A Day In The Life at Reach Capital

Featuring Rohan Chandra, Fellow - Reach Capital

This past summer, I moved to San Francisco, CA to work as a Summer Associate at Reach Capital, an early-stage VC firm focused exclusively on education and the future of work, through the ICM Mosaic Fellowship. The summer was truly one of the most enriching and exciting parts of my MBA experience so far: not only did I get hands-on experience with investment thesis creation, deal flow, portfolio support, impact measurement, and fundraising, but I also had the amazing opportunity to develop a network of fellow impact investors across many different funds through Mosaic Fellows programming. I felt incredibly lucky to have so many in-person experiences after the last few years of working exclusively remotely, which created deeper and tighter-knit connections overall. While there was no typical day at Reach, I will share an example of a particularly exciting day from my summer internship.

 

9a-10a: Emails and Weekly Update

After grabbing some coffee and a breakfast sandwich, I arrived at the office to catch up on emails and create my “to-do list” for the day. Typically, I would reply to inbound requests from founders who were looking to raise in the space, as well as portfolio company founders who I was helping support. Our team also has a tradition of sharing our most important tasks (MITs) from the previous week and the upcoming week, so I drafted my own MITs and read through my teammates’ during this time.

 

10a-12p: Investment Pipeline Meeting

At 10a, we had our weekly investment pipeline meeting. During this meeting, the entire investment team would come together to talk about new companies in our pipeline, companies that were in diligence, and portfolio company updates. We would start by walking through “first look” documents for companies that we were excited about, showcasing both reasons to invest and not invest in them. I was particularly impressed by how thorough the Reach team made these documents, and by mid-summer I was presenting my own “first look” documents from calls I had taken on my own! Next, we talked through diligence items for companies—it was really powerful to see how the entire team sifted through their individual networks that spanned other VCs, founders, educators, and policymakers to find any relevant people to interview. Finally, we talked about how to help existing portfolio companies, which included everything from strategizing for future funding rounds to finding senior level talent.

 

12p: Team Lunch

We moved directly from the pipeline meeting to a catered team lunch—today’s was from Oren’s Hummus, a yummy local Mediterranean restaurant. Given the amazing summer weather, we sat on our outdoor rooftop, surrounded by art that was sourced by my manager (Wayee Chu) who is on the board of the SF MOMA. We also had a special guest join us for lunch—Tade Oyerinde, the founder of portfolio company Campus. The conversations we had spanned from sports and music to Indian and African identities: there was truly never a dull moment with this eclectic team. Such lunches were very special in creating a “Reach family”, and I was particularly blown away by the effort the team made to physically come into the office while the interns were around, despite busy travel plans and kids’ summer breaks.

 

1p-3p: Mosaic Fellows Impact Measurement Training

Today was a unique day because the ICM team put together a virtual training on impact measurement for all the Mosaic Fellows! Before joining the meeting, we were asked to pre-read a document covering different types of impact investors and think about which category our own firm fit in. After a brief introduction, we broke into small groups to debate if we had chosen the right categories based on our firms’ work. We came back together as a larger group to debrief and go into more detail on how different firms measure impact and walk through some case studies on impact measurement at firms across education, climate, and healthcare. My key takeaway was that while each firm will inevitably measure impact differently, there are some shared frameworks that can help standardize the process, especially as we talk to both LPs and entrepreneurs. This training was part of a broader series that ICM put on for us, and it was immensely helpful to both learn about impact investing topics while forming deeper connections with interns across graduate schools.

 

3p-5p: Clayful Project (Portfolio Company)

I spent a large chunk of my summer supporting early-stage startup Clayful, which partners with K-12 school districts to provide preventative, virtual mental health services to kids. My project was to create a model that would rank the top 10 U.S. states for Clayful to enter, taking into account student mental health policies, state mental health expenditure, average socioeconomic status, and existing student-to-counselor ratios. After meeting with founder Maria Barrera from 3p-3:30p for a quick check-in, I spent the next 1.5 hours researching data sources that could support the model and started building it. It was especially interesting to figure out how to weigh each component, while also ensuring the model could evolve as new policies were passed.

 

8p-11p: Investment Thesis Development

After taking a few hours off for dinner and hanging out with friends, I signed back online for some focused time working on my investment thesis. Typically, VCs’ schedules are so packed with diligence and deal-making that it is hard to spend time on high-level thesis development and market mapping. However, the Reach team’s vision from the beginning was to be an exceptional research- and thesis-driven firm, so working on a thesis was of utmost importance for my internship. Today, I focused on building out a few case studies on existing companies that encompassed peer-to-peer learning, which would inform my future recommendations about which types of companies to invest in this space.

 

As you can see, my day was filled with context-switching which truly represents the day-to-day life of a VC. I feel incredibly grateful to have been given the opportunity to deeply learn about how to invest for both financial and social returns in a field I am passionate about while producing some solid deliverables for the firm and its portfolio companies. I also felt very lucky to be at a firm that is primarily women- and POC-led, while meeting a group of highly diverse graduate interns all interested in impact investing through the Mosaic Fellows program. I look forward to staying in touch with everyone I met, both personally and professionally as I get more clarity on what my long-term career path will look like!

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