Meet The Investor Who Specializes In Seeding Businesses That Were Started In College Dorms

Peter Boyce II, an associate with General Catalyst Partners, and co-founder of Rough Draft Ventures, was recently interviewed by OneWire CEO Skiddy von Stade.

In the interview, he explained how he got into the startup business by founding Rough Draft, a company that seeds student startups.

When he was studying applied math and computer science at Harvard, he noticed his friends struggled to find funding for their great startups.

They basically had two options. One was to enter a small business competition to win whatever was offered, even as little as $500. The other was to try and raise so much money that it made sense to drop out and run the business full-time.

There was nothing in-between these two.

That's why he co-founded Rough Draft, to scout for students running potentially game-changing startups from their dorm rooms, and expose them to the resources they need to grow.

"There's the $500 business plan competitions that you can enter into and win, then there's the 'raise a million dollars and drop out of school,' but there's really nothing in between and there's really no network of students that were able to empower other students to pursue creating startups. That's really what we created with Rough Draft Ventures. We have a team of students that basically helps identify and empower entrepreneurs at the university level, something that we're insanely excited to do, something that we're increasingly seeing - folks are going to continue to build amazing companies in their dorm room.

Boyce also runs the New York office of General Catalyst Partners and is expanding its footprint here. He's convinced that he's in the right city too. In the raging debate on the better coast for tech startups, he's Silicon Alley all the way.

"We've staked our careers here in New York, voted with our feet in a way. But I think from a diversity perspective of just being able to interface with so many different industries, whether that's banking, marketing, fintech, I think there's a lot of really great industries and a lot of great entrepreneurs that are going to build companies that [are] technology, that's going to empower and change these existing industries. And New York has been the epicenter for a lot of these industries for a long time ... I'm personally very biased towards this eco-system here in New York."

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