🏘️ Issue #75: StoryHouse Ventures - Our Ambitions and Origin Story
The origin story of Between the Lines and StoryHouse, and our plans to supercharge the careers and businesses of Claremont entrepreneurs
💬 Welcome to issue #75 of Between the Lines
Good morning & happy Thursday. To help close out the year, we take a break from our regular programming and have our very own Miles Bird, founder of Between the Lines, share the next chapter of our journey with Between the Lines readers. Hint: we’re going to put our money where our mouths have been. More on that below.👇
~ Josh & Miles
P.S. We’ve also got a brand-spanking new website. Check it out here at www.storyhousevc.com
📊 6th Street Stats: Launching StoryHouse Ventures
Today, I'm excited to share the next chapter in our journey with our Between the Lines readers: we've launched StoryHouse Ventures to partner with the next generation of Claremont's most promising early-stage entrepreneurs. We're fortunate to be backed by institutional investors and Claremont's most daring entrepreneurs and leaders. We've also had a busy year beyond this newsletter and have partnered with twelve Claremont founders at the earliest phase of their journeys.
Our vision is to supercharge the careers of Claremont community members by continuing to advance Claremont's entrepreneurial narrative and bringing together members of our community. Unlike most venture firms, we're focused on the individual and person behind the business. We are here to relentlessly support Claremont founders and future Claremont founders from their time as students in the classroom through the expanse of their careers.
Now, I’d like to take you back a couple of years to share how all of this came to be.
Liminal Space
In the Winter of 2020, I found myself unemployed in Oahu; 'between things,' as they say. I was thirty years old and had spent the last eight years working in venture capital and startups in the Bay Area. I had been laid off during early Covid while working at a pre-launch startup. I had booked a one-way ticket to the islands to nurse a bruised ego and a recent heartbreak. It was the depths of Covid, and salt water and sunshine were my self-prescription.
I was deep in my 'liminal space,' as coined by Dutch-German-French anthropologist Arnold van Gennep — "a place of transition, a time of waiting and not knowing the future."
In this salty liminal space, I reflected. I knew a couple of things — one was that I wanted to work on something with a significant positive impact on a topic about which I cared deeply. The second was that, whatever it was, I wanted to take a big swing. And so, among other ideas, I pulled a thread that I hadn't considered for a long time – a community-driven venture firm that backed members of the Claremont Colleges community.
A Claremont Colleges-oriented venture firm wasn't a new idea for me, though I had never deeply explored the concept. I'd worked in venture capital in the Bay Area long enough to have seen firsthand the positive impact of an active alumni ecosystem on its members. Venture firms like StartX (Stanford), E14 (MIT Media Lab), X Fund (Harvard), and others have built successful venture franchises managing hundreds of millions of dollars, cultivating their respective ecosystems, and backing community members. The secret sauce of venture firms like Y-Combinator and First Round Capital is to create ethos and identity amongst their portfolio founders, giving them tribal support.
I have long been a proponent of entrepreneurship resources for the Claremont community. As a student government leader nearly ten years ago, I founded the Student Commission on Entrepreneurship at Claremont McKenna College and advocated for establishing a student entrepreneurship resource center. That center ultimately became CMC's Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the leading entrepreneurship institute at the Claremont campuses today. In the Bay Area as a recent graduate, I hosted a monthly breakfast club for several years, bringing together Claremont founders, builders, and investors. This type of ecosystem work, which a theoretical venture firm could amplify, would significantly and positively impact the lives and careers of its members and their businesses. Coaching entrepreneurs and helping to advance others' careers, as well as supporting the Claremont community, were areas in which I was passionate.
But would a Claremont Colleges venture firm qualify as 'a big swing?' Most ecosystems were too small or had too few success stories to support a venture strategy, let alone a big one. Only a few alumni communities globally could support ambitious venture plays.
So, I started digging into the data. Pitchbook, Crunchbase, LinkedIn – no data source was safe from my research. The data was messy, and I soon recognized I could use some help. I put a job description out for Claremont interns to help me parse the data, and I ultimately connected to several talented students who helped clean and organize the data. I was lucky enough to connect to a current senior at the Claremont Colleges, Josh Tatum, a workhorse and absolute wizard with large data sets. Before long, we had assembled what I'm sure was the most extensive data set on Claremont founders and startups ever built.
We could never have prepared ourselves for the story we uncovered in that data. The Claremont Colleges alumni community was a startup powerhouse. Claremont had produced the founders of companies like Cisco, GitHub, Cruise, and countless other massive businesses representing over half a trillion dollars in enterprise value. Since 2010, just shy of 5% of all Claremont-founded companies founded have exited for or are currently valued at more than $500M or more. Over the past 15 years, Claremont alumni-founded companies have raised more than $40B for their companies, which is more venture capital dollars than any other alumni community outside of Stanford, Harvard, and Cal. No other alumni community comes close on a per capita basis. We're treble that of Stanford's alums, who placed second for that period, for example. Claremont's female alums stand in a class of their own and rank as the number one community of female alumni globally for venture dollars raised per capita.
Big swing? Check.
Putting Up a Mirror
To serve Claremont founders better than any other investor, we needed to understand Claremont founders better than other investors. So we got to work. I spoke with over two hundred entrepreneurial Claremont alumni working in technology to understand their post-graduation needs. My biggest takeaways from these conversations were two-fold: the first was that alums had no idea they were members of one of the world's most prolific entrepreneurial communities. The second was that Claremont founders needed to leverage their relationships or affinity with other members of the Claremont consortium in their professional journeys. For the most part, CMCers just knew CMCers; Mudders knew Mudders; Pomona-grads knew Pomona-grads, etc. Many Claremont founders felt they were pursuing careers in technology or entrepreneurship alone or had to cultivate entirely new professional networks for their businesses to succeed.
If only they knew! At this point, Josh and I had been scraping and analyzing Pitchbook, Crunchbase, and LinkedIn data for months. We were sitting on a mountain of Claremont startup data to the contrary. The Claremont community was wildly successful. Still, I knew if we published our findings, not only would more alums bet on themselves, but they would find even greater success. More Claremont founders with the confidence that others had walked this path. More Claremont founders with a roadmap chock-full of potential advisors, mentors, investors, customers, and hires.
This was the first time anyone had connected these dots. And these findings also had massive implications for the benefits of a liberal arts education. Our community's lack of self-awareness was one of the most significant barriers to even greater success. It was time to hold a mirror up to our community.
We decided that regularly publishing our findings and spotlighting the careers of Claremont's most successful entrepreneurial alums across all seven colleges would be the best way to make the most significant impact on the Claremont entrepreneurial community and the next generation of founders. On June 30, 2021, Josh and I published the first issue of Between the Lines, our weekly technology publication that shines a spotlight on Claremont's technology community. It is titled 'Between the Lines,' in homage to a liberal arts education, which teaches one to read between the lines.
You know the rest. Today, 1.5 years and nearly a hundred articles later, we've had over a million impressions of our content and driven outcomes like internships, hires, and investments amongst and between our readers. We also launched a jobs board with the Randall Lewis Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, a nice full-circle moment for me from helping to establish the institute as a student ten years ago. These efforts have led to dozens more placements between Claremont students and alums at Claremont-founded businesses. We will continue cultivating the zeitgeist and reputation of the Claremont community through content and pooled resources.
Why 'StoryHouse?'
Why 'StoryHouse' Ventures? We named our venture firm after 'Story House,' the first building on Claremont McKenna's campus. StoryHouse's namesake, Pomona Professor, and Claremont Consortium President Russell McCullough Story, made significant contributions to the colleges in the same ethos we stand for as a firm — that we are stronger together. During his five years as President of the Claremont Colleges in the 1930s, with few financial resources, Story worked ceaselessly to establish a third undergraduate college, Claremont Men's College, when the consortium model had fallen out of favor. The name is doubly fitting given our own origin story as storytellers of the Claremont entrepreneurial narrative. You can read more about Professor Story's significant contributions to the Claremont Consortium in our entrepreneurial history of Claremont McKenna here.
What's Next
Since that liminal space in Oahu in late 2020, I've spent most waking moments laying the groundwork to launch StoryHouse Ventures. I've taken remote work to its extreme and stood up the firm while living and traveling all over the world and meeting hundreds of Claremont entrepreneurs and technologists along the way. During this time, I've also often returned to Claremont to spend time with the next generation in the classroom. Come 2023, I'll be relocating more permanently to Los Angeles to open up our first office.
Since graduating from CMC in May 2021, Josh was awarded Best Senior Thesis in Economics for his analysis of Claremont founder and startup data. After a brief stint in Apple's Corporate Finance Group, he has joined StoryHouse Ventures as its founding Investment Analyst and Chief of Staff. He'll join me in Los Angeles from his hometown of Chicago, where he's been since graduation.
Over the next three years, Josh and I will partner with ~50 Claremont founders at the very beginnings of their journeys as founders. We'll also continue cultivating the broader Claremont community for the benefit of all with resources like this newsletter and our jobs board.
No other venture firm is laser-focused on supercharging the Claremont community. Thanks to our readership and our investors, there isn't a venture firm that can more consistently help Claremont founders unlock meaningful milestones at the earliest phase of their journey. We feel incredibly fortunate to be in this position. There are too many names to list, but to you who have stepped up to help make StoryHouse a reality – thank you. We're excited to keep building with you.
I'm excited also to invite anyone interested in following along my journey as a first-time venture capital firm manager to read a monthly note I share on what it's like building a venture firm from the trenches. It will inspire the next generation of great Claremont investors and shows founders how we do what we do. You can subscribe to the monthly updates on our newly launched website.
Thank you for your continued support. We’re just getting started.
Feedback? We love to hear it. Hit us with an email. 👊🏼