Hillside Ventures at Harvard's Venture Capital Group's Entrepreneurship Summit

Written by Marianella Salinas and Laura Braddick

With over 350+ attendees from 25+ universities, Harvard’s VCG Entrepreneurship Summit is the largest student-organized undergraduate venture capital conference. Ten members of Hillside Ventures from Genesis and STEM attended the conference to gain insights from Venture Capitalists and Founders in the Fintech, AI, and Biotech spaces. 

The conference had many different sessions ranging from “the Tech B2B SaaS Revolution” to a fireside chat with Steve Kraus, a partner at Bessemer to workshops like “the Growth Mindset in Scaling a Startup”. All of these different conversations taught us a key lesson: never get comfortable. 

One of the summit’s highlights was a compelling keynote delivered by Tim Westergren, the co-founder of Pandora Radio. He delved into the company's formative years, detailing the challenges and triumphs that shaped Pandora into a trailblazer in the music streaming service industry. Pandora was once the top free digital radio and music service but was late to offer an ad-free subscription service, and now it lags behind its competitors. With Spotify being a newer but strong competitor to Pandora, Tim’s experience exemplified the constant need to respond to competition. He emphasized always keeping an eye on your competitors, regardless of your market share or position, especially when everything is going well. 

But, how can we as students apply this advice? Hillside Ventures allows us to take risks and invest in companies that we believe have potential. After finding a solid company and having many founder, reference, and customer calls, we may get too comfortable with the deal and overlook the negatives which include the competition. Furthermore, the fireside chat with Kraus taught us to say yes to everything that interests us especially when we are starting our career (within reason- of course).

Overall one of the main takeaways was to never get comfortable in things that matter now like the diligence process for a cool Startup that we sourced and further down the line in our careers. Having a growth mindset and challenging ourselves will serve as the most powerful tools in our development as investors, professionals, and founders.