As one of the oldest and most active early-stage venture capital firms in the Southeast, IDEA Fund Partners’ investment philosophy has been honed from years of experience. Based in Durham, NC, we fund entrepreneurs who are applying technology and business model innovations to industries in the earliest stages of digital disruption with an emphasis on overlooked people, places and stages.

We are currently looking for our next Venture Fellows to join Idea Fund Partners’ Summer 2023 Program starting mid-June.

Our most successful fellows are described as intellectually curious, self-starters, ambitious, and engaged, with strong written and analytical skills. This is a great opportunity to assist with an array of firm matters and examine the next generation of startups and innovation. This internship is open to undergraduate and graduate students, in addition to other professionals. The approximate time commitment is 20–25 hours per week. In addition to core responsibilities outlined below, fellows are also offered structured lunch-and-learn seminars to gain a deeper understanding of startups and venture capital.

This is an unpaid position, with sponsorship for course credit available.

To apply, please complete this application form by Friday, May 12th, 2023

Responsibilities:

Core role responsibilities will include:

• Conducting preliminary reviews of prospective investments within the IFP due diligence framework
• Assisting with sourcing prospective investment opportunities, including attending demo days and reviewing databases
• Completing research reports examining startup, investment, and innovation trends within an assigned industry & subsector

Additionally, ad hoc projects will be scoped out throughout your experience, some of which include:

1. Sourcing & Analysis

• Assist with refining outbound deal sourcing process
• Ad hoc due diligence research projects

2. Operations & Finance

• Assist with Salesforce data entry and maintenance
• Support recurring monthly and quarterly financial reporting
• Complete financial models -Assist with operational and technology-related improvement projects

3. Marketing & Content

• Write blog posts
• Assist with expanding social media presence
• Support production of monthly firm newsletter
• Complete comparative review of peer group’s marketing presence.

Application Deadline: Friday, May 12th, 2023

Tentative Interview Dates: Week of May 22nd

Tentative Start Date: Monday, June 12th, 2023

Tentative End Date: Friday, August 11th, 2023

To apply, please complete this application form by Friday, May 12th, 2023. Please reach out with any questions.

During the fall, IDEA Fund Partners hosted our latest class of Venture Fellows, a program to provide on-the-job experience to students and young professionals looking to learn more about venture capital. These Fellows from around the country were not merely observers on the sidelines — they played an integral part in the team by being fully immersed in the deal review, due diligence, and broader strategy of the firm. Their contributions and insights will last much longer than the ten weeks they spent with us. They have shared some of their biggest takeaways from the fall:

Aaron Chen, Northeastern University

The IFP Fellowship has been a game changer for me. For students, Venture Capital can often feel out of reach or like its behind an iron curtain. This fellowship has given me a huge amount of exposure to what working in this industry is like, from doing initial diligence, to taking calls with founders, to doing a deep dive into a niche sector. The team did a tremendous job of providing me with the foundation I needed to learn the ropes, while also empowering me to operate independently as a VC and add value to the firm in creative ways. Its been an incredible learning experience.

Iza Noor, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School

My time at IDEA Fund Partners has given me a better understanding of how VCs make decisions about providing funding and evaluating pitches from different founders. I realize that a strong thesis alignment is just one of the many factors that go into assessing startups. At IDEA Fund Partners, I was lucky enough to review early-stage startups, present my findings to experts in the space, and research potential future verticals that IDEA Fund Partners can expand into. Lewis, Lister, and Chris were wonderful in providing their input and guiding me along the way. Myself and the other fellows were truly integrated into the team. I look forward to using the knowledge I have gained here in my future career.

Kash Patel, Duke University — The Fuqua School of Business

The most fulfilling part of working with IDEA Fund Partners was the amount of ownership and trust given to us. From day one you are not just doing deal diligence but providing an actual recommendation on the deal itself. With this ownership and trust came valuable learning experiences from the partners themselves and understanding how to think about what makes a deal exciting to invest it and how to validate that excitement by knowing where to look in the diligence process. This was my first experience in Venture Capital and the level of support provided from IFP was nothing short of amazing throughout the fellowship. To understand how you want to look at potential deals is a takeaway I can take with me for the rest of my career.

Lizzy Isgar, Duke University — The Fuqua School of Business

Idea Fund Partners walks the walk when it comes to empowering female representation in entrepreneurship and venture capital. The fellowship allowed me to leverage my operating experience in tech to learn the skills needed to conduct early-stage investments. During my time with IFP, I had the opportunity to perform due diligence on 50+ companies, analyze industry trends, and source new investment opportunities in the future of work and home.

Melissa Kim, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School

One of the greatest qualities of the IFP Fellowship is its accessibility to the VC curious and career hopefuls like me. From the application to interviews, the team provided an open dialogue that was thoughtful and deliberate for both the program and the individual candidate. The fellowship itself provided a hands-on opportunity to analyze an array of early stage deals and challenged us to examine problems, solutions, founders and the future with discerning eyes. This opportunity helped me to grow as a professional, expanding my ability to screen startups and I felt my voice was valued in our face-to-face meetings with partners. I appreciated IFP’s diligent effort to contribute to the diversification of both the VC industry and funding for early stage founders. I would participate in the fellowship again if time permitted, but I’m thankful for the lasting connection to Idea Fund Partners.

Nate Wilson, Brigham Young University (JD/MBA)

What I enjoyed most about the IFP fellowship, and what surprised me the most, was how involved the partners, Lister and Chris, were throughout the process. They were willing to share their insights and made all of us an integral part of the process. We got to see how they approached an investment opportunity, both from a thesis perspective and from a market perspective. Overall, it was a great experience and one that gave me the chance to build pattern recognition and learn from the best!

Sarah Peters, Duke University — The Fuqua School of Business

The IDEA Fund Fellowship was an amazing experience that allowed me to understand and experience the inner workings of an early stage venture firm. I really enjoyed exploring deals, sitting in on partner meetings, and working with members of the team to help explore potential thesis topics. This was an amazing experience to learn in real-time as well as gain valuable feedback from venture experts. I truly feel as though I have gained the knowledge to help me navigate the world of venture moving forward!

As one of the oldest and most active early-stage venture capital firms in the Southeast, IDEA Fund Partners’ investment philosophy has been honed from years of experience. Based in Durham, NC, we fund entrepreneurs who are applying technology and business model innovations to industries in the earliest stages of digital disruption with an emphasis on overlooked people, places and stages.

We are currently looking for our next Venture Fellows to join Idea Fund Partners’ Spring 2023 Program starting mid-January.

Our most successful fellows are described as intellectually curious, self-starters, ambitious, and engaged, with strong written and analytical skills. This is a great opportunity to assist with an array of firm matters and examine the next generation of startups and innovation. This internship is open to undergraduate and graduate students, in addition to other professionals. The approximate time commitment is 10–15 hours per week. In addition to core responsibilities outlined below, fellows are also offered structured lunch-and-learn seminars to gain a deeper understanding of startups and venture capital.

This is an unpaid position, with sponsorship for course credit available.

To apply, please complete this application form by Friday, December 16th, 2022

Responsibilities:

Core role responsibilities will include:

• Conducting preliminary reviews of prospective investments within the IFP due diligence framework
• Assisting with sourcing prospective investment opportunities, including attending demo days and reviewing databases
• Completing research reports examining startup, investment, and innovation trends within an assigned industry & subsector

Additionally, ad hoc projects will be scoped out throughout your experience, some of which include:

1. Sourcing & Analysis

• Assist with refining outbound deal sourcing process
• Ad hoc due diligence research projects

2. Operations & Finance

• Assist with Salesforce data entry and maintenance
• Support recurring monthly and quarterly financial reporting
• Complete financial models -Assist with operational and technology-related improvement projects

3. Marketing & Content

• Write blog posts
• Assist with expanding social media presence
• Support production of monthly firm newsletter
• Complete comparative review of peer group’s marketing presence.

Application Deadline: Friday, December 23rd, 2022

Tentative Interview Dates: Week of January 9th

Tentative Start Date: Monday, January 23rd, 2023

Tentative End Date: Friday, May 26th, 2023

To apply, please complete this application form by Friday, December 23rd, 2022. Please reach out to Lewis Burnham with any questions.

by Chris Langford, Partner

I’ve had several conversations recently with investors and homeowners who know my background and the topic always turns to “how much do you think houses are going to depreciate?” Clearly, a great deal of anxiety is present in the market today as the Fed appears hellbent on crushing inflation through continued hawkish interest rate hikes and the historical mental model for housing consumption has been “rates go up, prices go down”. People are generally shocked when I tell them that I don’t really see considerable pressure on home prices outside of those who may be forced to sell a marginal asset in the very near-term.

Before we jump in, I want to clarify that I have a somewhat poor track record at short term predictions but a really solid track record in both intermediate and longer term. This does not constitute advice on what to do with your portfolio or what your Mom should do with her house.

So why do I think pricing will remain relatively resilient? Four main factors.

Supply Constraint

Every year the US needs roughly 1–1.2 million new housing units to meet demand (800–900k for new household formation and 200–300k for replacement). From January 2008 through 2014, new home construction plummeted below replacement rate with a nadir in April 2009 of annualized housing starts below 500k. After rebounding in 2014, new housing starts have hovered around the replacement rate and never made up for the 6 years of significant underdevelopment. During this same time period, institutions and investors began snapping up real estate at the entry-level and in desirable short-term rental locations (see next section). Furthering supply constraint is an aging population who is living longer, healthier lives and wishing to do so in their homes. 65+ households are the fastest growing segment with the 85+ sub segment growing at an even faster rate. The combination of these factors means there is a supply constraint for an asset that everyone needs and wants. This does not make for a precipitous pricing adjustment.

This is especially true at the entry-level of homes. The cost of building a home (from materials to labor to governmental impact fees) makes it nearly impossible for homebuilders to build a smaller footprint home and turn a profit. In the 1970s and 1980s, between 1/2 and 1/3 of new homes were under 1,400 square feet. That dwindled to 1/5in the 1990s and 2000s and today is less than 1/10th. If the vast majority of new homes built in the last 30+ years are larger in square footage, it seems natural that overall pricing would climb substantially. This furthers the idea that “pricing” as measured by median will not decline substantially.

Investor Ownership

It has never been easier to monetize residential real estate. Property management services and software allow landlords to find, screen and manage tenants in ways that were not possible just 10 years ago. Marketplaces make it simple to drive demand for short term rentals which yield higher rents. As a result, institutional and private investor capital has flooded the market to purchase homes over the last 5 years. In my home town of Charlotte, investors made up 33% of all homes purchased in Q1 of 2022 and similar markets such as Jacksonville, FL and Birmingham, AL experienced the same. Investors underwrite a property on its ability to cash flow whereas an owner-occupant is looking at the expense they can afford. This makes the market clearing price equal to the present value of cash flows assumed and not just “what is desirable and who can afford it.”. And if you are an investor, what incentive would you have to sell off a high yielding, cash flow producing asset into a down market in which there is little to no replacement investment for that cash? Further, if affordability is a challenge and people are forced to rent, is that not a good thing for your business? All this adds up to limited inventory hitting the market which further supports pricing.

Stricter Underwriting Standards

I began my “housing” career in 2005 as an investment banker focused on homebuilders, building products, distribution and contractors. The factors that drove the insanity of that market are not what is here today. During the housing crash of 2009–2011, a significant amount of the risk and pricing issues were related to lax underwriting standards and poor risk management in the capital markets. Mortgages were being written with no income, employment or credit verification and multiple mortgages were given to people without the financial means or assets to support them. The mania of “homes never go down” ran rampant, people leveraged themselves to the fullest to own as many homes as they could in an effort to resell them, most of the mortgages were short-term, interest-only ARMs that were used as short-term financing until you flipped the home for the next one, and all the risk was sold off through CMBS. After the crash, lending standards got strict. Gone were the days of no verification. Banks enforced down payment standards, high credit scores and strict underwriting. This means that all things considered, people in their homes today can actually AFFORD to be in those homes and they will be expected to perform on their mortgages. Again, lending to high credit individuals at historically low rates does not support a pricing adjustment or a flood of inventory.

Lack of Replacement

If you are a homeowner today and have purchased prior to the rise of interest rates, you are the beneficiary of historically low cost of capital and reasonable housing prices. If you sell your home today, you will need a way to replace your purchasing power. Selling a home typically costs 6% + repairs and closing costs. Even if you extract every dollar of equity gained during the last few years, the transaction costs will eat into your ability to roll that into another property. Layer on the likelihood that your interest rate would double, there is no way for you to sell your home and get the same quality of house today. So you are staying put unless someone pays your full asking price (or more to cover the increase in financing costs). This again reduces the supply or the willingness to take a lower price.

Something’s gotta give right? To me, innovation is the way to increase attainability of housing. The era of affordability may be over but entrepreneurs are busy building new models today that will make attaining a home (even if it is not under the historical mental model of ownership) possible. I will dive into this and the changing paradigm of what it means to “own” a home in future blog posts.

Over the summer, IDEA Fund Partners hosted our latest class of Venture Fellows, a program to provide on-the-job experience to students and young professionals looking to learn more about venture capital. These Fellows from around the country were not merely observers on the sidelines -they played an integral part in the team by being fully immersed in the deal review, due diligence, and broader strategy of the firm. Their contributions and insights will last much longer than the ten weeks they spent with us. They have shared some of their biggest takeaways from the summer:

Manu Pareek, University of Georgia

“Being a fellow with IDEA Fund Partners has been an outstanding introduction to venture capital. From the onset, we were given immense responsibility in initial due diligence and deal analysis. Presenting our findings to the rest of the group helped build the importance of having a true sense of conviction. I am very grateful that I was able to be a part of this fellowship, as it helped shape what I hope to do in the future as a career.”

Chandler Abbott, University of Arkansas

“My time at IDEA Fund Partners has given me the tools to interpret what makes a good early stage investment and if there is an alignment between a startup and an investment thesis. The repetitions of analyzing real deals are invaluable. Developing a conviction for a startup and presenting a deal has challenged and influenced the way I approach thinking about markets and strategy. Thank you Lister, Chris, John, and Lewis for allowing me to learn from you and I’m looking forward to seeing the continued success of your firm.”

Chase Eller, Claremont McKenna

“The Fellowship at IDEA Fund Partners provided an excellent opportunity to learn more about the world of venture capital. Having exposure to the processes that IFP uses for evaluating sectors, deals, founders, and beyond was extremely educational. The program gives fellows meaningful responsibility that challenges them to think critically and be resourceful. The program was there to provide support and guidance and was an experience that I am sure will be extremely helpful moving forward.”

Jake Melman-Rogers, University of Virginia

“I could not ask for a more fulfilling professional experience than my fellowship with IDEA Fund Partners. Over the past three months, my knowledge of the Venture Capital landscape grew exponentially, but more importantly, I learned to hold strong opinions loosely and recognize what I don’t know. I was thrilled that the work we did this summer was real and valuable. IFP Fellows work in all areas of the venture capital ecosystem; from sourcing companies and attending demo days, to conducting industry research and assisting in due diligence, IFP Fellows get to do it all. This rare work experience, coupled with the ability to learn from some of the industry’s best, makes IDEA Fund Partners’ Venture Fellow program second to none. I am immensely grateful to Lewis, Lister, Chris, and John for their leadership and mentorship this summer.”

Rohit Jain, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School

“The Idea Fund Partners fellowship provided invaluable insight into venture capital. Venture Capital is really more of an art than a science. It’s not just raising capital from LPs and investing in startups, there is a lot that goes on behind the scenes to operate a fund. As a previous angel investor in startups, I appreciated learning the framework for evaluating opportunities and participating in weekly partner meetings. The Idea Fund Partners team offered tremendous knowledge and expertise, which has enabled me to evaluate companies and ideas with a different perspective. Grateful for the opportunity to see how Institutional investors deploy capital into disruptive startups!”

Ryan Pettit, Dartmouth College

“The IFP Fellowship offered exposure to multiple facets of VC, providing a unique opportunity to not only learn from, but actively contribute to, an established VC firm. During my time at IFP, I was able to analyze startups, attend demo days and partner pitches, conduct due diligence, and complete a culminating supply chain research project in order to contribute to IFP’s thesis work. The structure of this fellowship provided an opportunity to approach assignments with a degree of autonomy and independence while allowing for ample room to ask for guidance or help. Lewis, Lister, and Chris were tremendously helpful, creating a framework for professional growth by constantly providing detailed feedback on pitches and projects. Most importantly — this fellowship allowed me to connect with unique, intelligent, and ambitious peers. Working with the other fellows helped me to refine my approach to researching emerging verticals while also allowing me to connect to a talented cohort of peers who I hope I will remain in contact with far after the end of this fellowship. Thank you to the IFP team for creating this incredible opportunity.”

For the past several years we have built the IDEA Fund Partners Venture Fellows Program. The aim of the program is to provide on-the-job experience to student and young professionals looking to learn more about venture capital. These Fellows from around the country are not merely observers on the sidelines — they play an integral part in the team by being fully immersed in the deal review, due diligence, and broader strategy of the firm.

Now, as our firm continues to grow as we look towards our next fund, we are expanding our fellowship beyond our investment team and bringing on our first ever IDEA Fund Community and Brand Fellow.

We are excited to bring on someone who is passionate about communications and marketing — with a bit of experience — to assist with brand management. In this role you will help manage the IDEA Fund Partners brand, marketing, and communications strategy and collaborate with the full IFP team as we continue to establish and maintain our brand by communicating and demonstrating our core pillars to our internal and external stakeholders — portfolio companies, limited partners, and the overall venture capital and tech ecosystems. This position will work closely with the IFP investment team to implement and help execute programming, communications, content, and portfolio support. This is an incredible opportunity to work with startup founders and teams, build relationships with investors, and put your personal touch on the marketing and communications strategy for an early-stage VC firm.

This internship is open to undergraduate and graduate students, in addition to other professionals. The approximate time commitment is 10–15 hours per week and be responsible for the core responsibilities outlined below.

This is an unpaid position, with sponsorship for course credit available.

To apply, please complete this application form.

Responsibilities May Include:

• Write and publish website, social media and newsletter posts and ensure that every statement is fact checked and approved by relevant parties.
• Help design, plan, and execute in-person and virtual events to strengthen the connectivity and learning among our portfolio companies, investors, and broader IDEA Fund community.
• Follow an already clearly defined process for portfolio funding announcements with enthusiasm to continually improve on that process.
• Help grow portfolio resources including curated perks, best practices, job board and directory of domain experts and other vendors.
• Help build scalable systems and processes to identify areas where the team can lean in and be supportive to C-suite leadership in the portfolio.
• Assist with maintenance and improvement of existing programs that enable founders to help and support each other including our internal community portal, founder newsletter, and Quarterly Founder Series.
• Help manage the flow of internal communications and ensure the sharing of the announcements across appropriate channels.

About You:

• You enjoy working on something different every day, and can flex your skills from email marketing to event planning to content creation.
• You’re highly adaptable and have a “no task is too big or too small” attitude.
• You enjoy building new skills, and are constantly reading and learning about new topics, always absorbing information from the people around you.
• You’re able to work independently developing new ideas, conducting research, and sharing what you learn with others.
• You’re passionate about community building and fostering connections both IRL and online.
• You thrive in a fast-paced environment and are always ready for the next challenge.
• You run a tight ship, seamlessly keeping track of deadlines and projects. You thrive when you’re juggling many initiatives at once.

Required Qualifications:

This internship is open to undergraduate and graduate students, in addition to other professionals.

• Excellent communication, writing and editing skills; you instinctively tailor your voice to different audiences, from investor communications to portfolio companies to consumer social media
• Proficient using email automation tools and other marketing automation technology
• Attention to detail and visual aesthetics, up to date on the latest social media trends
• Highly organized and exceptional time management
• Emerging track record of managing projects/key programs within teams
• Demonstrated ability to anticipate needs, think on-the-fly, and provide tactical counsel when called upon

Application deadline: Friday, October 28th, 2022

To apply, please complete this application form. Please reach out to Lewis Burnham with any questions.

As a VC, this question is asked of you a lot. Sometimes it is genuine curiosity of a founder or another VC who wants to understand your background. Often, it is a veiled (or, often, not so veiled) shot at your credentials that insinuates that you couldn’t possibly perform your job effectively if you haven’t sat in the shoes of a founder.

Generally speaking, my answer to this question is “nothing.” That response was formed through a combination of two things: 1) an extreme appreciation and respect for what a founder goes through and 2) my personal imposter syndrome to even try to compare the one thing I have built to the struggle that most founders go through. That said, I have been doing a great deal of reflection on this question recently and I am starting to think that my answer should be “Lowe’s Ventures.”

Blasphemy! How can you compare “building” something in the safety net of a Fortune 50 company? The audacity. The nerve. Well, here’s my story. Hold judgement until the end.

“Idea” Phase

Lowe’s Ventures started as an idea on a proverbial napkin. The problem statement was this: I (as strategy head) needed better access to information about the future of our industry and entrepreneurs in the home / housing / retail industries could benefit from capital, institutional knowledge and support of a major player in their space. The purported product was a venture fund whereby I gained knowledge through 1,000 sourcing and knowledge sharing meetings with great entrepreneurs which I could translate into actionable corporate strategy and in return I would do my best to support as many of them as possible with capital, partnerships or knowledge. I had no background in this area and no roadmap for how to actually accomplish this but I knew it needed to exist.

“Pre-Seed” Phase

Prior to “raising money”, I decided that we needed to solve for three core elements: the team to help me, the product and the initial go to market strategy. To solve the first, I carved out a headcount from my Corporate Development team to work on this full-time and then recruited a five person “board of advisors” from inside who had various roles within the organization (VP and SVP level executives across a range of functions). To craft the product, I determined that we needed extensive “user” testing where users were defined as internal constituents, founders and other VCs (both corporate and non). We created a standardized survey about corporate venture capital (i.e. stages, rationale, check size, assets, team composition, etc.) and then posted up at CVC conferences and went to major innovation hubs and asked this to nearly 100 groups. From that user feedback, we crafted our initial product and go-to-market strategy which we presented to our “Seed Investor” to get funding. We also developed a framework for creating a continuous feedback cycle to refine our product post-launch. They loved it and off we went.

“Early-Stage” Phase

Upon launch, our goal was to create a recurring 6 month feedback loop whereby we made assumptions about how best to create value for both sides of our marketplace (i.e. founders and corporate), tested those assumptions in the market and then met with our advisory team to share our learnings, refine our product and solidify our measures of success. Elements of the product that we tested included asset allocation (funds vs. direct, stage, lead vs. syndicate), sourcing strategies (markets to source from, accelerators to work with, co-investor networks), human resources (headcount, roles, compensation models, office locations) and return metrics(learnings vs. partnerships vs. financial ROI).

During this phase, we tested several models. We invested mostly in directs, but also sponsored accelerators and became an LP in a fund. We led deals, wrote second-largest check syndicate investments and experimented with “yes over coffee” quick checks. We spent months in major markets and also went on nationwide tours of more than 40 cities to benchmark talent, opportunity and deal values. In the end, we found product-market fit. For entrepreneurs, we were a Future of Home & Retail focused VC sourcing and investing in major markets who can make quick, early-stage direct investment decisions, has a ton of industry-specific knowledge and connections and is willing to facilitate intros both in our building and beyond. For our corporate parent, we were a constant source of later-stage pipeline to innovation partners and an internal strategy team who can develop third-horizon strategic options with market validation. We could literally see the future being created and we became great at piecing it all together and productizing it for use to both constituents.

“Growth” Phase

The few years we had product-market fit and were growing were amazing. Our network was expanding rapidly, our processes were refined and our reputation was stellar. The team had grown to a whopping three full-timers and it was like clockwork. The entrepreneurial market REALLY wanted what we were selling. And the internal market was starting to see what we could drive. We had strong executive champions and it felt like we were on the precipice of something big.

We maintained a steady pace of 4 new investments per year (slow by today’s standards and slow for a financial VC, but solid for a corporate who was cutting its teeth) and followed on to support our portfolio as they raised new rounds. Our market insights landed us spots keynoting the national conferences of Zillow and USAA Homeowners Insurance. I was asked by many of the largest Sand Hill Road firms to come in and share our housing innovation learnings and theses. Life was good.

Market Forces Leading to an “Exit”

Unfortunately for us, the base business was going through some challenges and an activist investor decided it was time for a change of stewardship. I had been warned by my CVC colleagues that management change is the kiss of death (or at least the ultimate challenge to our viability). But I felt so good about what we had done and the reputation we had built. That said, we were not “default alive” which meant we were not set up in a way to live without external funding from our parent. We had presented several options to turn Lowe’s Ventures into an external entity with committed capital so that we could weather such a storm but to no avail. And the change of stewardship focused on a back-to-basics strategy which did not align well with what we were exploring in the third-horizon. Thus, we found ourselves in a funding crunch.

Fortunately, we had built something of value which was able to be sold. In managing those positions to an exit, what was built has already returned multiples of original capital with several category-defining companies still active. And as for those involved, life after Lowe’s Ventures turned out great. My partner in crime who helped me build it from the outset went on to work for one of the largest tech PE firms in the US. And our analyst we hired? He is a founding partner at one of the largest crypto funds in the US. More importantly: they are great people who I would work with again in a heartbeat.

While we didn’t fulfill our mission, we built something to be proud of and learned a ton. We exited our positions with grace, stood by our founders through and after the transition and all three of us still serve entrepreneurs to this day. You may say that what we did was “easy” or that we didn’t really risk anything to build it and, deep down, I agree with some of that sentiment. That is why when people ask me “what have you built, anyway” I have historically said “nothing.” But I am thinking about trying out “Lowe’s Ventures” in the near future.

As one of the oldest and most active early-stage venture capital firms in the Southeast, IDEA Fund Partners’ investment philosophy has been honed from years of experience. Based in Durham, NC, we fund entrepreneurs who are applying technology and business model innovations to industries in the earliest stages of digital disruption with an emphasis on overlooked people, places and stages.

We are currently looking for our next Venture Fellows to join Idea Fund Partners’ Fall 2022 Program starting mid-September.

Our most successful fellows are described as intellectually curious, self-starters, ambitious, and engaged, with strong written and analytical skills. This is a great opportunity to assist with an array of firm matters and examine the next generation of startups and innovation. This internship is open to undergraduate and graduate students, in addition to other professionals. The approximate time commitment is 10–15 hours per week. In addition to core responsibilities outlined below, fellows are also offered structured lunch-and-learn seminars to gain a deeper understanding of startups and venture capital.

This is an unpaid position, with sponsorship for course credit available.

To apply, please complete this application form by Wednesday, August 31st, 2022

Responsibilities:

Core role responsibilities will include:

• Conducting preliminary reviews of prospective investments within the IFP due diligence framework
• Assisting with sourcing prospective investment opportunities, including attending demo days and reviewing databases
• Completing research reports examining startup, investment, and innovation trends within an assigned industry & subsector

Additionally, ad hoc projects will be scoped out throughout your experience, some of which include:

1. Sourcing & Analysis

• Assist with refining outbound deal sourcing process
• Ad hoc due diligence research projects

2. Operations & Finance

• Assist with Salesforce data entry and maintenance
• Support recurring monthly and quarterly financial reporting
• Complete financial models -Assist with operational and technology-related improvement projects

3. Marketing & Content

• Write blog posts
• Assist with expanding social media presence
• Support production of monthly firm newsletter
• Complete comparative review of peer group’s marketing presence.

Application Deadline: Wednesday, August 31st, 2022

Tentative Interview Dates: September 7th — 9th, 2022

Tentative Start Date: Monday, September 19th, 2022

Tentative End Date: Friday, December 16th, 2022

To apply, please complete this application form by Wednesday, August 31st, 2022. Please reach out to Lewis Burnham with any questions.

The venture capital industry has a major diversity problem that is both stark and systemic — and the statistics are startling. Entrepreneurs of color receive less than 1/3 of the total startup dollars as compared to their white counterparts while female-led companies raised only 2.2% of total industry dollars compared to their male counterparts.

We suspect that much of this has to do with the composition of who makes those decisions and how those decisions get made. According to the NVCA/Deloitte survey titled “Diversity & Inclusion in the VC Industry,” 76% of the entire VC workforce is white while 86% of all investment partners are male. Reinforcing these issues are many industry practices such as requiring warm introductions, over-weighting being a previous founder or reliance on “gut instinct” and rules of thumb to determine what investments to make in early stages.

We believe that change starts from within and we are eager and focused to begin implementing new diversity initiatives at Janus Venture Partners. Success often comes from focus and, as such, we have determined that our success in this area will ultimately be measured by a single metric: the percentage of our portfolio that includes an overlooked founder. Leveraging studies by Kauffman Fellows, First Round Capital and Boston Consulting Group, an overlooked founder will be defined as a co-founder who is Black, Latinx or female. This definition is not perfect, but it enables us to measure our progress as a firm towards a more inclusive investment process.

The plan of action that we are undertaking comprised of three key components:

1. Measurement and Accountability: we will track diversity metrics for each startup that enters our funnel and review our diversity metrics on a monthly basis track our progress across all stages from initial screening to Partner pitch to term sheet. This will help us identify where our deficiencies are and enable us to make changes to our process to ensure a more inclusive portfolio.
2. Intentional Expansion of our Network: we will set aside time each week to connect with funds, accelerators and entrepreneurs focused on and comprised of overlooked persons in the markets from which we source. Our goal is to create mutually beneficial relationships with these networks to collectively move the needle on inclusion within the venture community.
3. Reduction of Bias in our Deal Review Process: we will continually refine our deal review process to reduce the bias embedded within its scoring algorithm. Areas of focus will be re-calibrating the scoring for referred deals, rethinking how we evaluate teams (less weight to where they went to school, where they have worked, and/or past entrepreneurial endeavors and greater emphasis on competencies such as integrity, ability to overcome adversity and market knowledge), and weighting team composition in a manner reflective of the data that supports diversity as a driver of economic outcomes. As we track our metrics through the funnel, we continually evaluate the way we score deals to determine where hidden biases may be reducing quality throughput.

In addition to these immediate operational changes, we are developing plans to increase diversity within our organization. This includes a thorough review and overhaul of our Venture Partner program, a more inclusive hiring process for future investment team members and actions to increase diversity within our limited partner ranks. Each of these steps are more nuanced in nature and challenging to implement for a smaller firm such as ours but we are fully committed to a long-term vision of greater inclusion and diversity of thought within JVP.

What does success look like? Our initial hypothesis is that our portfolios should more closely resemble the diversity of the markets that we source from. Using a combination of general population, working age population and educational attainment statistics, a more representative portfolio would be: 51–57% with a female founder, 12–21% with a Black founder, and 15–17% with a Latinx founder. These are not perfect measures and will serve as measuring sticks, not explicit quotas, to see how our funnel and portfolio compares to society more broadly. As we implement this action plan, we will provide public reports on the impacts of these changes and our steps forward to help with accountability on our end and to hopefully provide useful insights to and incite dialogue with our peers.

The action plan that we have outlined is not being undertaken purely because it is the right moral thing to do, but because it is an opportunity for driving returns to our investors. Companies with a female founder performed 63% better and are more likely to exit than investments with all-male founding teams while ethnically diverse founding teams were found to outperform all white teams by 30%. Thus, we realize that improving diversity in our portfolio is an opportunity in the marketplace where everyone wins.

Mary Engelbreit once said, “If you don’t like something change it; if you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.” At JVP, it is our hope that by doing the latter we will do our part in accomplishing the former. We recognize that the industry and our firm have a long journey ahead and that our announced actions today are the first steps in that journey. But we are also excited because these actions are not a change in our mission but are the culmination of much discussion and planning that we have been having as a firm to fulfill our stated mission of “Serving the Under-served”.

Sincerely,

The Janus Venture Partners Team

The tightness of the current labor market has, among other things, increased the urgency and budgets for companies to streamline and automate workflows. With 11.3M job openings in the US at the end of January 2022 — up 60% from a year ago — it’s now less about taking cost out of the business and more about getting business done at all. With the “Great Resignation” upon us, most companies will not be able to hire their way into solid growth.

The bulk of today’s US economy, nearly 77% as recently as 2018, is in the services sector; healthcare, retail, hospitality and financial services among the largest of those. Of these four sectors, financial services has, by far, seen the greatest strides in using technology to simplify and automate processes. For example, think of the ease at which you can access and move money from your bank account or trade stocks(or cryptocurrencies). Conversely, think of how painful it remains, for both the customer and service provider, to open a bank account, apply for insurance or, heaven forbid, obtain a mortgage. Why is this?

These activities all rely on the collection, transformation and analysis of unstructured data. For instance, when we at IFP renew our D&O insurance each year, we have to upload financial statements, fund documents (contracts)and a completed application with various information about our business holdings. All of these are PDF documents and none of them are formatted the same way or with the same data from one firm to the next. This makes it a very hard process to automate as humans must read the submitted documents to extract the needed data, most likely re-entering that data into a spreadsheet or system of record where it then can be compiled and analyzed.

Some of you are probably thinking “this is what RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is for!”. Well yes, but RPA doesn’t have any intelligence. These tools do not have the ability to look through a document and pull out the salient parts if the document does not have the exact same format every time (unstructured data). So you might then suggest that you teach an (ML) model to look for and identify the salient parts of a document for extraction? The issue with the (potential) application of AI/ML to this problem is that, until now, you have generally needed a (very) large dataset on which to train the model and many of these tasks are serving the “long tail”; i.e. a very large dataset does not exist.

This is where our newest portfolio company, Sortspoke, shines. Its intelligent document processing platform helps companies extract any data from any kind of document. With its intuitive user interface and powerful ML engine, Sortspoke can begin to identify and extract data from documents with as little as 10 training pieces. This means that in less than one day, Sortspoke can start to increase the efficiency of humans, ultimately by as much as 10x.

Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, Sortspoke was founded by Jasper Li to solve a problem that he had seen throughout his decade as a consultant with PWC where he helped companies streamline and transform operations. When we saw the pitch at a demo day last Fall, we saw a company playing in a large and growing market with compelling customer adoption and strong founder/market fit.

As we worked to understand the market and competition better, it took a good bit of research and conversations with existing and potential customers to understand where Sortspoke fits and why (we believe)it has meaningful differentiation. You’ve got general purpose AI/ML platforms from giants including Amazon, Google and Microsoft on one end of the spectrum and RPA platforms from fast-growing providers such as Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism(now SS&C Technologies)and UiPath on the other. In the middle you have various venture-backed companies including Indico Data, Hyperscience and Workfusion.

In speaking with customers across the insurance vertical, we found that many (if not most) have tried and failed with one or more of these competitors. Though many of them advertise the ability to work with unstructured data and quickly get to productivity, the reality invariably falls short of the promise for many applications. When given the chance to try Sortspoke, customers are amazed at: a) how easy it is to use and b) how quickly it becomes self-learning and productive.

Jasper and his small team have accomplished an incredible amount with the money raised thus far. They have a great product and happy customers with strong organic growth. We’re excited to have co-led a USD $4.5M Series A with a major US insurer to provide Sortspoke the capital it needs to go after the market aggressively.