explain why I'm doing this, what the rules of the contest are, and what I'm looking for. So why I'm doing this, as a high school and college student, I spent a lot of time writing essays to win scholarships to put myself through San Diego State. And in that position, I wish that there was like some sort of essay that allowed me to explore my interests. And then on the other side, now 4 years later, running my own venture capital fund, I think about the questions like, what does the future of play look like? How do we solve the loneliness epidemic? And putting capital to work answering those questions. So we've invested in 39 companies and counting in the future of work and play. Great companies building in like generative AI for edtech with Prof Gym, the creator economy with Statusphere. A universal ring to support mobility in elder care facilities, which is Lotus Labs. And I would love to hear your perspective as a college student about the problems or issues that you are personally passionate about. You are the next generation of investors and founders, and I want to hear from you. So the best kind of this writing is one includes an engaging hook that grabs our attention. And helps us understand and care about the problem. 2 is quotes experts. You can do this through interviews or researching or reading online or books, whatever, and includes research on market trends and relevant early stage startups, companies in the space. And then 3, this is like most important to me, is like, why do you care about it? Why is it important to you? Really tell me like why this is the problem that you chose to write about. Um, so what do you win? One winner from the selections will receive a cash prize of $500, a chance to record an episode of Seed to Harvest, which is the venture podcast I host, and get a week of shadowing me as a founding partner of a venture firm. If you're curious about learning more about venture startups, I think it would be a really interesting learning opportunity. And then 5 top contestants will have excerpts of their work shared on our Behind Genius Ventures blog. And the contest is open from December 13th, 2023 to January 18th of 2024, which falls in the winter break of most colleges. And yes, you're welcome to get help from others, including ChatGPT. I think this is like kind of a taboo subject, but I teach classes at San Diego State and I interact with a lot of college students and a lot of them use ChatGPT. So that's totally fine if you want to use that to help structure your writing or do research, whatever. All I ask is that you let me know if you use ChatGPT in your writing. This is like more, I'm like curious if it's very common practice in other colleges. And please only submit one essay per person. And please reach out to andi@behindgeniusventures if you have any questions. I'm really excited to hear from you about the problems or issues that you are passionate about. Hope you have a wonderful holiday break. And if you're not a college student, please share this with one that you think would benefit from this. And thank you. And a very special thank you to Seed to Harvest podcast editor Tate Doherty for his amazing work on this episode.