Overview
The Soma Scouts are a group of up-and-coming college students who are interested in exploring the path to becoming a founder, working at a startup, or becoming an investor. You’ll have the opportunity to participate in company diligence, join calls with the founders, scout for the top seed fund in the country, and be part of a community of other scouts from colleges everywhere. ****Program graduates will have the support of Soma in sourcing their next role at a portfolio company or other VC fund, and have the opportunity to intern at Soma directly over the summer.
Soma Cap Venture Scouts
Our mission is building the #1 seed fund in the world, and being there day 1 with superhuman generational company builders.
Aneel Ranadive has been in the Silicon Valley his whole life and saw day 1 as his dad Vivek Ranadive, a come from nothing immigrant from India, built Tibco (4.3b exit to Vista) which “digitized wall street in the 90’s” and powered 80% of Fortune 500 companies competing against Oracle. Vivek seeded and mentored Google, Yahoo, Salesforce, eBay, to Steve Jobs personally. Tibco even powered gov and city services, giving us close friendships with presidents of nations. Vivek has also gotten in to sports buying multiple teams, [from the Golden State Warriors to the Sacramento Kings](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/vivek-ranadive-snatched-major-league-124552500.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAG49Xgjv0Dr0vjt7dG-wWbiC6iPyjdJMOcIAHiEV09PAGwk_xcVV4tdFybq8OoLxLcn1xy28yRNYWD2B-Q8db_NruFNf9lrZCuSR9kySDvQzVFMnCjfJZiKzpQPWt1bg7JeaouT7yTn9ZDyhxq1WgpPDJcruJFgHz1h1uqK7s2cF#:~:text=Since his girls didn't,and went to the championship.)
Here are second to none connections we’ve made to portfolio co’s
Aneel Ranadive spent a lifetime learning from all these experiences seeing trillions in value creation starting from ground zero, then spent over a decade building startups and creating relationships day 1 among peer “millennial” cofounders of startups like FB, Dropbox, Box, Twitch, Uber, Reddit, among others. 8 years ago upon starting Soma, we set out to combine a lifetime of all these learnings to go build the #1 seed fund in the world which we would have wanted ourselves as founders.
Our goal is to be your most uniquely connected, hardest husting ally on the cap table from 0 to IPO and pour fuel on the fire along the entire trajectory.
Soma Cap has now invested early in +20 unicorns like Deel, Rippling, Ramp, Ironclad, Lattice, Human Interest, Cruise, among others, totaling over +$100 billion combined value of all our founders. We have a portfolio of close to 1,000 brilliant founders across multiple sectors and geographies. We’re usually one of the first checks, and we accelerate our value adds along the entire path.
Our all time “unicorn” breakout founders say things like “Soma changed our life” (Ramp) and “Soma helped us get our first 100 customers” (Deel) see testimonials here
What is the Soma Scouts program
The next generational company builders creating products for billions of people, lifting up humanity on to their shoulders and pushing civilization forward are starting now - and we need your help finding them. We aim to find a ninja swat team of brilliant, intuitive builders who will attract other builders, and keep their finger on the pulse of top world class talent for us.
We’re compiling a couple scouts per campus on top undergrad campuses across the world and need your help. Being in an undergrad program is not necessarily required.
Rewards for Great Performance
- Learn the ins and outs of venture, build the network of a lifetime among our legendary portfolio founders, VC co-investors, and LPs
- Help find or contribute to seeding the next +$100b businesses which touch billions of people and change the world
- Our scouts have gone on to get jobs at other top tier venture firms - we will help with references and applications
- We can help you start a company with customer intros, help w/ fundraising, hiring etc
- Some of our scouts have also gone on to join a portfolio company
Expectations & Learnings
- Who are the top 5 most brilliant, and entrepreneurial people on your campus most likely to be the next bill gates, michael dell, steve jobs, mark zuckerberg - notice these all dropped out to go build their legendary platforms. We will review your list every week
- Weekly research reports - for example create a thesis in AI, or write up what most entrepreneurs on your campus are most excited about with examples (crypto? renewable energy? chip design? etc)
- Find 1-2 additional scouts on your campus, or another campus, who we should interview
- Learn how to source deals
- Join initial meetings with our investment team, learn how we evaluate startups while selling Soma at the same time, and write short memos on the startups
- We often invest in YC startups - help us scout and identify all YC applicants and start reaching out and setting up meetings with the Soma team for top targets who get accepted
- Help generate leads, and review applications for our fellows program somafellows.com
- Get deal making experience - learn how we win allocations, onboard our startups, and then work hard to add value
- Build the network of a lifetime learning how we cross pollinate within the portfolio making customer intros, and how we leverage our advisors to help founders bit.ly/somavalue
- Work on product with our software portal which sources deals, and tracks and manages the portfolio. Help onboard founders and some of our investors on to using the portal
- Build the investor network of a lifetime - we’re backed by top GPs from Sequoia, NEA, Insight, Iconiq, IVP, DST, Greenoaks, Tiger, Clearlake, Vista, Veritas, Blackstone among others and help put follow on rounds together for our top portfolio companies with these great allies
- Work on data studies of the Soma portfolio, for us all to continue learning and improving
- Fine tune your bar / judgments of what our top tier portfolio breakouts look like
- Be resourceful and creative and find and execute a few value adds per week for our portfolio founders
- Weekly office hour check ins
<aside>⚡ Interested? Apply HERE!
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Expectations
We expect you to be an active contributor to our community! We hold our scouts accountable to engaging with the Slack and participating in diligence work with us. If you’re a passive member, you won’t be allowed to be a scout. We only ask for a few hours at minimum of your active time each week (but like everything in VC, the more you put in, the more you get out 😉).
Graduates of the scout program will have had visibility into the top raising seed companies in the country, and will have the support of the Soma team behind you for sourcing your next role.
