Oxford Venture Capital Network co-founder is looking for the next big student venture

Green Templeton College student, Oxford Venture Capital Network co-founder and Creator Fund investor, Marc Moesser, is looking for student start-ups with potential.

As an Oxford-GSK Chemical Biology PhD Candidate and Ideas 2 Impact fellow at the Saïd Business School, Marc describes his journey to investing into Venture Capital and investing in the Venture Capital firm Creator Fund:

I am a second-year DPhil student in the Oxford Protein Bioinformatics Group, researching the application of machine learning methods to the early stage drug discovery process. Before I started my DPhil, I spent the summer in Munich as an intern for the management consultancy EY-Parthenon, where I focussed on the life science sector, but over time I became more and more interested in the transfer and commercialisation of new technology rather than just the technology itself. As a scientist, I love new and exciting tech as well as the creative ways entrepreneurs use tech to innovate, but putting on the hat of a consultant, I am also interested in how this technology could be pushed out into the world to impact on people’s lives. I found that Venture Capital (VC) ticked both of these checkboxes for me: I can work at the forefront of innovation, meeting founders with amazing cutting-edge technology; but also help them actually bring it to the market. For this reason, I co-founded the new student society Oxford Venture Capital Network, with the mission of educating students on venture investing, but also to bring more VC firms to Oxford and help entrepreneurs find funding. My engagement around VC in Oxford made the Creator Fund founder and CEO Jamie Macfarlane aware of me and he reached out to invite me to interview for the new 2020 cohort of Creator Fund. When I got the call, I was blown away. Creator Fund offered the perfect opportunity that I hadn’t known existed. The amazing part about being an investor at Creator Fund is that every single investment decision is made by student investors like me. It gives me the chance to get actual investment experience, to build a track record of investments and get professional training, all while still being a student.
Together with my colleagues Joe Brown, Toyosi Ogedengbe and Claire Rich, we are now looking for the next big student venture from Oxford: if you have an amazing start-up and need support or funding, come talk to us!

About Creator Fund:

Creator Fund is the first pan-European student-led VC fund. Europe has some of the best universities on the planet, and we believe that the next great start-ups are being dreamed up right now by students in laboratories, class rooms and lecture halls across the continent.
We believe that the best person to support student founders is not an outside investor that suddenly appears on campus at a one-off event. It’s the classmate working with them in the lab, sitting next to them in the lecture hall or discussing ideas late into the night in their flat. That’s why we have built a team of some of the UK’s smartest students to identify, support, and invest in student start-ups across UK universities. For every start-up we invest in, we want to have someone on our team with relevant deep commercial and technical knowledge. That’s why we have a PhD in machine learning at Oxford, a PHD in Chemistry from Cambridge, MBAs at LBS who’ve founded their own global businesses companies and more that have worked at some of the UK’s leading VCs. Our student investor at UCL has also been recognised as one of the top student leaders in the UK. Our team hails from 6 different nationalities. We have built this team to bring the greatest diversity of perspective, experience, and background together around one investment committee table.
We believe such diversity of perspective is key, giving us the ability to not only source, understand and diligence the most exciting student ventures, but also effectively support them post-investment. Unlike other funds, as we’re all students ourselves, we also understand everything that our founders are going through — whether its living on quick-cook noodles for weeks on end or having to balance your degree with your business, we’re here to support you on this journey.

We have raised a new fund and have a new cohort of student investors for 2020, if you are an early stage start-up looking for £ 30k investment, get involved in Creator Fund.