What is Cardinal Ventures?
At Cardinal Ventures, we’re passionate about supporting student founders with disruptive ideas. CV was founded in 2015 by Justine and Olivia Moore, with the goal of helping companies launch and scale. Our founders represent Stanford’s immense talent at all levels — undergraduate, graduate, post-doc and alumni. We are driven by our internal community, created by our hard-working management team, our talented cohort at the time and our helpful alumni. Our external community is also at the core of Cardinal Ventures — our mentors, sponsors, speakers and event attendees provide meaning and value to the program. Although they often lead busy lives, they provide time to our entrepreneurs because they believe in them, just as we do.
We provide our founders with mentorship, access to resources, and a network of diverse investors and 200+ Cardinal Ventures alumni founders. The value of Cardinal Ventures comes from the diversity of resources and people available for founders to discover their full potential:
- Speaker sessions and workshops: Topics ranging from “Navigating the life of a student founder” and “Raising a round,” we try to develop a currated curriculum and try to touch upon the most useful aspects of lauching and scaling a company.
- Office Hours: Just like the classic college office hours, we offer our own on varying topics (legal, UI/UX, grant writing, branding, etc.) Founders sign-up according to their needs and receive help from some of our amazing community members!
- Mentorship program: We try to match our founders with mentors in their industry or mentors can help them most to accomplish their short-term and long-term goals. At the beginning of the quarter we have a Mentorship Mixer for founders to meet and mingle with our mentor pool and find their best matches. Both mentors and founders rank their top choices and we try to pair them up according to everyone’s needs.
- Community access: Not only do we provide our founders a great community, we also allow them to have easy access to it. We have multiple databases, including an Alumni Database, a Grants/Competitions/Accelerators Database and a VC/Angel Investors Database under construction.
- Internal community: Throughout the quarter, our founders participate in multiple fun, engaging events. We want to give them the chance to network, amongst themselves and with other community members that can provide value for their businesses. Some of these events include a day-long Orientation Retreat in San Francisco, a Mid-Session Mixer and bi-weekly check-ins.
- Resources: We provide our founders with multiple resources, that they explore through our resource fair at the beginning of the quarter.
- Sponsors: Our sponsors help us financially to make the program possible! Here’s a list of our sponsors:
Since 2015, we’ve graduated over 90 companies who have raised $25M+ in funding from top tier VCs like Sequoia, angels like Marissa Mayer, and have gone on to join accelerators like YCombinator. But, beyond the amazing accomplishments of our founders, what moves us everyday is creating an impact in the lives of these founders and providing them guidance in their entrepreneurial journey. As Jeremy Intal, one of our VPs said:
“Seeing the evolution of young, ambitious entrepreneurs from all walks of life and areas of expertise is the most rewarding and energizing part of the Cardinal Ventures community.”
We want to create a memorable experience for our founders and we are excited to watch them grow and learn with us:
“Cardinal Ventures was our formative year packed into 10 weeks. Learnings taken away from the speaker series are still in everyday use, while the relationships that the program helped us build were not only integral to our seed round but will be a key part of our company’s future. Climb aboard while you can.” — Nathaniel Barling (Knowhere Inc., Fall 2016
As an entrepreneur myself, and having to interact with entrepreneurs everyday with Cardinal Ventures, I have learned one thing: entrepreneurship is hard. There will be ups and downs, sleepless nights and multiple challenges, which is why we have to lean on the people who care about our companies the most. We invite you to lean on us and learn more about what we do!
Until next time,
Nicole Birkner
Cardinal Ventures VP
