Youniversity: A more efficient form of angel investing, with some names you’ll recognize

Venture Beat — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 16:28:54 -0700

Youniversity is a mundane play on a very familiar name: YouTube cofounder Jawed Karim is starting an early-stage investment group, together with two well angel investors, Kevin Hartz and Keith Rabois.
The fund will be focused on current and former students at Stanford University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, at least for the time being — one or two people working in a garage.

The three aren’t actually creating a new investment vehicle, rather they’ll each invest their own money in companies they collectively find appealing — but strictly consumer internet companies, Rabois tells me. Each one will bring their own expertise and networks to bear, and take a proactive role in helping small companies get a strong start, he says.

They plan to fund companies with between $50,000 and $300,000 dollars. They’ve already funded two. One is prediction marketplace BluBet, which they and Flixster chief executive Joe Greenstein collectively invested $225,000 in, PEHub reports. The other is video-chat service TokBox, which we covered last fall.
Why the focus on those two universities? Rabois says that nearly every great internet company has had at least one founder come out of one of those schools. While the Stanford entrepreneurial story is obvious — top companies like Yahoo and Google got their starts there — Rabois adds that Illinois’ crop includes well-known entrepreneurs like Marc Andreessen, Max Levchin and Ray Ozzie.

There’s also a clear personal connection to the two schools. Karim received his undergraduate degree from Illinois, where he met his YouTube cofounders. He left the company relatively early in its life to pursue a graduate degree from Stanford — where Rabois and Katz both received their undergraduate degrees.

Kevin Hartz is the co-founder of Xoom Corporation, which handles international money transfers, and he’s currently the chief executive of event service Eventbrite. Rabois was an early employee at PayPal and is currently the head of business development at widget company Slide.

All three are currently limited partners at Sequoia Capital, which was also an investor in TokBox.