Welcome to Illuminated, a biweekly curated newsletter featuring must-read content by Rice Ventures, Rice University’s student-led startup accelerator and entrepreneurship club. We’re aiming to become the BNOC (big name on campus) for anything and everything entrepreneurship at Rice. In this curated newsletter, you’ll find how RV operates, ways to engage in entrepreneurship at Rice, and insights into the Houston startup ecosystem. Please like this issue above if you’ve enjoyed reading! If you’ve been sent this email and you’re not a subscriber, you can join by clicking on the button below.
Just kidding! 🦃 👩🏻💻 ❤️ Turkey and tech are the main course, and we’re looking forward to seeing both on top of our (literal and figurative) plates this week. Since the Rice fall semester is over due to covid-19 shortening the academic year, we get three weeks of dead days before finals, and an extra-long winter break. We hope you take this extra time to relax and take a well-deserved break from the hustle! And once you’re ready, you can jump back in with the latest tech news from us at Rice Ventures. We’ll keep this issue short for you so you don’t miss out on any of the festivities because you’re just too engrossed in the newsletter. Enjoy the holidays, and stay safe!
Rice Ventures Reports
Are you non-technical trying to break into tech? That’s relatable, which is why you should check out Tech Pod! Tech Pod is a community of students aspiring to break into the business side of tech, because you don’t necessarily need to be able to code to be part of this world.
As we begin to reflect on the year, Business Insider compiled their top 100 startups of 2020 according to VCs. See any of your fantasy portfolio companies on there? 👀 If not, better get started on some investment memos for practice!
Lolita Taub published the Community Fund’s investment thesis, sharing how they source, select, and support startups. The Community Fund launched this year, and are an early-stage fund investing in community-driven companies. Check out Lolita’s article here.
Everyone on Clubhouse just got 20 free new invites, and some people are even paying up to $300 for an invite (don’t do that). If you haven’t heard of Clubhouse, it’s an invite-only audio social platform that is frequented by VCs, celebrities, and technologists. The app has run into some issues in the past, with reports of harassment and hate speech on the platform. While the team has worked to better the moderation features on Clubhouse, one must still be mindful to be respectful when engaging in discourse and conversation and that exclusivity isn’t an invite to attack others. A social audio-based platform like Clubhouse is one that would benefit most from deep diversity of all types.
Internships:
We love to see the hustle! Prime time to be working on those apps, so best of luck! If you represent a company and want us to promote an open position, send us an email at team@riceventures.org!
Quaestor’s Business Dev Internship
Expansion VC’s Analyst/Associate role
Harvard WeCode 2021 Tech Fellowship
On Deck’s Operations Internship
On Deck’s ODF Candidates Internship
645 Ventures’ Investment Fellowship
What We’re Following:
Enjoy the holidays ahead, and hit us up if you have any content recommendations! Like virtually everyone else, we will be binging The Queen’s Gambit and eating plenty of food, so your recs will be greatly appreciated.
Nafisa’s map of the Rice startup support ecosystem
I did a thing! As part of the Republic Venture Fellow program, we were tasked with mapping out our campus ecosystem, so check out the thread I made on Muze + Riff!
Twitter “Fleets”
Have you ever been on Twitter and thought, “gosh, I wish that I could post a story here too, on every single social media app that I have, because posting stories on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn simply isn’t enough”? You’re in luck! Twitter rolled out Fleets, receiving some mixed responses. Some appreciated the additional way to express themselves on Twitter, while others are less than enthused by the addition of a 24-hour “disappearing” content feature.
Are you hoarding mason jars?
Turns out that mason jars are an economic signal. We remember back in March, when covid-19 massively shut down operations, Ball, the famous canning brand, was thriving. Ball’s stock price spiked at $78.56 on March 4, dipped down over the summer, and has jumped up to $96.30 on November 25. Jen Doll wrote a Medium article on the history of the mason jar and its place among economic recessions. This is your cue to live out your hipster fantasies and bring out the mason jars.
These up-and-coming VCs!
Amazon’s AWS US-East-1 went down yesterday, leaving us with these gems:
Just because you can tech… doesn’t always mean you should tech.
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