Day 1 Orientation

Today is my first day at CoreNetwork Fund. I arrived the office around 9 A.M., and started a day of learning. I was a bit of nervous before entering the office but a warm welcome from my company mentor brightened the day. I first had a small tour of the CoreNetwork firm, which is also the Savage Consulting firm. There are three full-time employees including Mr. Bob Savage, and three interns including myself. I met one of the other two college interns Neils, who has interned for CoreNetwork Fund since last September (what I found more interesting though, was that he also could speak Mandarin and Swedish). They were all welcoming and nice, so I look forward working with the colleagues at the firm for the next three weeks!

After the tour, I had a meeting with my mentor, Erik DuPont, the project manager at CoreNetwork Fund and Savage Consulting. He first handed me an Employee Agreement to read and sign. After carefully reading the terms (which essentially were about keeping companies’ information confidential, so in my blog posts, I won’t go into details of the companies’ financials), I signed my name. Though I wasn’t technically an employee but a high school intern, signing the form made me feel more independent and closer to the life stage where I will have a job rather than going to school. Then, my thoughts were pulled back as Erik started giving me a brief introduction of the Venture Capital industry, which I will be learning about for the next 3 weeks. He also talked about what the CoreNetwork Fund firm does and the companies that it currently invests money in. We talked about my goals for this independent study so that Erik could help me arrange some of the materials I will be learning and work I will be doing.

Since some of my goals include learning about common factors of a good investment and understanding terms in the VC industry (or you could say learning the VC & Finance language), Erik assigned me to read a 2017 update report on the 8 companies that CoreNetwork worked with. While reading, I took notes and jotted down some questions (mainly about what specific accounting numbers indicate or how to interpret the graphs). Later in the afternoon, after I had figured out my questions with Erik, I started learning about the VC terms (by using the glossary in the back of a book called Venture Deals). Before leaving work at 5 P.M., I also finished researching more about the 8 companies in CoreNetwork’s portfolio and one company called MCAG. To practice business writing, I wrote a summary for each business. Erik said not to worry too much about the quality since it would be the first time, I still ended up spending quite some time working on it. I look forward for his feedback tomorrow!

Office view at 2 P.M.