The Center for Venture Capital, Private Equity and Entrepreneurial Finance (CVCPEEF) integrates financial thinking and strategic decision-making with innovation and entrepreneurship via research and education across the university, and outreach to the venture capital (VC) and private equity community around the world.
A flagship initiative of the CVCPEEF is the MSU Student Venture Capital Fund, a thriving collaboration with the MSU Foundation and the Red Cedar Ventures. This partnership gives students the opportunity to conduct due diligence, competitor, monetization, and valuation analysis, empowers 4-5 VC-focused companies in MSU’s entrepreneurial ecosystem to receive pre-seed funding each year.
Our advisory board is made up of distinguished professionals, serial entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, private equity professionals and five core faculty members that provide invaluable guidance for the center.
It is our commitment to advance and promote academic and applied research by MSU faculty and students. Our findings inspire solutions to the relevant, pressing issues that today’s businesses face.
As MSU’s only center focused on venture capital and private equity, we are uniquely positioned with experts in both finance and entrepreneurship to advance the center’s mission and to provide transformational leadership opportunities.
We focus on the interactions among entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and private equity investors – and the interactions among venture capitalists, private equity funds and their investors.
The number-one reason why innovators and entrepreneurs fail is because they are not able to integrate financial decision-making with strategic business development and growth. The CVCPEEF positions Broad and its students as transformational leaders with cutting-edge knowledge and skills to adapt to the ever-changing global business environment.
We disseminate academic and applied research on venture capital, private equity and entrepreneurial finance through hands-on projects. This core knowledge is critical for our community of students, alumni, venture capital and private equity professionals, as well as high-tech, biotech university entrepreneurs.
I am a senior finance major and economics minor. This past summer I interned in the investment banking group at Stout, based in Chicago. In this capacity, I was placed on the deal team for the divestiture of a non-core subsidiary of a publicly traded company. In this capacity I developed marketing materials, performed industry analysis and prepared extensive buyer research. I also staffed on several pitches to secure new clients.
Since I have joined the Center for Venture Capital, Private Equity and Entrepreneurial Finance, I have been involved in research involving private equity firms’ investment strategy. I have also had the chance to attend seminars given by private equity and venture capital professionals, as well as serial entrepreneurs. These events were incredibly informative and enhanced my understanding of the industry. The knowledge that I built through the CVCPEEF assisted me in my internship through a greater understanding of private equity investment strategy and implementation. An example includes one of the pitches that I staffed on this summer. I performed research on large private equity firms that had done convertible preferred deals in the past. I analyzed the deal terms and other rationale behind the deals so we could better promote our pitch to the prospective client.
The center has also encouraged me in my own entrepreneurial ventures. I am the founder of a discounted-commission business brokerage firm for small businesses, River City Partners. Through the network of connections that I developed through the CVCPEEF, I have been able to gain valuable advice regarding how to best position and grow the business.
We actively collaborate with similar entrepreneurship and venture capital centers at our peer institutions across the United States and around the world for research, teaching and outreach activities.
We reach out to build mutually beneficial relationships: