BGU President Prof. Daniel Chamovitz, Rector Prof. Chaim Hames, Dana Gavish-Fridman, the VP-Entrepreneurship at BGN Technologies and more than two dozen students gathered at BGU's Sara Tadmor Auditorium last week to celebrate Cactus Capital, the University's landmark venture capital initiative and to mark the completion of the first cohort of students to complete the fund's three-month course in venture capital management (pictured below).
The fund, launched in December, 2018 and run jointly with fresh.fund, aims both to offer seed-level funding for student-led innovation and to provide BGU students with real-life experience in the process of venture-capital investment.
“Like in science, investors do not know the answers to their questions at the beginning of a project. As my Ph.D. advisor once told me, 'if we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be research!'" recalled President Chamovitz. “By definition, 'research' means you don't know where the process is going to lead. You ask questions, try to identify potential paths through initial research to answer them, and at some point, you need to choose the path your research and intuition lead you. Good scientists, like good analysts, have the intuition to choose the path that will more often than not lead to impactful results.
“So there are important similarities between scientific research and entrepreneurship, and that is part of the reason that Cactus Capital has attained such a central presence on our campus in just six months. On one hand, we've got student entrepreneurs who are confident in their ideas and in their abilities to make them successful; on the other hand, our up-and-coming businesspeople developing the critical eyes necessary to evaluate business ideas and people," said Prof. Chamovitz.
Roy Kimchi, general manager of Cactus Capital, added that the interest and dedication of BGU students to innovation and investing made the program's first semester an unqualified success.
“To begin with, the fund invested $20,000 grants in student-run ventures," Kimchi recalled. “And that's only the beginning: Over the year we will invest in approximately 10 more projects. On the other side of the equation, we had 150 applicants for just 24 spots in the VC manager's course. The students that were eventually accepted attended 12 three-and-a-half hour weekly sessions, two outings, homework assignments, and reading materials, but not one person dropped out. That demonstrates both the hunger on campus for high-level professional training as well as BGU students' ability to buckle down and work hard. Twelve of them will go on to play active roles in managing the fund.
“I'd call that a win-win," Kimchi said.
