Aram is a veteran investment professional with 20 years of experience. He’s realized over 45 transactions across Project Finance, LBO Financings, Growth Equity, Venture Capital, and M&A in half a dozen countries on three continents.
The Origins
In 2016, I started teaching the Venture Capital course at HEC Paris Master in International Finance (MIF), ranked #1 globally by the Financial Times every year but one since 2010.
I didn’t know it then, but it was the beginning of The VC Factory.
After spending hundreds of man-hours building the curriculum for the HEC Paris course, I realized that training students or executives and mentoring/advising startup Founders had the same shortcomings:
- Most of the face time was spent repeating the theory
- As a consequence, there was little time left for real-life, practice-based teaching and advising
- It was always difficult to find a suitable time for all parties
Being a solution-driven individual, I started seriously working on an e-learning platform in February 2018. After building the first online course in a chaotic environment (I just had my first-born, had hired seven interns to work on the platform, and I was working at a private equity fund which meant limited slots dedicated to the project), I decided to go for it and launched the TytchMe Academy in September 2018.
Over the years, e-learning has morphed into e-mentoring and the TytchMe Academy has become The VC Factory, which better describes what we do. I use a separate website to host the training platform. You can visit it here.
The VC Factory Today
I will no doubt one day take some time to publish a blog post on all the mistakes I made along my entrepreneurial journey. I frequently use them when training startup Founders.
What you see today in the v5 of that project born in 2018. We now have two main programs:
- VC Career Accelerator: an 8-week program to help Aspiring VCs get a Venture Capital job, and Junior VCs (less than 2 years experience) get a faster promotion
- Funding Accelerator: a 10-week program to help fundraising Founders raise money with Angel Investors & Venture Capitalists (focused on Seed Funding & Series A Round)
A Little Bit More About Myself
I generally don’t like to talk about myself too much, but since this is an e-mentoring platform, the personality and expertise of the mentor matters. Here are some highlights.
A Unique Perspective
Working on “both sides of the chequebook”, as I say, i.e., both as an Investor and an Advisor, gave me a unique perspective I’m now sharing with you. My objective is to bring you inside the head of a Venture Capitalist making an investment decision. If you’re an Aspiring VC or a Junior Investor, it will help you get familiar with the job faster. If you’re a fundraising Founder, you will (finally) understand not only what to put in a pitch deck or how to run a funding process, but also why you should do it in a very particular way.
I still dedicate a small portion of my time to advising work, to stay relevant and be able to bring the latest market practices to the e-mentoring side.
Psychological Traits of Entrepreneurs
A second endeavour worth mentioning is that I’m pursuing a doctorate on the psychological traits of entrepreneurs (Executive DBA, 2019-2023). More precisely, I’m trying to understand how entrepreneurs uniquely manage their stress to limit its impact on their mental health.
I host a podcast, La Folie d’Entreprendre, on that topic (in French).
Elite Mentoring Engagements
I don’t really like to place one accomplishment over another because I deal with human psychology and cognitive abilities, and they are all unique. But I know that in this world, what you know is sometimes less important than who you know. So here are a couple of prestigious/unusual experiences.
I’ve been coaching startup Founders pitching famous Super Angels in the French version of the Shark Tank TV Show since the start. We shot the first season in 2019, and it was aired in early 2020 with great success. We shot the second season in early 2021, it should air in late 2021 or early 2022.
It’s a time-pressure assignment (I coach over 30 participants in less than a month) but really fun and a good opportunity to meet some of the best entrepreneurs in the country.
Another experience worth mentioning: I held a training session on the VC Pitch at Web Summit 2019, the largest tech conference in the world.
I also often take part in startup juries, conference panels, and other similar public appearances. Follow me on LinkedIn for more info.