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Connor Hasson

Field: Economics, Venture Capital

Major/minor:Political Science, Economics

Host: Plug and Play

Duration: 3 months in summer 2018

Job title: Berlin Rotational Intern

 

Job description:

Startup sourcing, due diligence, and one pagers for potential investment:

  • Used Pitchbook and Crunchbase to comb through European startups that may be interesting for investment or of interest to one of our corporate partners.
  • From here, if I or one of the associates did find a company interesting, we would contact them to gauge our initial interest with the company.
  • If the initial contact was successful, we would arrange follow-up meetings would for due diligence for investment, or with a corporate partner.
  • For investment, if the company made it through multiple processes and looked good on the DD sheet, as well as was approved by our ventures leaders in Silicon Valley, an investment would be made in the company.
  • During this time, I would sit in on meetings, take notes, and fill out information onto DD sheets to send to our ventures team.
  • Calls/Meetings with leadership of some of the largest European corporations.
  • Sitting in on these meetings was less of a job duty than something I found interesting and wanted to do to hear pitches from PlugandPlay’s corporate partnerships and see how sales operated.
  • What I did do to help the business development team was source the contact information of a list of executives in companies over 1 billion in Germany to try and sell our corporate partnership.
  • Assisted in planning/operating flagship events in Berlin (Corporate Deepdive and Expo): These events are for our corporate partners and the startups in our ecosystem. Throughout the day, a corporate meets multiple startups to attempt to find ones that can help them to innovate. These events require a lot of busy work -- setting up catering, checkin, setup, RSVP -- which I did and made sure everything ran smoothly during the day.

The best part was researching these different new companies, then being able to go and actually meet the founder/team in person. Looking into all the financials and ideas for the product, you feel invested in the company and it is great to meet the people you have been reading about to really understand their vision.

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