Welcome to Cardinal Ventures 2.0
This Stanford student-run, nonprofit accelerator is back and better than ever.
Started by Justine and Olivia Moore in 2015, Cardinal Ventures has helped launch 115+ companies who have since raised $349M+ in capital. With a whole new management team, broader mission, and a groundswell of support for student entrepreneurship growing across the globe, we’re ready to launch Cardinal Ventures 2.0.
Since CV’s start five years ago, the landscape for student founders has changed dramatically. The old binary between starting a company and staying in school is breaking. The deep value of a university ecosystem to bring together the best young talent, mentorship, and ideas is stronger than ever. And students from over a dozen colleges around the world have reached out, eager to start or grow startup ecosystems at their own schools.
Of course, there are also new challenges. COVID forced us to rework the best parts of our community-first program and threatens to disrupt many of our tailwinds. But it has also opened up fascinating new possibilities to expand our mission. Now that all of our events will be virtual, why not let incubators from nearby schools, the East Coast, and even Europe listen in? Beyond sharing events, what if we pooled mentors? Or even co-founders?
In keeping with our mission of enabling founders to create the future now, we’re saying ‘yes’ on all counts! (Watch out for an announcement on this soon…)
In the meantime, our team worked incredibly hard this past year to build a best-in-class virtual accelerator. To fit the online format, we revamped our curriculum with more 1:1 workshop time and weekly support checks. We can finally diversify our mentor base beyond the Bay, pull them in for intimate conversations, and tune into events — now virtual — from other ecosystems. And we can lean on our growing list of rockstar CV alumni, including Athelas, Nova Credit, OhMyGreen, Pair Eyewear, and Knowhere, as seasoned voices of reason as well as beta-testers and brainstormers.
We hope to become the benchmark platform for student entrepreneurs well beyond Stanford. And we hope to get there by doubling down on the hyper-local values that have guided us to this point.
Values like ‘For Students, By Students’ and ‘Steeped in Stanford’ will continue to guide the ways we support and push our community forward. CV 2.0 is a ‘yes and’ proposition, not a clean-start. That also means bringing more talent to the table. A value like ‘Bring the New’ speaks not only to technologies and companies, but also the founders that build and invest in them.
Cardinal Ventures has always been a community first. We know how hard it is to build something that sticks — we’ve hit walls and changed paths plenty — but we also know how powerful a community can be. As we launch Cardinal Ventures 2.0, we hope you’ll join us.
Connect with Cardinal Ventures via Medium, our newsletter, website, Twitter, or by emailing us at info@cardinalventures.org.
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