University of Chicago students are known for their wit and creativity. New works of art, inventions, medical breakthroughs, trailblazing research and more are born out of their unique thought process year after year. However, new ideas and products require resources to see them through to fruition. Finding ways to fund them can be a difficult process, often full of roadblocks and dead ends.
Enter Learning to Fly (LTF) Ventures. Founded in 2017, LTF Ventures is an undergraduate venture capital (VC) firm that helps startup projects on campus. LTF provides monetary support to startups with no strings attached, as they take zero equity in the startups approved for funding.
Current President Chris Mesch, a rising third-year economics and creative writing student, explained how the club was established with the overarching goal of “supporting founders at UChicago by giving non-equity grant funding.” The process is simple: undergraduates submit an interest form and two General LTF Partners—who are also undergraduate students—have an informal “coffee chat” with the founder(s), and then, some are asked back for a more official pitch meeting with the LTF Board.
In order to make it to the Board pitch, the executive decision maker of the startup has to be a UChicago undergraduate, and LTF has to be their first check. Mesch explains that during the coffee chats, founders are gauged to see if they are engaged in the community and helping others.
Jack Flintoft, an LTF Managing Partner and rising third-year economics and philosophy student, shares that they talk to about 50 founders and potential founders each year, and about half of them will make it from the coffee chat to the Board pitch. By the end of the year, LTF provides funds to about 10 companies on average.
Flintoft adds that “LTF invests in the founder and the team as well as how they think about their product as opposed to just the product itself.” He calls this a “litmus test on a good founder.” Flintoft uses Ben Swerdlow, the founder of Freestyle, a Typescript native cloud, as an example.
“[Swerdlow] had this infectious personality as well as, most importantly, a high conviction in his startup,” said Flintoft.
Diego Scanlon, a rising fourth-year LTF General Partner studying business and economics further explains Swerdlow as not only a great coder but someone who is always “articulate and personable” and “nails the gestures and inflections of his sales pitch [while talking] to other coders as if they were old friends.”
Board pitches are run similar to “Shark Tank”, the popular television show that features companies pitching their ideas to a panel of celebrity investors. [KY2] The company presents their product and provides details on how much funding they are asking for. Dara Benyacar, LTF general partner and rising second year, is a part of this process and explains that the decision making happens almost immediately once the pitch is finished.
“After a Board pitch, a pre-voting form is filled out by the board before any further deliberation,” said Benyacar, who is part of UChicago’s Master of Engineering program and a Pritzker Scholar. “Each person gives the startup a hard or soft, yes or no as well as their brief opinion.”
Mesch shares that this is done so board members can put a “soft commitment” out there first, without others’ influences and to avoid groupthink. He describes the metrics of these ratings as “the strength you’d go to bat for the company.” A hard yes gives the impression that a Board member might put their own money into the project, while a soft yes does not demonstrate that same confidence, even if they meet the criteria.
After pre-voting, the members have a deliberation period with each other, and they finish off the process by filling out a post-vote form to see if anyone changed their minds. Occasionally, this deliberation period might last a couple days where, in some instances, companies are asked to come back and do a second pitch. However, typically, LTF gains a strong sense of their decision after 15-30 minutes of deliberation. The majority vote among the Board rules, and the founders will be notified in approximately a week if they are to receive monetary funding and if yes, how much.
LTF also offers non-monetary, long-term support to startups. Flintoft gives the example of Perspectives Health, a startup by Nick Kovalsky and Eshan Dosani. LTF approved their idea for grant funding in 2024, but the assistance didn’t stop there.
“Afterwards, the LTF team helped them refine their pitch deck to get more funding as well as help them get to other VCs and incubators,” explained Flintoft.
Perspectives Health recently raised additional funds for further development of their idea.
Benyacar gives another example with (P)rind, a food company that makes snacks out of parmesan rinds. After their board pitch, LTF didn’t end up funding them monetarily, instead they helped (P)rind with their pitch deck, advertising and packaging. Mesch sums up their role by describing LTF as a “sounding board” and a great resource for startups to not just potentially earn a grant but to also gain valuable advice and guidance.
Mesch expresses that they are currently in the works of creating an even stronger support system for startups after their involvement with LTF. He explained how each company comes and leaves LTF in “different stages,” and Benyacar shared that they are now focusing on increasing post-funding outreach, especially for graduating seniors.
LTF hosts several other events that live outside the pitching process. Their Fireside Chats series is just one example where they bring in speakers to share their expertise with current founders and encourage those interested in forming a startup to learn more about what it might take.
Recently, they hosted Konstantine Buhler, a Sequoia Partner for the VC firm behind Google, Apple, NVIDIA, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, and more. More than 200 people were in attendance during the conversation that was held inside the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures. The goal of the event series is to foster an environment where UChicago students are both educated on and inspired to begin a startup of their own.
LTF hopes to get more funding in the future to support more startups. Proposals submitted to LTF have significantly increased since its start, and they believe that the demand is only going to continue.
“If LTF can provide more resources to people on campus without sending them to more 'startup-centralized' places, we could help put UChicago on the map of startups and have more VCs looking towards the Midwest and Chicago,” said Flintoft.
As interest in entrepreneurship on campus continues to grow, the College will launch an entrepreneurship and innovation minor this fall, led by Chicago Booth. Open to undergraduate students from all majors, the minor emphasizes interdisciplinary thinking—encouraging connections between entrepreneurship and students’ areas of study.
“The school acknowledging entrepreneurship and backing it through curriculum is super exciting,” said Mesch. “It means that people’s own interests in, say, the sciences can now be compounded with the support of the minor, where more people coming for robotics, for example, can begin creating robotics startups.”
Flintoft additionally believes that the minor “will make people more interested in founding startups” which will likely lead to more people going to LTF. Ultimately, this will foster a stronger entrepreneurship community on campus. The minor, in the words of Beyancar, “can only help get people more excited about entrepreneurship,” and it is LTF’s goal to be a beacon through it all.