In 2016, UCLA fourth-years Robbie Page ’14 and Steve O’Dell hopped on a northbound morning train leaving Los Angeles for the sole purpose of having dinner in San Francisco and pitching their business idea to UCLA-affiliated entrepreneurs. An annual event, the dinner is hosted by members of UCLA Ventures, a network of UCLA alumni and friends of the university who all share a common goal: supporting an entrepreneurial ecosystem at UCLA.
The trip paid off: Page and O’Dell landed an angel investor for their fledgling tea business. Today, Tenzo Tea’s matcha is sold across the country.
“Those kinds of little touch points are always very exciting,” says Marion Patricio ’14, who has served as the associate director of UCLA Ventures since 2020. “It really is a testament to the group that we’ve built and to the culture of giving back that UCLA has created.”
Run by External Affairs, UCLA Ventures was established in the late 1990s, when Josh Green ’77, J.D. ’80 and UCLA parent and venture capitalist Ron Conway approached the university to ask, out of curiosity, how much it had raised in private donations to invest in startups associated with UCLA. The answer was disappointing: Such a venture capital fund did not exist.
The two set out to change that. By the close of the decade, Green and Conway had amassed over a million dollars in a UCLA venture fund to invest in anyone (mostly alumni, though it wasn’t a requirement) with a dream and the right business plan. The model was from Stanford University, where the university invested a small amount side by side with venture firms in Silicon Valley, with returns going back into the school.
Discover how UCLA is forging the careers of tomorrow’s entrepreneurs. And meet the UCLA freshman building a business with a line of gourmet slimes.
There were risks, of course: Stanford’s venture fund lost money in the 2000 dot-com crash. UCLA Ventures, whose portfolio also took a hit, responded by developing an approach that its backers say is more variable and responsive to such risks. In 2005, the group’s founders coined the concept of a “cashless pledge” — a more cyclical model, says Patricio, and a way for entrepreneurs to pledge equity to the university without having equity in hand.
The process starts with a simple document on which would-be entrepreneurs pledge a number of shares of their startup to UCLA. If or when they go public, those shares are merged into another company or sold for cash. UCLA gets its promised shares, presumably now higher in stock value, resulting in a donation to the university that the entrepreneurs can write off.
“It’s a way of aligning UCLA with the risks that an entrepreneur takes, and therefore it’s very entrepreneur-friendly,” says Green. Moreover, the program gives its members access to exclusive pitch events, mixers, networking opportunities and programming with academic partners.
All distributions to the university support entrepreneurship on campus, whether they’re going back into UCLA Ventures’ programming and resources or supporting other incubators, such as Startup UCLA or the Venture Accelerator at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
“There are entrepreneurial activities everywhere around campus, but that’s only something that’s happened in the last 10 to 15 years,” says Green. “I give Chancellor [Gene] Block great credit for emphasizing the importance of that going forward at UCLA.”
Interested in making a pledge to UCLA Ventures? Please reach out directly at 310-794-4442 or ventures@support.ucla.edu.
Read more from UCLA Magazine’s Summer 2023 issue.
