For this episode of Startup Success we’re joined by Mike Collins, Founder and CEO of Alumni Ventures, one of the most active venture capital firms in the world. Collins shares how a contrarian idea—opening venture investing to individual accredited investors—grew into a global platform with more than 11,000 investors, over $1.5 billion raised, and 1,000+ portfolio companies. The conversation covers how Alumni Ventures evaluates startups, where Collins sees opportunity beyond AI, his practical advice for founders navigating uncertainty, and what truly differentiates Alumni Ventures in a crowded VC landscape.
What Sets Alumni Ventures Apart from Other VC Firms
Alumni Ventures was built around a belief that venture capital shouldn’t be reserved for a small group of institutions. Instead of relying on endowments and pension funds, the firm draws capital from individual accredited investors around the world, forming a powerful, engaged network.
For founders, this structure translates into a different kind of partner. Alumni Ventures doesn’t seek board seats, renegotiate terms, or control outcomes. They invest alongside top-tier lead investors, typically taking a smaller portion of the round, and focus on being helpful without being intrusive.
Once on the cap table, the firm actively looks for ways to support founders through introductions to customers, hires, strategic partners, and peer founders, leveraging a global network that continues to expand. As Mike puts it, the lead investor is like a marriage; Alumni Ventures aims to be the trusted, well-connected uncle founders can call when they need help.
What Mike Collins and Alumni Ventures Look for When Evaluating Startups
Alumni Ventures’ unique approach to venture capital also shapes how they evaluate opportunities. As a co-investor rather than a lead, one of the first signals they look for is the quality of the lead investor already involved in the round.
If an experienced partner at a top-tier firm is making a meaningful commitment in a domain they know well, Mike sees that as a strong indicator the company is already “on second base.” From there, Alumni Ventures conducts its own diligence, with a heavy emphasis on the founding team.
For Mike, adaptability matters as much as vision. Markets shift, products evolve, and startups pivot. Teams that learn quickly, respond to customer feedback, and navigate change with discipline tend to outperform those locked into rigid plans. Technology strength, defensibility, market size, and early traction all matter, but the ability of founders to execute and evolve consistently rises to the top of the scorecard.
“The founder and founding team’s ability to navigate change, and to learn and adapt, is a really important part of our scorecard.”
~ Mike Collins
AI Is Transformative, But Not the Only Sector Worth Watching
Mike is unequivocal about AI’s importance. He sees it as the most significant technology of his lifetime, largely because it automates aspects of human intelligence and is still in its early innings.
“I think AI is probably the biggest technology of my lifetime.”
~ Mike Collins
At the same time, he’s quick to push back on the idea that AI is the only place innovation is happening. In his view, this is a golden age for entrepreneurship, with meaningful disruption underway across numerous sectors of the economy.
Energy stands out as a massive opportunity, driven by rising global demand, electrification, AI workloads, and new approaches spanning solar, nuclear, batteries, and infrastructure. Healthcare is another area. Mike believes diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes and heart disease should be “running scared,” as advances in biology, computing power, and AI unlock faster discovery and more personalized treatments. He’s also optimistic about long-overdue innovation in education, where technology may finally enable personalization and lifelong learning at scale.
Add in space, quantum computing, and deep tech more broadly, and the takeaway is clear: founders don’t need an AI-first pitch to build something venture-scale. They do need a real problem, strong execution, and a clear path to impact.
Mike’s Advice to Founders, in Three Words: “Just Ship It”
When asked for advice for founders, Mike distills decades of experience into a simple mantra: just ship it.
He contrasts today’s startup reality with the old model of extensive planning, detailed business plans, and linear execution. Modern entrepreneurship, he argues, looks far more like the scientific method. Founders form a hypothesis, test it in the market, learn quickly, and iterate.
“The business of being an entrepreneur is much more of a scientific method.”
~ Mike Collins
Speed matters. Not recklessness, but learning velocity. The companies that win are often those that engage customers early, release imperfect products, gather feedback, and adapt faster than competitors. Mike points out that even iconic companies like Google succeeded not because they had the perfect plan at the start, but because they learned and evolved faster than everyone else.
For founders, setting the tempo of the organization is part of the job. Some moments require slowing down and thinking deeply. Many others demand action. Knowing when to do each is a defining leadership skill.
Mike’s perspective is optimistic and pragmatic. Technology continues to move forward, sometimes imperfectly, but with enormous upside. By broadening access to venture capital and prioritizing collaboration over control, Alumni Ventures is carving out a distinct role in the ecosystem that resonates with founders and investors navigating what comes next.
Special thanks to Mike Collins for joining Startup Success and sharing his perspective on the future of venture capital. To learn more about Alumni Ventures, explore their approach to investing, or join a syndicate to see the deals they’re backing, visit av.vc.
Intro 00:01
Welcome to Startup Success, the podcast for startup founders and investors. Here you’ll find stories of success from others in the trenches as they work to scale some of the fastest growing startups in the world. Stories that will help you in your own journey. Startup Success starts now.
Kate 00:18
Welcome to Startup Success. Today we have Mike Collins, who is the founder of Alumni Ventures, and now the CEO. And this is a real treat, because Alumni Ventures is a very well known VC firm, so we’re super excited to have you, Mike. Thanks for being here. So I’d love to hear in your own words how Alumni Ventures is different from most VC firms we speak to, and then we can get into why you felt the need to found your firm in this direction, if you wouldn’t mind.
Mike Collins 00:53
Yeah, sure, a couple of main ways. One is, most venture capital firms get their capital from institutions, endowments, pension funds, sovereign wealth, money. Our capital comes from individuals. So, you know, we’re a huge network of people, all accredited but around the globe. And the basic idea is that, you know, we think venture capital is really important, including for individuals to have in their portfolio, and that we could do better with this all-important asset class together than any of us could do on our own. From an investing strategy standpoint, we’re a co-investor, so we’re not going on boards, we’re not pricing rounds, we’re not firing management. We are supportive co-investor. And we get access to what we think are really top tier deals because of that same network. So if you’re an entrepreneur, you obviously have a relationship with a lead investor. That’s, you know, that’s, that’s almost a marriage, right? We’re more like your favorite uncle. So it’s, we leave you alone, but we really, when you need help, we really try to be helpful. And, you know, we’re helpful in ways, usually with introductions to people within our network. So hiring, board members, customers, talking to other entrepreneurs who might be at this similar stage or in a similar industry. We try to add value that way. And I think our reputation, one of the reasons we’ve grown and been as successful as we have been, is I think our reputation is that we really kind of punch above our weight class when it comes to helping entrepreneurs. And so, you know, we have a particular niche in the industry. You know this co-investing strategy means, you know, we work with everybody. So we don’t, we don’t compete. We do dozens and dozens of deals with, you know, the name brand venture firms. Our most common lead investors, you know, we’re behind Khosla and a16z and Sequoia and Lightspeed and USV and really amazing lead investors, and we’re just a small part of the round, and try to be helpful.
Kate 03:32
I really liked how you described that. You really captured how unique you all are. And I interview a lot of founders, and they’re, they’re always, you know, they have so much respect for Alumni, but they don’t always get it sometimes. So you did a great job of explaining it. Tell us, I want to delve into that more, but tell us why you felt the need to found the firm, and a little bit about your background. I find that really interesting.
Mike Collins 03:59
So I’m an old timer. My first job in venture capital was in 1986. So, timemachine – the personal computer is just starting to happen. It’s thought of as a toy. There’s no internet. There’s no mobile phone, no cloud computing, no blockchain. It was a different era. But I was with a great firm in Boston called TA Associates at the beginning of my career, so I had great mentors. Really learned a lot, you know, big influence on me. And went back to business school, Harvard Business School where I again, had great influences, including, you know, a guy named Clayton Christensen. Clay was again a big impact on my life as just an intellectual powerhouse, really. You know, wrote some of the seminal work in entrepreneurship and innovation. “Innovators Dilemma” is a bible of entrepreneurship and and disruption. Got an early start in the business. And,I feel just really passionately that technology, entrepreneurship, innovation, is really what drives mankind forward. And yes, you know, with any new technology, there’s unintended consequences, including negative things. The automobile led to smog and car accidents and sprawl, but still, pretty good invention. The mobile phone has created some issues, for sure, but I’m glad we have it. (Yeah, right.) And just being pragmatic too Kate is, you know, we don’t go backwards really well. We can romanticize. I’m in an old mill building from the 1800s and it was a revolutionary business model at the time, but you know, it’s like, people died in these mills with machinery, and there was child labor, and people working 18 hour days. And, you know, it was nutty. So technology moves forward. I just am a big believer that it’s a really important asset class, and that the more people that can be involved in venture capital and investing in these kinds of companies, the better. Now, obviously this is different than buying mutual funds or an ETF. I mean, there’s the power law, this is an asset class that you know has risk, it’s illiquid. You really need to be thinking about the right allocation within your portfolio. If we’re helping to democratize it just a little bit, I think we’re doing good work.
Kate 07:02
Did people think it was an odd approach when you went this way?
Mike Collins 07:07
Oh, yeah, no, they completely thought I was crazy. Why would you deal with a heart surgeon in Des Moines who wants to make a $50,000 investment in a portfolio of 20 or 30 companies? And I believed there was potential of creating a network of people that could be very, very powerful. And now that’s, again, every entrepreneur that we’ve invested in that has done well, has been thought of as crazy at some point. I mean, that’s almost the nature of the beast is you’re seeing something that other people don’t think that you’re you know, I could not understand why this did not exist. I needed it. I needed a smart way to be a venture capital investor. And so I just said, you know, this is my life’s work to create that. And, we have 11,000 customers, and we have raised over a billion and a half dollars, and we have over 1000 portfolio companies, and we’re now expanding globally, Kate. We just opened an office in London and in Tokyo. And so our vision at Alumni Ventures is to be a global network of, there’s great portfolio companies being created everywhere now. There are people that want to invest in this asset class everywhere now. The vision of being able to help a startup in Israel that’s, you know, wants to raise its A round in Silicon Valley, and wants introductions to potential clients in Asia. That is something where we really shine. That’s our mission, and we’re a decade in, and we’re pleased with our progress, but really excited about the future and where we go from here.
Kate 09:07
Very exciting. I’m glad you shared the stats. Yeah, my producer sent him to me that you’ve raised nearly 1.5 billion from over 11,000 investors, backing more than over 1000 startups. Really incredible. Your vision, I think that is a testament to what you’re doing. Now I’m guessing individual investors come to you, right? (Yeah.) But in the early days that was probably part of what you were doing, was finding investors?
Mike Collins 09:37
Yeah, no. I mean, the early days again, this is kind of classic startup, which is, we started around a community of people that I knew. I’m a Dartmouth alum, so we started with alumni of Dartmouth and created a kind of a community. The name Alumni Ventures was because we organized alumni groups, and started with Dartmouth. And, yeah, it probably took me a year to raise a million dollar fund. And, you know, we raise, you know, a million dollars in an afternoon now. It’s very different. We have communities around people who want to invest together, alumni groups of 20, 25 top universities. But we also have communities around things that people want to invest in and together. So we have a deep tech fund. We have an AI fund. We have a woman’s Founders Fund. Whatever your area of interest, we try to make investing in venture capital really almost as easy as it is to invest in public stock. So you can go into funds, you can go into themed funds, and you can go into individual companies. A lot of people start out with just joining our syndicate, which is just free to join, no obligation. You just have to be accredited. And you’ll see the deals that we’re doing. And we lean a lot Kate into education as well. We think that that’s part of our role here is to explain about venture capital. We have 40 venture capitalists here. We take time explaining why we’re excited about an investment, how we’re analyzing valuation, all the questions that people might have about venture capital and how it works, and how we think, and how we look at a particular industry or trend or specific company. We try to be as transparent as possible about that process. So again, I think that that’s a really important part of our mission.
Kate 11:49
I love that. I think a lot of people don’t understand venture capital, so the fact that you’re doing this and you’re doing it so well says a lot. Let’s touch on how you work with founders, because the way you described it is also unique. Tell us a little bit about that for the founders listening, because it’s a great approach.
Mike Collins 12:08
Yeah.I mean, the pitch to a founder is, we’re not a lead, you know, you’re going to want the best possible lead you can to lead your financing. The very best companies, the very best startups, actually, you know, they’re usually picking from the top 100 venture firm, because it’s really important that relationship. And they’re going to be on your board, you’re going to spend a lot of time with them. They’re going to set the price, they’re going to lead, as I mentioned, that’s a key relationship. But we would like to be part of that round of financing, and we’ll do 5 or 10% of it. We’re not going to renegotiate terms or ask for different agreements. If your lead is strong they’re going to negotiate it, and we’re going to go along with it. And if we don’t agree with it – we think the price is too rich, or we don’t like the terms – we just won’t participate. We’re not going to try to renegotiate. And then, if we are part of your company and on your cap table, we actually do a whole onboarding process. We have a team at Alumni Ventures that works with our founders to see how our network and community can help you. And again most founders spend a lot of their time trying to get clients. How can we help there? They spend a lot of time with wanting to build their team. How can we help you in recruiting? And then there’s just other kind of key strategic relationships with other founders. It’s usually just trying to activate our network to help our companies succeed. We’re not going to be your tech department or your business development team. I mean, you’ve got to build your own team. But it’s more strategically how can we help you? It’s kind of the same thing you look for your advisors and board members for it’s just, you know, we’ve got it on steroids with such a large, powerful network, if you will. So that’s our role.
Kate 14:19
That’s that’s a big kind of you’re contributing a lot there. I didn’t realize that you all did that much. That’s great. The lead partner must be happy when you join a round.
Mike Collins 14:29
Yeah, no. I think our reputation is, is great. The very best companies getting access is competitive. It is you’ll have three amazing lead investors fighting to get into a company. And, there are times where it’s like, you know, regardless of who wins the lead position, you know, we’ll kind of tuck in behind them. So, we have complete respect for the lead investors and the partners and the significant role they play. We try to be humble and try to be helpful, but we also try not to oversell ourselves. As a founder myself, I mean, ultimately, the success of a company really is the team building the company/ And you know, board can be helpful, for sure, but it’s really, let’s not kid ourselves. Great founders, great teams, great teammates, really make or break the situation. And we provide capital, we try to be helpful, but you know, we don’t kid ourselves that we’re going to change the trajectory of a company.
Kate 15:43
It’s interesting you say that, because a lot of the top VCs on this show, they all say that it comes down to the founders and the teams they build over and over again. So is that one of the primary things you’re looking at? And what else are you looking at when making an investment?
Mike Collins 15:59
For us, we’re looking at the quality of the lead, which is a little different, right? (Oh, right, that’s true.) So it’s like, we work with all the VCs, so we know if this particular partner at this particular firm is making a big investment in the domain that they have experience in, that’s a huge tell to us that this is a, yeah, so that company is already on second base with us, right? And, you know, then we all do, we do our own due diligence as well. And obviously we believe in the team a lot. It’s so important. The world is so dynamic, and a lot of companies evolve or pivot or change their approach. And the founder and the founding team’s ability to kind of navigate change and to learn and adapt is really, a really important part of our scorecard. And we’re also just looking at kind of, some of the things that are the same things that other VCs are looking for, is like, what is the strength of the technology here? What are the moats that they’re building? How big of a problem is this? Have they gotten traction, like, is this a team that has gotten out of the lab and actually talked to customers and sold something? So, I don’t think we’re terribly unusual in the kinds of things that we’re looking at. I think we disproportionately value the lead investor, and we disproportionately value the team.
Kate 17:43
Ah, okay, that’s helpful. That’s helpful. And then talk to me about the ecosystem, like, everywhere you read Pitchbook, everybody, they’re like, it’s AI. It’s AI. If you don’t have an AI play, you’re not getting funding, you know, no VC is excited about you right now. Is that how you feel? Are you seeing, I mean, are you all in on AI, and are there other sectors you’re excited about?
Mike Collins 18:08
I mean, I think, I think a couple of things can be true. And one, I think AI is probably the biggest technology of my lifetime. And I’ve seen some pretty big technologies, but when you talk about and I think we’re just at the beginning of it, but we’re automating human intelligence. So you know this, it’s a big deal. That said, there are lots of great segments to invest in. Probably this is the golden age of entrepreneurship and technology and innovation. You know, when I started out, there were pockets of technology and innovate. You know, software and micro electronics, and there were some things going on in biotech. But now it’s almost every segment of the economy has really profound opportunity for great new entrants. So and I’ll just list a few. One, energy. The world needs more electrons, full stop, right? And that’s solar, that’s fusion, that’s fission, that’s all of the above. You know, if you look historically at growth and quality of life, it is really strongly correlated to energy and the demands of energy for AI or electronic vehicles or space, these are all demanding, going to demand that we innovate with energy. And it’s not picking a favorite. It is all of the above, and it’s energy infrastructure, and it’s, you know, battery technology, and all of the rare earths that go into energy, that are in the energy processing. So I would just give you energy as another huge bucket. I would also say Kate, that really, for the first time in my life, I am really optimistic about, oh, good to hear, innovation coming to education, right? I mean, my parents are teachers. I come from a long line of educators. And education has kind of been the hill that (oh for sure) entrepreneurs have gone to die on. I think the combination of some innovations in AI that we are going to see over the next 10 or 20 years, a lot more personalization, a lot more of lifelong learning, I think the idea of American education, which really comes from kind of an agricultural economy perspective where we take the summers off because we get the kids home, bring in the wheat. Listen, my grandmother taught in a one room schoolhouse in Wisconsin with no heat. And it really hasn’t changed that much.
Kate 21:28
No it hasn’t. They just separate the ages a little better.
Mike Collins 21:32
Yeah, that’s about it, right? So I think education is going to see a lot of disruption. I think there is enormous potential in healthcare and curing cancer and Alzheimer’s and diabetes and heart disease and a million other diseases. I think those diseases should be running scared good, because I think there’s great understanding of how humans work, human systems. I think we’re getting very granular. There’s great things coming out of, you know, AI, Google Labs. There’s enormous understandings of protein folding and then bringing kind of the power of compute and AI to create things that used to have to be done very slowly in a lab manually, can now be done with kind of synthetic modeling. And so, you know, we’re starting to see scientific breakthroughs just beginning to break through, kind of poke their head out. But I think we’re just at the dawn of really improving health span again, which is a very excitable area of investing. And then I think there’s Space and I think that we’re going to, we’re at the dawn of a new era of space exploration and mining and communications that I think are very exciting. Quantum computing is another area which is the next probable platform, which again, is still in kind of the science fiction lab experiment mode, but, you know just. So you can understand Kate, I think from my enthusiasm that it’s just every day, you know, we make about 300 investments a year at AV, and every day we’re reading about a new company that we’re investing in that is just really exciting. And it’s like, oh gosh, I’m so excited we’re an investor in that company, that’s amazing, what they’re working on.
Kate 23:54
That’s really helpful and hopeful to hear. Because so much lately, everybody who comes on here just talks about AI, which is great, like you said, and very exciting. But it was nice for you to take us through the quantum computing and remind us about healthcare and all of that, because there’s so much innovation happening there. Thank you for that. We always wrap up the show with advice for the startup founders listening. Anything you could share. It’s their favorite part.
Mike Collins 24:25
You know, ship. Right, I mean, I come from the school, you know, I was taught like the startup was kind of, go write a business plan. Go do a bunch of research, you know. Go think about all these wonderful frameworks, and then go write the plan, then go execute the plan. And you know, that’s wrong, frankly. The business of being an entrepreneur is much more of a scientific method. You have a thesis, you have a general idea, you run some experiments, and you iterate fast. And so it is really about get out there, meet customers, show them something, ship it, fix it, iterate, evolve. It’s much more of the biological system of entrepreneurship that I believe in. This kind of phrase, hurry up and break things gets a wrap of being like, sloppy or just careless, and we’re not talking about that. But we’re talking about the pace of learning is really what separates the companies that make it in the companies that don’t. I mean, I’m old enough to have seen, you know, this search landscape of which Google was one of 20 companies, and Google won because it learned faster and iterated quicker than its competitors. And so, yeah, my T-shirt for a founder is, you know, just ship it.
Kate 26:20
I love it. And I think you’re spot on. Every successful founder on here says, We just move, we iterate, we move, we don’t overthink it, and we just, yeah, keep iterating.
Mike Collins 26:32
And it’s one of the jobs of the founder is company tempo. And there’s going to be forces that you have to manage the tempo of your team. Sometimes they actually have to be slow. This decision is too important. We need to slow down a beat. We have to think through it. We have to do scenario planning. And then there’s a lot of times where it’s “ship it”. So again, that’s your job as a leader to you know, set the tempo of your organization.
Kate 27:06
Excellent, excellent advice. Thank you for your time today. Where can listeners go to find more information about Alumni Ventures?
Mike Collins 27:12
Really easy. We have a good URL. It’s av.vc, Come visit us. Sign up for our Syndicate if you’re interested in seeing the deals we’re doing. Attend one of our webinars to learn more. Come to one of our events. We believe in getting together in real life with people. So we have offices in New York, in Menlo, Chicago, Boston. So come say hi.
Kate 27:39
I love it. Thank you so much for your time today, it was a real treat. Thank you.
Mike Collins 27:44
Excellent, Kate. Thank you.
Intro 27:46
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