Can this 26-year-old change the face of venture capital?
Peter Boyce speaking to the students of Harvard's CS50 class

Can this 26-year-old change the face of venture capital?

At the age of 21, Amadou Crookes thought he had the future pretty much figured out.

A computer science major at Tufts University, Crookes spent the summer after his junior year interning with Google. To his parent’s delight, the tech giant made him a generous offer to come back full time after graduation. He had been flirting with the possibility of starting his own company based on an idea he had with some friends, but Google seemed like the safe choice. With no trust fund to fall back on or much in the way of savings, Crookes couldn’t figure out how he could support himself while striking out on his own at such a young age.

Then he met Peter Boyce.

Boyce, 26, is the co-founder of Rough Draft Ventures, a fund that he started his sophomore year at Harvard that helps student entrepreneurs receive small sums of money to start companies. The premise is simple: College students like Crookes can pitch their startup ideas to Rough Draft campus teams comprised of student volunteers who vet the pitches and grant funding when it makes sense. It was Boyce’s team who not only first spotted the potential of Cymbal, Crookes’ Brooklyn-based music discovery startup, but invested $20,000. Boyce then worked with Crookes and his co-founders to raise more than $1 million from outside investors before they graduated so they could pursue the potential of the app full time.

"We would not be where we are today without Peter,” said Crookes. “It’s just that simple.”

Since 2012, Boyce’s goal has been to help thousands of students across the country make the same decision Crookes made. With more college kids interested in ditching traditional career paths to start out on their own, the VC says now is a better time than ever to lead a student-focused fund. He is not alone in his thesis. Rough Draft itself is backed by Boston-based venture capital firm General Catalyst, and other notable funds like First Round Capital have started student funding programs as well.

Crookes (left) with his co-founders Mario Hall and Gabe Jacobs

In the four years since Rough Draft started, Boyce’s team has backed over 80 student teams from more than 14 different campuses that have gone on to raise $230 million in follow-on capital. The hope is that a few of these growing startups become the next Airbnb or Facebook, which were both founded by college students as well.

“Google is always going to be there, but the opportunity a student founder has to build something with his or her friends is only here today,” Boyce said. “You shouldn’t have to be from a wealthy family or go to an Ivy League school to start a company. Folks with great ideas deserve a chance.”

12x charisma

David Fialkow, a co-founder and managing director at General Catalyst, got tipped off to Boyce soon after Rough Draft launched on Harvard’s campus. While the notion of investing in student-led startups seems old hat now, Fialkow said Boyce was onto something novel back in 2012. When his firm originally got involved with Rough Draft, Fialkow would support Boyce in small ways like allowing him to use their office in Harvard Square to host pizza mixers for fledgling entrepreneurs.

But once he saw Boyce go to work, he knew he wanted to get more formally involved.

“Peter has a really unique and incredible ability to spot talent and encourage people to be creative and dynamic at the same time,” said Fialkow. “He’s helpful, but not intrusive.”

Fialkow’s partner Joel Cutler said Boyce was one of the first to sit down and try to organize the influx of startup activity happening now on college campuses. An investor in Airbnb, Warby Parker and Jet, Cutler was impressed by Boyce’s ability to spot talent and help founders take an idea that may have started as a class project and turn it into an actual product.

“He is brilliant, charismatic — he has 12x the charisma of most — and helps enable people to do what they are most passionate about and best at… That’s a gift,” Cutler said.

It doesn’t take long to witness the charisma and energy in Boyce that Kaplan and Fialkow described. In September, I met up with him at General Catalyst’s office loft during an event he was hosting for Rough Draft’s growing New York community. We were supposed to sit down for an interview, but Boyce was too focused on hearing the latest from the founders and student partners he had with him in the room. For two hours, I watched as Boyce hopped from one conversation to another. His typical mode: Spot someone standing alone or off to the side of the room and energetically bring them into the discussion. At 9 p.m. he looked just as fresh as he did at 6 when there was just a handful left in the room.

Boyce speaks with guests at Rough Draft's New York event

“Speaking with students and figuring out the one or two ways I can be helpful to them is something that I would do any hour of the day and any day of the week,” he said. “I am trying to illuminate for them that there are ways to build a company and do something different that maybe what their parents told them they can accomplish. That’s what gets me excited.”

‘Actual success stories’

While the thesis behind Rough Draft is mostly unquestioned, Boyce knows he still has a lot to prove. Throwing a couple million dollars at students with startup ideas is one thing. Ensuring that they are set up for success — rather than failure — is another. He stressed that the set of resources that a 16-year-old student needs to grow an idea is entirely different than what founders with years of experience working at tech companies are looking for. It’s no surprise then that Boyce finds himself trying to figure out how he can provide access to mentors, tutorials on growth hacking and hackathons to students at scale.

Boyce’s community approach to investing in students has paid off with a couple early signs of success. Rough Draft was one of the first investors in Beepi, a used-car selling startup founded by MIT Sloan graduate Alejandro Resnik. The platform is now available in 16 metro areas and is looking to expand more with nearly $150 million in funding. Another win in Boyce’s book is his initial investment in Mark43, an online platform for law enforcement officers so they can share information more quickly. Founders Flo Mayr, Scott Crouch and Matt Polega launched the idea as a class project at Harvard and Rough Draft invested shortly after that. (Crouch made 2015’s Next Wave list: He told LinkedIn that law enforcement software used to look “like someone vomited 1,000 buttons onto a screen.") Now the startup has $40 million in funding and its software is already benefiting police teams across California.

Boyce at a Mark43 board meeting

“In the beginning we just had stories; now we can look at actual success stories,” Boyce said. “We spend a lot of time talking to students on as many campuses as possible."

Fialkow acknowledged that it will be several years before they will truly know if General Catalyst’s bet on Boyce will pay off. But the experienced investor is bullish that his 26-year-old prodigy has the right formula to build on the few wins he already has.

“The best venture firms are wrong over 50 percent of the time,” Fialkow said. “The best we can do is find founders who are stunningly smart and motivated. That is what Peter does.”

‘The largest network of young entrepreneurs in the country’

Boyce has aspirations for Rough Draft that go beyond being the first fund to spot the next great college founder or dorm room idea. The majority of venture capital dollars continues to go to white males, a reality that Boyce believes he can change. The prototypical Silicon Valley founder graduates from an elite school, enters into a top-tier boot camp like Y Combinator and then is introduced to cohort of venture capitalists who may be interested in funding their idea. Boyce believes this stereotypical path to venture funding is alienating a whole market of potential founders with great ideas.

Rather than solely set up networks at elite schools like Harvard and NYC, Boyce is recruiting teams at lesser known colleges like Olin College in Needham, Massachusetts and Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, in large part to diversify the base of founders his team interacts with. Eventually, he hopes to have a Rough Draft representative on every campus -- yes, every campus he says -- with the hopes of closing the opportunity gap for student founders entirely.

“I think we have a huge opportunity to really change the background and profile of venture capital and who a startup founder is,” said Boyce. “Each year that unfolds we see that we can have that impact.”

The impact that Boyce is having by bringing diverse leaders into the tech is already evident. On top of backing diverse founders like Crookes and Eva Shang of Legalist, Boyce has groomed community members like Nimi Katragadda and Medha Agarwal, who are beginning their careers in venture capital at firms like BoxGroup and Redpoint. For Boyce, diversity goes beyond skin color and gender into areas like work experiences and education. Bringing all these perspectives is not only key to the success of his venture, he says, but the success of venture capital moving forward.

“We are going to build the largest network of young entrepreneurs in the country,” he said. “The appetite for taking control of your own destiny is happening earlier and earlier. We are bringing to students the resources and partnerships to enable that opportunity.”

See more of LinkedIn's Next Wave list here.

Update: This story has been updated to reflect that Rough Draft portfolio teams have gone on to raise $230 million in follow-on capital.

Saransh Garg 🇮🇳

Serial Entrepreneur & Indian Market Expansion Strategist | 14+ Years | Helped 500+ Brands

6y

Great read, congrats to Peter Boyce II.

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Kedar Prabhu

VP Product Management

7y

I applaud what Amadou and his cofounders at Rough Draft are doing but "changing the face of venture capital" is a bit grandiose. Their big idea is to bring startup capital and business expertise to under-served and under-represented markets. Good for them and I hope they succeed but there is nothing groundbreaking about this notion. Keep up the good work fellows.

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