Essence of Venture Capital: Highlights

On the 9th of November AaltoPEC had the pleasure to host the club’s first-ever venture capital event together with Wave Ventures, Europe’s largest student-run venture capital company, and Aalto Entrepreneurship Society (AaltoES). The guest company was Maki.vc whose Investment Analyst Petra Koivuvaara gave insigths into the venture capital industry

The evening started with a brief introduction into Wave Ventures and its open positions.

Wave Ventures specializes in pre-seed investments with its 1.5M€ portfolio, and the company was founded in 2016. Currently there are eight ambitious students working part-time at Wave, and Wave recruits new Investment Managers on a yearly basis.

Next, the evening continued with a presentation about Maki.vc and the venture capital industry

Maki.vc specializes in deep tech and brand-driven venture capital investing in early stage companies and has 180M€ in assets under management.

Venture capital differs from private equity in several ways. For instance, venture capital investing concentrates on early stage companies and the portfolio companies might have more risk due their initially small size. Some of the companies may even go bankrupt but a well diversified portfolio often contains several success stories that “save” the fund’s returns.

And finally, Petra Koivuvaara from Maki.vc shed light on her career story and her thoughts about getting into venture capital industry. Key aspect of getting into venture capital is intellectual curiosity and the ability to adapt into different situations as portfolio companies may vary greatly from one another. In addition, there is not a specific career path into venture capital but versatile background can be useful. 

All in all, the event was a success and the Board of AaltoPEC and AaltoES are keen to develop their partnership further in the future!