My Reflections on Building Ivey Venture Capital Club (5 Principles to Student Leadership)
Two years ago, I founded the Ivey Venture Capital Club, a community that transformed my final year and left me with many lessons in storytelling, building and managing. I had the chance to build a team of 15 people to make VC education more accessible for students.
Today I want to share five core beliefs that shaped me to become a better leader and friend
- Prioritize Your Team Over Anything Else
- Do Things That Don’t Scale
- Make This Your Identity
- Find Your Edge & Lean On It
- Be A Good Friend First
Prioritize Your Team Over Anything Else
If everything else fails, I want my executive team to look back and say they enjoyed being part of the club. I believe that the best indicator of your club’s success is how much your executive team felt valued and enjoyed working with you.
As a leader, you want to make them feel like they are part of the community, by investing in their personal and professional development, whether it is rock climbing socials after monthly meetings, mock interviews for jobs they are recruiting for, or introductions to firm reps they wanted to connect with. You have to invest in the team.
The second-best indicator is the talent your club can attract and retain the next year. Every year, school clubs get refreshed with new leadership, agenda, and operating environment. Prioritize your team development and establish a culture that lives past your tenure, a culture of excellence, a culture of fun, and a culture of something people want to be part of.
Do Things That Don’t Scale
If people see you are giving your all, they’ll be more likely to follow. True authority isn’t rooted in the difference in titles and roles, it is rooted in experience, trust and grit.
When we first launched our public Slack group, I sent over 200 cold DMs to new HBA1 (third-year students) at the beginning of the year, growing the group to over 140 people in its first month of launch. One day, my VP told me about how I reached out to a lot of her friends with the invite, and it has helped build her trust in me and the community.
On a caveat, it is not able to do all the heavy lifting yourself, your goal is to become an enabler of your VPs who have ideas they want to drive. The secret to doing this well is spending a lot of time with them and aligning on ideas they want to drive. Be stubborn about the vision and the problem, and be flexible on how they are done.
Make This Your Identity
You need to treat this club as if this is your whole identity. It is probably the one thing you can control that will give you maximum leverage.
People draw associations between individuals and ideas. I was known as the “VC guy running the VC club on campus”, and that was the entirety of my identity for the whole year. It is reflected in how you spend time (what people see you do), what you share on social media (what people hear you say), and word of mouth (a second-order effect of the first two — what your friends say about you to their friends). These all feed into the construct of your reputation, and a good reputation opens doors of opportunities for you and the club.
Find Your Edge (for School Clubs, It’s the Jobs)
In school clubs, job opportunities are the lead magnets to attract members and drive engagement. Our club is founded to make VC education accessible for students. We knew that having educational workshops and speaker sessions is important, but we also knew that providing VC internships and full-time opportunities is foundational to the club’s success.
We pitched the most prominent venture capital firms in Canada to connect with our students, and we offered to serve as a talent pipeline for internships. Since most funds have an informal hiring process, we were able to connect many students with the GPs and helped them land internships in venture capital and adjacent fields (e.g., venture studios/startups)
The relationships we shared with the VC ecosystem in Canada have become our competitive advantage, and it was something that became clear to me towards the end of the year. Find your competitive advantage and lean on it.
Be A Good Friend First
My last belief is that you have to become friends with the people you work with. It is a belief that has extended through my corporate experience as well. If you are trying to build great things, you need a great culture, to build a great culture, you need to build on mutual respect and a shared vision, and these are built upon informal mechanisms and relationships than anything.
You want to understand their motivation and personality, and you want to create a safe space for healthy debates and truthful reflections. This is not done by assigning names to roles or a recurring monthly town hall meeting, this is done through the random check-ins messages about your VPs midterms or interviews, and the casual lunches you have with the directors.
Especially in school clubs, where people are not paid to work for you, try to build a deep genuine connection with them where you talk about things beyond the club, and offer them the best experience possible.
I’d like to think that our directors and VPs who voluntarily decided to dedicate their time to building this club with you, you should think about how to give them the best experience possible, inside and outside of the club. And doing so helps you narrow the gaps between your goals, their goals and the club’s goals.
Lastly, I just wanted to say I’m grateful for the opportunity to build something that serves a bigger purpose and along the way, I have made deep connections with people that helped me grow as a better leader, friend and individual.
Credit to Vincent, Annie, Maharshi and everyone on the IVCC inaugural team.
