Watch out Stanford. WashU is coming.
The making of the "Stanford of the Midwest."
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With 3LAU and JD Ross announcing Royal to the world last week, and my buddy Michael Blau joining a16z’s crypto team, I can’t stop thinking about how exciting the WashU tech scene is right now.
Some Background
In May, I graduated from Washington University in St. Louis ("WashU") with a joint degree in finance and entrepreneurship. My four years at WashU were filled with learnings, many of which I did not anticipate before kicking off my college education.
As a native New Yorker, I grew up around the financial world that makes up Wall Street. Software, technology, and venture capital, however, were all foreign to me, largely until a few introductory business courses I took during my freshman fall at WashU.
Becoming "the Stanford of the Midwest"
The startup and tech scene at WashU is starting to bloom — it's still in the early innings, but the ecosystem is growing rapidly.
The university’s business school (Olin) recently appointed a new Head of Entrepreneurship, Douglas Villhard, a former serial entrepreneur himself. While most aspects of entrepreneurship cannot be taught in the classroom, Doug is doing all he can to widen students’ access to startups & entrepreneurs, via a widened course offering, consulting engagements with high-growth tech startups (both locally and in places such as SF & NY), and more.
I have long joked with Roshan Chandna, Lukas Steinbock, Joshua Rahn, Arun Sundaresan, and Adam Kurkiewicz that WashU may one day become "the Stanford of the Midwest." I think that this is actually happening. Now.
The caliber of talent at (and coming out of) WashU is incredible. The only downside is that many of these bright, ambitious students still go down the paths of consulting, investment banking, and big tech after graduating.
There is a massive amount of talent coming out of WashU — startups, take note. If more tech companies promote job opportunities to WashU students, I have no doubt that this will lead to better outcomes for these organizations, while also enabling these students and young professionals to have both the best learning experience and biggest impact possible.
One serial entrepreneur who has already taken note of the immense amount of talent WashU has to offer is Jesse Pujji, who previously founded and ran Ampush and is currently building GatewayX. You may recognize Jesse's name from Twitter or from Colossus's Business Breakdowns podcast (he's a host). Jesse recently moved back to the St. Louis area from SF to build GatewayX, a holding company for DTC brands, and is thrilled to give top-caliber WashU students a platform to start their careers, learn about entrepreneurship, and build businesses, through GatewayX.
Alumni builders
Missouri (and St. Louis, in particular) is no longer a fly-over state. You either know now, or you will know soon. The amount of talent coming out of WashU, and the level of innovation happening both at WashU and in the greater St. Louis area, cannot be overlooked.
In April 2019, I put together a blog post highlighting 90+ startups founded by WashU alumni that had raised over $1m in venture funding since 2015. In the post, I highlighted companies such as Fair.com, Pear Therapeutics, Varsity Tutors (going public via a SPAC), Opendoor (now public), Illumio (recently raised at a $2.9b valuation), and KeepTruckin (recently raised at a $2.3b valuation), among others.
A number of other WashU alumni-founded companies have also blossomed recently. Masterclass, Benson Hill, TripleLift, Bluecore, Digital Asset, and Salsify have all reached unicorn status, with Benson Hill planning to go public in the near future via a SPAC.
Wait?!? It’s September 2021 and you got this far into a blog post without mentioning crypto and NFTs? Say no more… Several WashU alumni are helping shape the future of crypto and non-fungible tokens. NFT marketplace Nifty Gateway was founded by WashU alum Griffin Cock Foster and his brother Duncan Cock Foster (who unfortunately went to one of our rival schools, Emory). DeFi platform Saddle, which is working to unlock deep on-chain liquidity, raised a $4.3m seed round earlier this year from Framework Ventures, Polychain Capital, and Coinbase Ventures, among others.
And, as mentioned briefly at the top of the post, 3LAU and JD Ross (who’ve been close friends since their WashU days) recently shared with the world their new startup, Royal, and announced a $16m seed round led by Keith Rabois and Founders Fund (Atomic and Paradigm also participated). Royal is a platform that enables individuals to buy ownership in songs and earn royalties alongside their favorite artists.
Royal marks Rabois’s second time backing Ross, who previously co-founded Opendoor. That investment worked out well for Rabois and Founders Fund, so it makes sense why Rabois is doubling down on the WashU pair (Opendoor’s market cap is $10.48b). Rabois’s new venture, OpenStore, is is also co-founded by a WashU alum, Matt Lanter, who was formerly Rabois’s Chief of Staff at Founders Fund.
Rabois was early on Miami, but he may have been even earlier on WashU. Check out the time stamp on this Tweet (s/o Adam Kurkiewicz for sharing this!)
Looking more closely at startups in the St. Louis area, a number of companies have captured headlines recently, many of which are founded by WashU alumni. While WashU (and St. Louis in general) have long been home to healthcare and MedTech innovation, the tech innovation scene (in areas like software, AI, and fintech) has recently started gaining steam, too.
Balto, an AI-powered tool for call center agents, recently announced a $37.5m Series B led by Stripes (also investors in Fireblocks, Fabric, Pleo, and Snyk, among others). Adalo, a no-code app builder, recently closed a Series A led by Tiger Global, with participation from a number of great angels, including my former bosses Barak Kaufman and Shlomo Dalezman :)
SteadyMD, a telehealth company founded by serial entrepreneur Guy Friedman (who we featured on The Takeoff last summer), raised a Series B led by Lux Capital earlier this year, Ashton Kutcher and Draper Associates also participated in the round. Summersalt, a direct-to-consumer women’s lifestyle brand founded by WashU alum Lori Coulter, has raised over $28m from investors including Mercato Partners, Founders Fund, and St. Louis-based Lewis & Clark Ventures and Cultivation Capital.
Other alumni-funded companies like CareSignal, Well Principled, Rezilient (who recently announced a $2.5m round), and Invisibly are also worth keeping a close eye on. Noonlight, Clever, Tallyfy, and Customily are also exciting startups in the St. Louis area, though not founded by WashU alum.
While many of WashU’s top graduates have traditionally left St. Louis for places like SF, New York, and Chicago, the rise of fast-growing local startups seems poised to change this. Moving forward, keeping talent (especially engineering talent) in the region should be a top priority for the school and local startups if they want St. Louis to truly become the startup ecosystem & hub that it can be.
In addition to the already mentioned companies, two class of 2019 graduates were accepted straight into YC out of school to work on a tech-focused wealth management startup, Compound. And, a couple of recent grads (all of whom started in banking / consulting) are now in executive positions, leading growth, at fast-growing startups (Zeal and Blair).
Two friends of mine have also recently dropped out to pursue their own startups. David Bromberg (founder of Lantern) is keen on changing the way companies manage upselling and post-sales opportunities. Another friend (whose name I won't mention given his company is still in stealth) recently closed a $1.5m seed round from some of the best crypto / tech investors in the Valley — and, they closed the round in lightning-fast time.
Alumni investors
A number of WashU alumni are leading technological change and innovation on the investing side, too. Most notably, here, is Lee Fixel, whose new fund Addition has invested in the likes of Nym Health, Chainalysis, dLocal, OctoML, Snyk, and Lyra Health, among others. Fixel is a frequent part of Forbes's Midas List, which highlights the world’s 100 best venture capitalists in any given year, and led Tiger Global's private investment arm before launching Addition.
In addition to Fixel, other WashU alum such as David Ulevitech and Eddy Lazzarin (both investors at a16z; Ulevitch, a former founder himself, who sold his business OpenDNS to Cisco for $635m), Gaurav Garg (Wing VC; founder of Redback Networks), Ted Maidenberg (Tribe Capital; former GP at Social Capital), Gabe Greenbaum (B Group Capital; former founder of StudentSpace), Ray Colletti (Zag Capital; early hire at DataDog), and Joshua Rahn (Oceans Ventures; previously built Facebook NYC from 0 to 3000 employees and 20m MAU to 1.5b MAU) are helping drive innovation by backing world-class founders and teams solving some of today’s most pressing issues.
Lastly, no discussion about WashU alumni in the startup & VC world would be complete without mentioning David Eckstein and Jonathan Gass, two rockstar people and world-class operators & investors. Eckstein, the CFO of Menlo Security, is also a Sequoia Scout and recently launched his own fund to back early-stage entrepreneurs. Gass, who recently sold his outsourced CFO / finance company (Nomad Financial), has been advising Alpaca VC for the past ~ year, while also coaching and advising founders in his network. Prior to founding Nomad, Gass was the Head of Finance & BD at Vimeo (the now $5.5b public company).
Conclusion
The future is bright for WashU and the level of talent coming out of the university makes me excited to see all of the new companies founded (and built) by alumni in the coming years. The WashU tech and startup scene is starting to take off.
In his 2016 blog post How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub, Paul Graham wrote:
“What can CMU do to help Pittsburgh become a startup hub? Be an even better research university. CMU is one of the best universities in the world, but imagine what things would be like if it were the very best, and everyone knew it. There are a lot of ambitious people who must go to the best place, wherever it is. If CMU were it, they would all come here.”
If you replace Pittsburgh with St. Louis and CMU with WashU, the same holds true.
The companies and individuals listed in this post are far from exhaustive. If you're a WashU alumni building something, I'd love to be helpful — you can reach me at spirom at wustl dot edu or on Twitter @mspiro3.
Let's build!
Special thanks to David Moon, Pryce Adade, Michael Blau, Roshan Chandna, Lukas Steinbock, Adam Kurkiewicz, Arun Sundaresan, Zach Glabman, Joshua Rahn, and Lori Coulter for reading earlier versions of this post :)