Developing a New Generation of Fund Managers at the Newton Venture Program
The venture capital industry has been the backbone of today’s highly successful startups and scale-ups – and yet until now it does not have many formal training or entry routes.
Those looking to kickstart a career in VC would typically go through an apprenticeship and learn on the job – a method of learning that is slow and costly.
How can we accelerate the career growth for the venture capital industry, globally?
That is the challenge that the Newton Venture Program is taking on.
About the
Newton Venture Program
Newton Venture Program is a leading executive education venture capital training and development provider with a mission to level the playing field for people from typically overlooked and underestimated backgrounds – ensuring that the next generation of investors represent the world we live in.
Newton is a joint venture between London Business School and LocalGlobe VC, with founding partner SVB. With our unique blend of faculty and practitioner teaching, we are training the investors of tomorrow to back the ventures of the future.
Our robust training programmes, VC Fundamentals and VC Fellowship, ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity to break into venture capital to create a more accessible and diverse ecosystem.
Building on the program
Right from its very first cohort for Fundamentals, Newton has gotten glowing feedback from its participants.
Both Fundamentals and the Fellowship not only offered the opportunity to learn from top-tier practitioners across the ecosystem, London Business School faculty, and a goldmine of tools and resources, it also provided participants with a valuable network of like-minded fellows.
And the results speak for itself – Newton graduates have gone on to start their own funds, form angel investing syndicates, as well as use the knowledge gleaned to join real-world funds as a VC.
The people have been incredible. I can go on and on raving about the people at the program – the instructors, the guests, the peer group in the cohort. Fund Manager beautifully compresses the entire lifecycle (think 7-12 years) of a fund into a 3 day, fast-paced, competitive and enormously fun collaborative learning experience.
Yash Biyani
Founder, Sector 7
Newton Venture Program Alumni
Supporting a world-class venture program with
Fund Manager!
Having already run three cohorts for the Fundamentals program and at the time, halfway through the inaugural Fellowship program – Newton was on the lookout for a way to build upon the great foundation they had set up.
In a meeting between Strategy Tools and Newton Venture Program in London earlier this year, they began to hash out what that could look like.
“Newton wanted to give the participants more of an experience of what it’s like to be in the decision-making or senior role of the fund. This was where the Fund Manager! Simulation came into play,” said Scott Newton, Fund Manager! Simulation facilitator and Strategy Tools partner.
A deep dive into fund management
in three days
Due to the global nature of the Newton programmes, the Fund Manager! Bootcamp for the Newton alumni ran completely remote, in a digital environment. The bootcamp was applications-only, with invites extended to qualified Newton alumni to ensure a high quality experience.
In May this year, 23 Newton alumni worked on developing a fund strategy, raising LP funding, scouting deal flow, investing in a portfolio of startups, generating successful exits and delivering returns to their investors.
Over three 4-hour workshops, the participants experienced the entire journey of building and running a successful global investment fund from A-Z.
The three intense days were facilitated by Rick Rasmussen, Scott Newton and Christian Rangen from Strategy Tools – all highly experienced experts in venture capital.
This was probably the most engaging and interactive program that I’ve been a part of. It was fantastic working together as a team building a fund and seeing the types of back-office decisions that impact fund success. As a VC investor, it’s easy to get caught up with day-to-day fund activities such as deal sourcing and investment execution. The program showed me the importance of long-term portfolio value creation and LP selection on fund performance
Peter Wamburu
Investment Associate, Vested World
Newton Venture Program Alumni
Understanding venture capital
through simulation
In Fund Manager!, participants step into the shoes of a new fund management team.
The simulation immerses you in the challenges fund managers typically come across in the real world – looking for the best LPs, figuring out ways to compensate venture partners, locking arms with good strategic advisors and ultimately, reaching sizeable fund returns.
There was very little theoretical learning during the bootcamp – rather, the participants learned by doing.
“Being in the simulation created a great amount of urgency, focus, decision-making and strategizing in a way that helped me make connections to some concepts that I’d understood before somewhat, but not on a deep, strategic level,” said Rumbi Makanga, a participant.
“For example, we all know about the Power Law in venture capital – but there was something about actually seeing and living that within our fund and going through the process of optimizing for it to get those outsized returns that made it viscerally real. It helped me understand the VC mindset a lot better,” she added.
“It’s given me a very solid appreciation for just how difficult fundraising and the VC process was. The entire experience with Fund Manager! was very hands-on and not pure theory.”
Nafez Dakkak
Co-Founder & Managing Partner, BLDR Ventures
Newton Venture Program Alumni
Impact
Newton Venture Program executive director Eleanor Kaye found the Fund Manager! Simulation to be a great synthesis to the knowledge gleaned from the Newton programmes.
“The Fund Manager! Simulation was the perfect way to consolidate what our fellows had learned and test them to the limits. It propelled them into the future, taking them from raising a fund to exiting in just three sessions. The pace of the course matched the tenacity of our fellows and challenged them to think long-term while acting fast. We can’t wait to take the next group of fellows through the simulation!” said Kaye.
“Seeing the impact from the Fund Manager! simulation is truly something”, added Christian Rangen of Strategy Tools.
“Our goal is creating the full fund management experience, an experience that takes 10-15 years in real life, and we can now recreate it in 10-15 hours. This allows emerging fund managers, ecosystem builders and even startups, to experience the full life span of a fund, from sourcing LPs to delivering 100X multiples on their pre-seed investments. As far as we know, there is nothing else out there that can give people this experiential learning experience”
The Fund Manager! simulation has now been used with 100’s of VCs, fund managers and VC ecosystem participants around the world since its launch in early 2022.
“It’s definitely the most fun I’ve ever had on a course! I really appreciated the different energies that all the facilitators brought. The simulation really drove us to think about the future in a much more intelligent and expansive way – in the sense that you’re thinking about the companies you’re investing in today, but also thinking about how those markets are going to adjust or change, or be created over time. The course just unlocked something in my mind where I can see all of that more clearly now.”
Rumbi Makanga, Venture Partner, Republic
Newton Venture Program Alumni
Featured Newton Alumni
In the research and writing of this case study, we interviewed 4 Newton alumni that were part of the Fund Manager! Bootcamp in May 2022.
Rumbi Makanga, Co-Founder, Origin Twenty
Rumbi has spent much of the last decade scaling deep tech innovation across the globe, democratising access to entrepreneurship and capital, and investing in and scaling impactful bottom-up solutions in Africa. She is interested in how as societies we can reshape how we think and do things to meaningfully serve and support all of us. She is currently – and always – building the collective infrastructure to enable anyone, anywhere, to succeed. Rumbi is the founder and Managing Partner of Origin Twenty, a collective of investors backing the African founders who are building the future, with a particular focus on pre-seed fintech, deeptech and B2B startups.
Connect with Rumbi on LinkedIn
Nafez Dakkak, Co-Founder & Managing Partner, BLDR Ventures
Nafez is the managing partner at BLDR Ventures, a venture builder focused on the future of work and learning in emerging markets. Previously, he venture built Edraak.org one of the largest online learning platforms for the Queen Rania Foundation and was the CEO of the Foundation’s UK office focused on strategic partnerships. He has a masters degree in educational neuroscience from Harvard and a bachelor’s of economics from Yale University.
Connect with Nafez on LinkedIn
Peter Wamburu, Investment Associate, VestedWorld
Peter is an investment professional with over 6 years of operational experience across venture capital, strategic finance, consulting, data analytics, project management and product development. He is currently an Investment Associate at VestedWorld; a US-based venture capital fund focused on early-stage companies in East and West Africa in the agribusiness, consumer products, and technology-enablement thematic areas. Peter is passionate about solving pressing economic challenges such as financial inclusion, education, climate resilience, and youth employment through technological innovation.
Connect with Peter on LinkedIn
Yash Biyani, Founder, Angel Investor, Sector 7
Yash Biyani is the founder at Sector 7, a venture studio that partners up with early stage founders and founding teams to help them go from 0 to 1. Yash works at the intersection of brand, design, technology and business to help early-stage startups in the for-profit, as well as the non-profit sector, go from idea to execution. The startups he has worked with span across healthcare, D2C commerce, media, AR/VR, travel, B2B SAAS, web3 and edtech domains.
About the Fund Manager! Strategy Simulation
The Fund Manager! Fund Strategy Simulation is a highly immersive, interactive experience to puts you in the shoes of the founding team of a new investment company. Your goal is to raise a fund and invest in successful companies. You compete with other world-class funds on achieving the best fund performance.
The simulation will enhance and upgrade any educational program. Strategy Tools also delivers Bootcamps and Masterclasses for emerging fund managers and VC ecosystems around the world – both online and in-person. Interested to learn more?