Simon School Venture Fund

Investment decisions are made by a rotating committee of MBA students, with final sign-off typically resting with an oversight board that includes faculty advisors and an Alumni Advisory Board composed of experienced operators like Nick Lantuh and Gregg Steinberg. The student team handles sourcing, due diligence, and recommendation memos, but the advisory board provides the continuity and institutional memory across student cohorts.

Deal flow comes through multiple university-linked channels: the Simon Finance & Investment Club, the broader Simon alumni network, faculty connections, and the fund's own outbound sourcing by student analysts. The fund's position inside a graduate business school in upstate New York gives it differentiated access to startups emerging from Rochester, Cornell, RIT, and the surrounding region, alongside nationally sourced alumni referrals.

It operates as neither. The fund is an academic program structured as a venture investment vehicle, capitalized by the university's institutional resources rather than any single family. Its structure most closely resembles a small, education-first venture fund, with the critical distinction that investment staff turn over with the academic calendar and the core mission includes student training alongside financial return.

The fund focuses on direct investments in early-stage companies, typically at the seed and start-up stages. There is no public evidence of fund-of-fund commitments or LP positions in external venture funds. The direct model maximizes student exposure to company-level due diligence, term sheet mechanics, and post-investment board engagement — all core to the educational objective.

No specific sector exclusions are publicly stated. The fund's generalist mandate and small scale allow it to evaluate opportunities across industries, with student teams likely weighting sectors where Simon's faculty, alumni advisors, and Rochester's regional economy offer an informational advantage. In practice, the absence of life-sciences or deep-tech references in available materials suggests the fund may skew toward business-model-driven ventures over capital-intensive R&D plays, though this is an operational observation rather than a stated policy.