Empowering the youth through Venture Capital: sharing our lessons learned with university students

At Kfund we’ve always been interested in building close relationships with universities, engineering schools and business schools across Spain and beyond. 

Spain is fortunate to have some of the most highly-ranked MBA programmes in the world, and these and other educational programmes tend to be both a good source of entrepreneurs and startups, as well as talent both for us at Kfund and for our portfolio companies. In fact, since our early beginnings in 2016, we’ve backed several startups and spin-offs out of university and business schools. 

It’s for this and other reasons that in the past few years we’ve been involved in several university programs across the country, and this is something that we’ll continue to do in the future and we’re very much looking forward to, in order to also raise awareness of the world of startups, technology and the VC asset class.

In the past few weeks and coming months -after the summer break- we’re going to double down on our university and educational efforts.

In the past few weeks we’ve had the pleasure to visit and share our experiences as investors at ESADE, CUNEF, and UC3M universities. In these sessions we explained how Kfund and a VC works, we answered questions that students brought up and we also tried to involve some of our portfolio companies and even LPs in the conversations.

I would love to share our three key takeaways from this initiative:

• The ambition amongst young people for the tech sector is incredible, and the talent on show is highly promising, we are coming strong! Seeing students, even those in their first years of university, already stepping into the professional world and having knowledge of the asset class and market trends is just an example of the willingness of these new generations to create an impact.

• I’ve missed seeing more women attending these events. We need more women in the sector, and this has to start as early as possible! At Kfund we deeply care about diversity in entrepreneurship and VC, and we’d like to see a larger presence of business and technical-oriented students join us for these sessions. If any women reading this are interested in getting to know more about Venture Capital, startups, or technology, PLEASE, contact me.

• Sharing our professional experiences, explaining our day-to-day tasks at our job, and making the professional world less opaque for the youth is A MUST! Months ago it was me, sitting on a university desk with fear about not knowing what was coming next. Making the path easier for the upcoming professionals can only foster better, long-lasting ties between future talent and employers.  

In summary, we are super happy to have found great talent, ambition, and energy to crack the professional world, and we hope to have fulfilled our initial and main objective: making the Spanish VC and technology industry more transparent and accessible for others. See you next time 🙂

If you are part of a university club, association, or anyone willing to organize events for students about entrepreneurship and/or investments, please, contact me at silvia.sancho@kfund.vc

Ps: A special thank you to my colleagues Jorge Campo and Jaime Novoa who have also been leading this initiative, and of course, to the student clubs Start UC3M, Finance Association UC3M, StartUp CUNEF, and E3 Initiative for opening the doors of their respective universities to us.

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