WashU teams sweep VC regional competitions

Two teams of WashU Olin students racked up the school’s first-ever wins in regional competitions for venture capital investing, moving on to a global competition in April.

A graduate team won the top prize in the South Regional Finals of the Venture Capital Investment Competition on January 24 at Rice University in Houston. Meanwhile, an undergraduate team won the VCIC’s Midwest Regional Finals on February 8 at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

The competition gives students a taste of real-world VC investor challenges. Teams are given three pitch decks from real startups, as well as time to do due diligence on the companies. They interview the founders, then they have two hours to finish a proposal to a panel of venture capitalists.

“The team that wins is the one that questioned the founders best, created the best investment proposal, and defended it best,” said team member Jake Hibbert, MBA 2025. After Olin’s team tied with the University of North Carolina, judges closed their eyes and voted with a show of hands.

“It was very tense,” he said. “We won with eight votes to six.”

Hibbert called this year’s Olin graduate group a “team of equals,” each bringing specialized knowledge about various sectors, as well as tenacity in asking questions of the founders.

“As a team, we were commended multiple times for our ability to question and push the founders, 10,000 miles ahead of everyone else,” he said.

The undergraduate team placed first in all three categories of their competition and drew particular praise from the judges for the depth of their knowledge, said team member Emilia de Jounge, BSBA 2027.

“When we were in the partner meetings, they were able to ask us very deep questions — whether it was about explaining our financial model or picking out anything in five pages full of information and asking, ‘What does this mean’?” she said. “The judges mentioned they were impressed by the background knowledge we had.”

Hibbert was on Olin’s graduate team last year when it placed second in the same event. “It’s a great milestone for the school,” he said. “It is a real indication of how hard the teams have been working and of the support from Olin’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.”

In particular, he credited the support of Olin instructors including Jeremy Degenhart, Doug Villhard, II Luscri, and Dave Kanoff for helping them prepare this year.

Degenhart said the wins this year were the culmination of a five-year effort between Olin and the Skandalaris Center for Interdisciplinary Innovation and Entrepreneurship to recruit promising students for the competition and give them more in-depth preparation.

“We debriefed teams after every competition to capture lessons learned,” he said. “Our teams started moving up in the results at regionals about two years ago, but this year’s students are exceptional.”

De Jounge said the WashU Venture Network at Skandalaris was a major force in preparing her team for this year’s competition by organizing internal competitions and training.

WashU's always had this very strong entrepreneurial presence, but there's been an effort to really build up this VC space as well, helping students see how it stands with entrepreneurship, but also as its own unique field to explore.

—Emilia de Jounge

De Jounge also noted that her team got assistance from subject matter experts from across WashU during their competition.

“We leaned on so many members of the WashU community, whether it was reaching out to a professor in the med school or talking to the athletic director. I think our team is very appreciative of the Washington University community in that sense.”

Both teams are already preparing for the next stage of the competition: the VCIC’s global finals at the University of North Carolina, set for April 11-12.

“I think this is honestly an area where the people who do the best are those who have the most experience,” de Jounge said. “So we’ll be trying to get in as many reps as possible—just practicing, practicing, and trying to build those skills so we all feel really prepared again."

The graduate team included Hibbert and Jessica Tabb, both MBA 2025; Daylan Skidmore, Bonnie Wall, and Joe DiSipio, all MBA 2026; and Anushka Gerald, a PhD candidate. The undergraduate team members were de Jounge, Kate Westfall, and Biswash Bhattarai, all BSBA 2027; Rohan Daggubati EN/BSBA 2027; Mac Barnes, EN 2026; and Zain Rahman, EN 2027.