Bold ideas. Industry-leading innovation. Forward-thinking businesses. The Mines community is known for pursuing new ventures that provide solutions to industry and societal challenges. To help students, faculty, staff and alumni bring those transformative ideas to life, the Foundation launched a critical new resource last year: the Mines Venture Fund 1.
We talked to Todd McLean, managing director of the Mines Venture Fund, to learn more about the Fund, how it helps enhance innovation at Mines and how alumni can be part of the Fund’s success.
About the Mines Venture Fund 1
This inaugural fund is the first of its kind for Mines as part of the university’s entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem and provides startup capital to entrepreneurs and innovators. The Fund will help commercialize products and technology or support companies that are providing a service that fills a market gap and solves a problem.
“The whole goal of the entrepreneurship and innovation program is to help build successful companies with those who have an affinity for Mines and truly have a remarkable impact on the world,” McLean said.
How the Venture Fund directly supports Mines
The Mines Venture Fund general partner is owned by the Mines Foundation, which McLean said is uncommon for universities due to the high-risk nature of venture investing. But this structure means Mines directly benefits from the 20 percent carried interest by using those funds to support the entrepreneurship and innovation program. It also means Mines has a lot of confidence in the startups—and the people—it invests in.
“There’s a lot of failure rate in venture investing,” McLean said. “We’ll have that same failure rate, no doubt, but I believe it can be mitigated from investing in companies with economic tailwind, not headwinds. Plus, we have a lot of resources, and we can pull on our insight into the industries we’re involved with.”
The inaugural fund, Mines Venture Fund 1, provides startup capital to entrepreneurs and innovators with ties to Colorado School of Mines.