Are you an aspiring entrepreneur looking for inspiration and guidance to navigate the world of startups and venture capital? In this episode, Christina Tamer, Vice President for Venture Programs at Venturewell, shares her insights and experiences in supporting entrepreneurship. With nearly a decade of experience, Christina discusses her journey from working at a venture fund to her impactful role at Venturewell. She emphasizes the importance of supporting entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds and the transformative power of technology-focused startups. Listeners are in for an insightful conversation as Christina Tamer provides an overview of Venturewell's mission and the Aspire program, a vital initiative that supports technology startups on their journey to securing seed funding. The discussion highlights the critical role of Aspire in preparing scientific founders and technical entrepreneurs to communicate effectively with investors and attract potential funding. Additionally, the episode touches on the Catalyst program and its impact in building a more diverse and inclusive angel investing community, emphasizing the significance of empowering underrepresented individuals in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. If you're seeking inspiration and practical advice on entrepreneurship, this episode is a must-listen, offering valuable insights from an industry expert passionate about promoting economic development through innovation and venture investment.
Are you an aspiring entrepreneur looking for inspiration and guidance to navigate the world of startups and venture capital? In this episode, Christina Tamer, Vice President for Venture Programs at Venturewell, shares her insights and experiences in supporting entrepreneurship. With nearly a decade of experience, Christina discusses her journey from working at a venture fund to her impactful role at Venturewell. She emphasizes the importance of supporting entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds and the transformative power of technology-focused startups. Listeners are in for an insightful conversation as Christina Tamer provides an overview of Venturewell's mission and the Aspire program, a vital initiative that supports technology startups on their journey to securing seed funding. The discussion highlights the critical role of Aspire in preparing scientific founders and technical entrepreneurs to communicate effectively with investors and attract potential funding. Additionally, the episode touches on the Catalyst program and its impact in building a more diverse and inclusive angel investing community, emphasizing the significance of empowering underrepresented individuals in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. If you're seeking inspiration and practical advice on entrepreneurship, this episode is a must-listen, offering valuable insights from an industry expert passionate about promoting economic development through innovation and venture investment.
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Marcia Dawood
Welcome to the show.
Christina Tamer
Hi, Marcia. Thanks so much for having me.
Marcia Dawood
Well, I'm excited to talk to you today and have you tell us more about everything that's going on at venture. Well, especially the Aspire program, which I know I have a special soft spot in my heart for, because I've participated as a mentor many times. So maybe just start off before we get into all that, with your background and how you came to be so helpful to the entrepreneurship.
Christina Tamer
Oh, thank you. Okay, well, happy to share. So, my name is Christina Tamer. I am the vice president for venture programs at Venturewell. I've been there a whopping nine years coming up in April, which is amazing to think about. And it's been quite a journey from starting off as a program officer to where I am now. And all along the way, I've been really committed to supporting entrepreneurs and just building this really great network of investors like yourself. Marcia.
Christina Tamer
Before I came to Venturewell, I was at a venture fund, which is where I really learned the tools of the trade. It was a $20 million fund focused on different technologies, including renewable energy, agriculture, technology, and communication technologies in emerging markets. So we did a lot of work in East Africa and India and in some emerging markets in the US as well. So just learned really about term sheets, due diligence, and managing a fund portfolio management through that experience, and bring that with me into my work here at Venturewell. And even before that, back in the college and grad school days, was working with a nonprofit supporting women entrepreneurs in Uganda. So there's been this thread of supporting entrepreneurs, whatever that looks like, whether it's a venture backed Silicon Valley based startup or women making beads out of paper in Kampala and Uganda, it's been wide ranging, but all connected back to supporting entrepreneurship as a way to promote economic development.
Marcia Dawood
I love that. So where did you get all this entrepreneurial spirit from so early in your life?
Christina Tamer
That's a great question. I kind of happily fell into a lot of this. I do have uncles who are entrepreneurs, and they definitely found a lot of success in both developing their craft and their skills and running successful businesses. So saw that and definitely aspired to be like them, and just stumbled into understanding business and the social impact that a business can have just by potentially existing or by the choices that the business makes, and wanted to pursue that both on the nonprofit side and through this venture backed startup side as well. So really understanding the different ways that businesses, big or small, can have impact.
Marcia Dawood
On their communities, that's awesome. So I know Venturewell does lots and lots of different things, but can you just give us an overview of what Venturewell does, and then maybe we'll get down into the nitty gritty more about Aspire.
Christina Tamer
Yeah. So Venturewell is coming up on 30 years of being.
Marcia Dawood
My gosh, 30 years.
Christina Tamer
Yeah. I'll have to have a big birthday party.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah.
Christina Tamer
So, yeah. Started out about 30 years ago. It was the vision of a prolific inventor named Jerry Lemmelson. He really believed in the power of invention. He had over 500 patents to his name and the foundation. Today, the Lemmelson foundation still supports invention for impact, and they're one of our core original funders here at Venturewell. And Jerry really was his vision that found Adventurewell, and that spirit still lives on today. So at Venturewell, we work with higher education ecosystems, we work with federal partners on supporting their innovation and commercialization programs, and then we have the portfolio that I oversee, which is all of our startup or venture focused programs, whether that's supporting a student entrepreneur and exploring entrepreneurship for the first time, all the way up to the Aspire program that you mentioned, which supports startups around the country, all in technology.
Christina Tamer
When I say technology, I mean whether that's medical technologies or climate technologies on their way to raising their first seed rounds.
Marcia Dawood
Yes. I love talking to these entrepreneurs, too, because they're pretty early, but they have some traction, and they really kind of have a pretty good idea about where they want to go. But then they are at a point now where if they don't get funding, they're probably not going much farther, right?
Christina Tamer
Exactly. Yeah, they're at a really critical inflection point. By the time they get to aspire, they've usually already gone through some sort of business model canvas or lean innovation course, which is usually really valuable, especially for the types of founders that we're working with, which are all scientific founders. Technical founders focused on engineering degrees. We're giving them through all of our programs, the tools and the skills to bring in that business side. It's almost like a really quick MBA for a technical founder. And the Aspire program really is designed to shorten that learning curve. There's lots of ways you can learn how to fundraise, how to read a term sheet, how to negotiate.
Christina Tamer
You can just experience it. You can read blogs, you can listen to podcasts like this one. But the Aspire program gives someone an immersive experience and a safe place and the necessary space to actually talk one on one with real life investors and get that real, firsthand experience on what it's like to communicate with an investor and ask their questions as they come up. So they get to talk over the course of five weeks and really get to know the investors and ask their questions as they think of them.
Marcia Dawood
What I found interesting, too, in talking to some of the entrepreneurs, and most of them have some type of hardware or big audacious goal of, like you said, either solving some kind of major medical problem or climate tech or climate change. So these are not kind of the simple, not that any startup is simple, but this isn't something like a tech software where you build it and people start using it and you get an MVP, and then the next thing you know, you're in beta and you're off to the races. This is like building big things that are hard to build and have to find the places to manufacture them and all those kind of things. So talk about why is it that Aspire decided to focus in these specific areas?
Christina Tamer
Yeah, I think Ventura as a whole really supports those types of areas intentionally because of the outsized impact that they can have. Although it might take ten years for that medical device to get to market, there's a lot of resources out there that can be leveraged, like nondilutive funding or programs like Aspire, which are educational, that can help accelerate that timeline and get them more prepared for the angel investor community or the seed stage venture fund community. And we focus on that because those technologies can have such a significant transformational impact. And these founders otherwise might just go be a cog in a wheel at a large corporation, which can innovate and solve these problems as well. But this allows them to move much faster, hopefully, and hopefully identify more problems that we otherwise might have overlooked.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah, I like that. The transformational impact, because it really can. These different companies are working on things that if they don't get a lot of help around them to kind of support them and figure out where to go. It's just so needed. When I think about angel investors and when you talk to kind of your average angel group, they may tell you, oh, well, unless we have somebody in our group that specifically understands hardware or anything that has to do with a hardware company, we're going to probably pass because we just don't have the expertise to even evaluate it. So having a program like Aspire to get these companies investor ready, to have them really know what their needs are in order to get them to commercialization, I think is just so important.
Christina Tamer
Yeah, you're particularly good at that, Marcia, when you're really forcing the entrepreneurs to explain the technology in layman's terms. Right. And that's really what will help a technical entrepreneur or technical founder have success when they go into those angel group meetings, if they can explain it, what the impact is, what the business model is, without necessarily going into all the nitty gritty of exactly how it works or why it works. I mean, that data is likely going to be important later on in showing that you have that information. But the story at the beginning, the strategy, the vision, the simple here's the problem we solve and who we solve it for is really critical. And even though you can get that in many programs, aspire, really brings it to a tipping point of can you explain it to an investor? Is there something here that could be long term successful and potentially generate a return on investment? So it really puts the pedal to the metal at that point. It's where the rubber hits the road. To use multiple cliches on, have they actually really articulated the value for the world and for potentially their investors as well?
Marcia Dawood
Totally. And it's so funny, when I go through with the entrepreneurs for five full weeks, I do get a pretty good understanding of their companies, and I really am not an expert in any way, shape or form in climate tech or medical tech stuff. I always tell them, look, I am not a scientist, you cannot rely on me understanding most of the things coming out of your mouth. But as I work with them for those five weeks, I really do get an understanding. And I see where people who really don't have a background in this, that's okay, because what we care about is the real problem that they're solving. But if an entrepreneur can't make that first in that 1st 2 minutes or even, I always tell them it's really the 90 seconds that you're first pitching that means so much. And if you can't articulate the problem in a way that is super simple and that somebody as an investor is going to care about, well, then they're really not going to care about what your solution is.
Christina Tamer
Exactly. And this program really pushes them to the limit because it's not a stand and deliver pitch program, right. They're not getting on stage doing their pre rehearsed pitch. They might do a pitch at some point during the program, but the meat of the program is really getting into strategy and seeing how the entrepreneur is responding to questions like where are they comfortable, what are they going back to over and over again, and helping them get comfortable with moving away from exclusively thinking about the technology and how it works. It's very important. Then they do need to think about that, but it's also testing and building their muscle, really, on being comfortable running a company. So we're taking changing someone from being just a founder. Not just a founder, but they're moving from a founder or an innovator or sometimes even a student to a CEO.
Christina Tamer
It's really accelerating them to this next stage of you're not just doing a pitch competition, which is important. It's a really helpful experience to begin to hone those skills. But this is putting it into practice in a sort of nimble in the wild, I guess I should say. You're not just in a safe little on stage, you're out in the wild talking to investors, and it's a safe zone with those. Investors are friendly, but you are talking to real investors. They could potentially be check writers for you, or their network might be check writers. So it can be a high pressure environment, if that makes sense. An entrepreneur can be nervous coming into it, but we really try to create an environment where they can build trust with the investors and get comfortable over those five weeks with sharing more and learning from each other.
Marcia Dawood
Totally. I have seen that happen over and over again, and I've probably been a mentor, I don't know, six or seven times within the program and just watching the confidence level change. I remember talking to a couple of the entrepreneurs when at the very beginning of the program, and they'd say, well, I know that they call me the CEO, but I'm kind of the science guy behind all of it, or girl or whatever, and you're like, well, no, wait a minute, though. You're the glue and everything that's holding this company together and is going to get it, at least to the point where you've got some significant traction, got some significant investment. You are the CEO. And then as they go through the program and they get all those tools in their tool belt, all of a sudden their confidence is going up. And the next thing you know, they're like, yes, I am the CEO. It's awesome.
Christina Tamer
I love it. Yes, I remember one of those examples in Houston, one of the entrepreneurs, she was a young woman recently out of university, and they had been going through some team issues, redefining roles. There was a bunch of friends involved as a class project, but it was transforming into a real startup with real grants coming in, potential clients being negotiated with. And she stood up on that last day of the program and said, I am the CEO. Here's why I deserve this role. So it wasn't just the education that she got through the program. It was a significant transformation of her confidence and her identity as a CEO that she deserved that position, and she was the right person for that.
Marcia Dawood
Oh, yeah, I love seeing that. So let's talk a little bit about the catalyst program. I know Dawn Batts, who's been on the podcast before, has been instrumental in that. So talk about how that works with Venturewell and Aspire.
Christina Tamer
Yeah, we love working with Don and the community around Techtown. So a few years ago, we got a grant from the Economic Development Administration under the build to scale program, and the grant was designed to identify and train 200 high net worth individuals that were underrepresented in the angel investing community. So people who identify as women or black or brown, and we partnered with the Angel Capital association on this program, and 200 individuals will have a chance to go through the ACA angel investing university basics courses over the next. We're two years in and we have one year to go. So they'll go through those ACA basics courses, and then they will come through aspire as well. A select few of them will have a chance to join aspire as mentors in residents. And those individuals will have their own perspective on entrepreneurship, either experience as an entrepreneur or working with entrepreneurs, but are training to be new angel investors. And what's been really magical about that program is those new angels that have entered the ACA community have entered the venture well, community, have really engaged with each other, engaged with the other angels like yourself, Marcia, that were already in the venture well community and established in the community and have been learning so much from the entrepreneurs and each other.
Christina Tamer
So it's been a really wonderful experience to change the face of angel investing in the Great Lakes region in partnership with dawn and, you know, really contribute, add a lot of value to the mentor network that we're growing.
Marcia Dawood
I know I got to meet several of them. I was lucky enough to be at Techtown twice this past year in 2023, and got to meet some of the people who had gone through the catalyst program. And they are just awesome people, and they can add so much value to that area.
Christina Tamer
Yeah. And they're out there, and it's just a matter of a lot of people could be angel investors. I know ACA talks about this all the time, but just haven't been invited or haven't been exposed, haven't found a group that resonates with them. So we are really slowly chipping away at activating some new angels, and it's been really transformational, and we're excited to see where they go next, hopefully making some more investments in deals and participating as leaders in the ACA community. But we've been delighted to see that the engagement in aspire has been an indicator of lasting engagement in the angel community.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah. Yes, very much so. Well, Christina, thank you so much for coming on the show today and telling us all about aspire venture. Well, the catalyst program and all those great things. Really appreciate it.
Christina Tamer
Thank you so much for having me, Marcia. It's always a pleasure.