Inside MN:EVC’s First Summit. Lessons for the Next Generation of Investors

Nearly three years ago, two friends working in Minnesota venture capital started Minnesota’s Emerging Venture Capitalists (MN:EVC) network with a simple premise: analysts and associates needed a place to learn from one another.

The first gathering drew less than a dozen people to a brewery for a casual happy hour. Late last month, MN:EVC hosted its first summit, bringing together 35 early-career investors from 17 funds across 5 different states.

Most MN:EVC events are built around peer relationships, comparing notes on deals, sharing experiences inside different firms, and building friendships with people at similar stages of their careers. The summit added another dimension. It brought in founders, investors, operators, and industry leaders who could speak to what comes next.

Across sessions on artificial intelligence, founder relationships, career development, and fund operations, a larger theme emerged. Venture capital is changing. The work looks different than it did even a few years ago, roles are becoming less clearly defined, and the people building careers in the industry will have to evolve with it.

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AI Is Changing VC Operations

Grant Gibson, Principal at Great North Ventures in St Paul, opened the summit with a look at how his team is incorporating AI into the firm’s day-to-day work.

The obvious benefit is efficiency, but Gibson pointed out that the bigger opportunity is allowing a small investment team to take on work it always wanted to do but never had the bandwidth to manage.

Portfolio monitoring is one example. Great North has long maintained Google Alerts for its portfolio companies. Now, an agent reads and filters those alerts, so the team only sees the news that actually matters.

AI is also starting to take on repetitive questions analysts field every day. What is our ownership stake in Company B? What was that pet food company we looked at three years ago? Connect the CRM, portfolio tracking platform, and other internal data sources to an LLM, and those questions become a quick message to Claude instead of an interruption to an analyst.

Although it sounds glamorous, becoming an AI-native fund takes more than buying a new tool. Gibson shared three steps his team has taken.

1. Get everyone using AI.

Nobody needs to become an expert overnight. The goal is to start using it for everyday tasks and learn where it is actually helpful.

2. Clean the data and connect the sources.

That includes the giant internal spreadsheets with miscellaneous calculations in the margins and fragmented systems familiar to nearly every investment firm; if the data going in isn’t clean, the information coming out can’t be trusted.

3. Automate workflows.

At Great North, that can mean evaluating incoming companies against the firm’s thesis before a deal reaches an analyst or routing opportunities to other funds or angels when they are a better fit.

Gibson’s session pointed to a broader shift in the analyst role. As more repetitive information gathering and early screening gets automated, analysts can operate at a higher level. The job becomes less about finding information and more about interpreting it and using it to make better investment decisions.

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What Founders Actually Want From Their Investors

Founder and CEO of Minneapolis’ Pdear Commerce, Eric Martell, shifted the conversation to the investor-founder relationship from the founder’s side of the table.

As a multi-time founder, Martell is no stranger to fast growth, building teams, or raising capital. His baseline expectations from venture partners are straightforward: customer introductions and access to future capital.

He does not necessarily expect investors to get deep into the day-to-day mechanics of the business. But when an investor has expertise that complements the founder’s own superpowers, that involvement can be incredibly valuable.

Martell pointed to former investors Stage 2 Ventures and Dundee Capital as examples. Both brought industry experience that filled gaps in his background.

Venture firms talk a lot about being ‘value-add’ investors, but founders don’t necessarily need more investor activity. They need useful activity.

The same applies to communication. For larger check writers, Martell said monthly conversations can make sense when a company is chugging along, while weekly conversations may be helpful when the company needs support and the investor is actively contributing. Smaller check writers should probably be comfortable with a quarterly email update.

His advice for the junior investors in the room was equally simple: don’t be afraid to speak up if you can legitimately add value. But there is also value in knowing when you can’t.

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Careers Are Built by Collecting the Dots

Kyle Hagge, a Minnesota native who now serves as Chief of Staff at Morning Brew in New York and co-hosts the podcast ‘Per My Last Email,’ offered career advice through a path that has been anything but linear.

His background includes degrees in political science, teaching, co-founding a digital media company, and coming close to raising VC money for a hardware startup.

For Hagge, the point is not to map every career step in advance. It is to “collect the dots before you connect the dots.”

Those dots are the skills and experiences that eventually help you figure out what you are actually good at. One way to find them is by looking for your ‘spikey traits,’ the things you are noticeably better at than most people around you. Knowing where you stand out can be a better starting point than trying to reverse-engineer the perfect career.

Hagge was asked how he thinks AI will shift the workforce. His advice? Get really good at building relationships.

As AI becomes the default for more tasks, genuine personal connection becomes harder to replicate and more valuable. The ability to build trust and maintain relationships is an advantage technology can’t easily replace.

Those relationships shouldn’t only be built vertically. It is easy early in your career to focus on networking with partners, executives, or people already sitting where you hope to be someday. Hagge made the case for investing just as much in horizontal relationships. The analysts, associates, founders, and operators sitting next to you today may be running funds and companies 10 or 15 years from now. The message was well received in a room full of those so-called horizontal relationships.

Mary Grove of Bread and Butter Ventures picked up the career conversation with a similar emphasis on being intentional about where you spend your time and curiosity.

Her argument was that career direction rarely just shows up. You often have to pursue it outside your normal workload by learning about things you are genuinely interested in and reaching out to people without fear of being rejected.

For investors, that curiosity should extend beyond venture. Going to another VC event may be easy, but attending an industry-specific conference filled with the customers a fund wants to understand may teach you much more.

Grove also suggested making mentorship more useful by sending mentors a short email with five or six bullets on what you have been working on and where you need help. She extended that same intentionality outside of work with a personal ‘life portfolio,’ allocating time across work, new skills, and hobbies with actual goals attached to each.

Taken together, Hagge and Grove offered a useful message for anyone early in their career: you do not need to know exactly where you are going. Keep collecting experiences, pay attention to what you are good at, stay curious, and invest in relationships along the way.

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Platform Is Becoming Core Venture Infrastructure

One breakout session focused on an area of venture that can still be surprisingly difficult to define: platform.

Attendees could choose between investment career progression with Innoventure IA Partner Liz Keehner and a platform discussion with Shannon Shroyer of Matchstick Ventures in Minneapolis. Having heard ‘platform’ used broadly without ever fully understanding what it may be, I chose the latter.

Shroyer defines ‘platform’ as everything outside of writing the check. Depending on the firm, that can include portfolio support, community development, events, marketing and branding, operations, business development, and investor support.

Platform is still a relatively new function within venture, but it is becoming increasingly important. Shroyer pointed to a16z, a Silicon Valley firm with roughly $90 billion assets under management (AUM), as an example of a firm using their platform to create a competitive moat. When firms compete for both founders and investors, platform can become another way to differentiate.

Steph Rich of Bread and Butter Ventures approached the subject from another angle, focusing on how platform and operations can support raising a fund. Fundraising is not just a job for the partners, it’s a team sport.

That contribution is often unglamorous but essential. This includes things like maintaining the CRM and fundraising pipeline, updating investor materials, taking notes on calls, managing follow-ups, and keeping marketing, branding, and operations moving.

Rich called it ‘providing coverage.’

Her framing makes platform feel less like a separate department and more like support running underneath the entire firm. When the broader team helps with fundraising and deal execution, partners have more time to focus on the work only they can do.

There’s also a lesson there for early-career investors. Even if you plan to stay on the investment side, understanding how the rest of the firm works and being willing to help where needed can make you much more valuable.

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The Industry Is Still Being Built

The most valuable part of MN:EVC’s first summit was not any single tactic or piece of advice, but seeing all these ideas next to one another.

AI is changing what junior investors spend their time on. Founders are becoming more direct about what they actually want from investors. Career paths through venture are becoming less linear. Platform and operations are playing a bigger role in how firms raise capital, support their teams, and differentiate themselves.

There is no perfect roadmap for building a career in venture, because the industry itself is going through so much change. The skills that matter will continue to evolve, and therefore so will the jobs.

But the ability to learn quickly, build genuine relationships, understand where you add value, and adapt along the way will matter. No matter what comes next.

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About the Author:

Ellie Pigott is an Associate at Traction Capital, a Minneapolis-based venture capital and private equity firm focused on growing businesses across Minnesota and the surrounding region. She's active in the local startup community, mentoring students at local universities and advising early-stage founders as well as part of Minnesota’s Emerging Venture Capital network, supporting the next generation of investors and operators. She holds a degree in Entrepreneurship from the University of St. Thomas.