By Doug Liedle, IU Ventures

If you don’t work in a university setting, you might not be thinking about alumni networks in your day-to-day experience. But you might be surprised at how valuable those networks can be and how many people you’ll find in your line of work, with more in common than you realized.

As IU Ventures has expanded its reach and programming since 2018, we’ve been pleasantly surprised to discover the large number of alumni involved in venture capital and entrepreneurship. Once that connection to IU has been established, we’ve found it instantly creates a relationship. The affinity alumni have for IU makes them want to give back in any way they can.

We decided to dig in and find out just how many of our alumni are currently involved in venture capital. IU has one of the nation’s largest living alumni bases, at over 712,000 living alumni, with the Kelley School of Business accounting for 115,000; and we found that about 1,000 alumni work in the venture capital industry.

We have found a similar connection as it relates to the state of Indiana itself. Once that common ground of being a Hoosier is established, there’s a willingness to help that surfaces.

We expanded our search to include alumni from all institutes of higher education within Indiana and came up with about 2 million individuals, nearly 200,000 of whom are from Indiana business schools. In the venture capital industry, we discovered 2,400 alums from different universities in Indiana.

By expanding our search to include alumni from all of Indiana higher education, our network within the venture capital space more than doubled. We look forward to continually expanding our network through building relationships with entrepreneurs, syndicate partners and experts in all sectors by finding common ground in the Hoosier state and the world at large.