May 19, 2026

Tuck MBA Team Wins Global Venture Capital Investment Competition

By Erica Keyes T’26

A team of six Tuck MBA students won the 2026 Venture Capital Investment Competition, a global competition featuring 75 MBA programs from around the world. After winning the New England Regional and advancing through the semifinals at UNC Kenan-Flagler, Valerie Abbruzzese T’26, Olivia Greif T’26, Will Holding T’26, Jessie Huang T’26, Erica Keyes T’26, and Ethan Mulvey T’26 competed against teams from Chicago Booth, BYU Marriott, Colorado Leeds, Korea University, and National University of Singapore to claim Tuck’s first-ever global VCIC title.

Below, the team reflects on the experience, from practicing with live deals and working with founders to making fast decisions under pressure and learning what it takes to evaluate an early-stage company.

Walk us through the VCIC experience. What did the competition ask of your team, and what skills or perspectives did each of you bring to the process?

Before we even attended the competition, we were practicing the format on live deals each Sunday. This was an incredible experience, and it connected us with investors, founders, and Tuck alumni who generously volunteered their time to support us. We are incredibly grateful to our professor and advisor, Jim Feuille, for organizing each weekend and dedicating so much time to the experience. The Center for Private Equity and Venture Capital, particularly Mark Hardie, helped financially support the team, and we are indebted to their generosity. We are excited to continue giving back to the next teams.

To compete, we were expected to evaluate early-stage startups through external diligence, pitch decks, and short conversations with real founders. This meant we had to be efficient with our time, work together to get up to speed on a new industry quickly, and create polished materials to communicate our own perspective on these opportunities. We were required to become experts in new industries in a matter of hours, engage with founders with empathy, and defend our perspective with humility and confidence in front of judges. VCIC is an exercise in operating under pressure and time constraints as much as it is about venture capital.

Each of us brought a unique background and experience to the table. Jessie Huang was the narrator of the team, using illustrative stories and big-picture framing to weave a vibrant fabric from tangled threads. Jessie was also our product expert, where her technical background and empathy enabled her to connect deeply with the user journey.

Valerie Abbruzzese’s curiosity, genuine interest in diving into details, ability to decipher nuance, and skill in building real conviction around a deal were invaluable. Valerie is consistently and quickly able to master complex market dynamics, company valuations, and go-to-market strategy. Her ability to logically construct and underwrite a deal is both admirable and astonishing.

Coming from an equity research background, Will Holding provided expertise and guidance on competitive dynamics and investment opportunities in complex industries. He is indefatigable and helps refocus the group on the larger issues when we start to get lost in the weeds.

Erica Keyes brought a keen eye for pattern recognition and an ability to synthesize large amounts of information from the deal into critical components. Erica is highly structured, manages her time—and the team’s time—effectively, and can clearly and confidently articulate and defend the team’s decision rationale under pressure.

Olivia Greif helped fundamentally dissect the financial model of any company with a skill and acumen rarely seen. She can deftly create both revenue models and a genuine connection with founders.

Ethan Mulvey is uniquely able to cut through swaths of information to find the key lever that defines whether a deal is viable, asking critically important questions of founders with enthusiasm and empathy. He keeps us focused by providing valuable reframing so that everyone can understand the issues at hand.

Working together as a team was one of the most valuable experiences at Tuck and a true opportunity to practice supporting each other. Our varied backgrounds allowed us to appreciate nuances across industries and create the diversity of thought needed to tackle difficult investment decisions.

When evaluating the companies, what signals mattered most to your team?

Our practice over the fall, winter, and spring was spent researching and evaluating companies at early stages. At this stage, the risk profile of any investment is incredibly high. The odds that something goes wrong, at any point, can be incredibly difficult to overcome. Investors usually ask, “How can this go wrong?” and defend safe investments that provide as close to a guaranteed return as possible.

A key insight we adopted through the VCIC experience was the inverse of this perspective. Our team focused on asking, “What happens if this goes right?” We chose to reframe the narrative for our deals around the upside: what the value of the company could be if the path was cleared, if the model was disrupted, and if the vision was realized.

A strong founder, clear market value, and sound financials all make a good company. Revenue and demonstrated product-market fit are signals of a good company. But what makes a great company is one that can fundamentally change the way business is being done. Thinking through the upside possibility allowed us to critically evaluate the impact of a potential investment and find buy-in among the team.

What was the hardest judgment call your team had to make, and how did you work through it?

At our regional competition, we were prepared to pitch two different companies. Our choice would depend on any new information discovered during 14 minutes of conversation with the founder. During diligence with one of our chosen companies, we discovered that the investment was potentially unviable. Our second company then announced that it wanted to exit early, meaning that the assumptions and story we had crafted before the competition were now irrelevant.

This forced the team to make an immediate decision: go with the first deal that was likely unviable but had tremendous upside, or rework our second deal to fit reality. We chose to completely rewrite and restructure our second deal in the one-hour window allotted between diligence calls and partner meetings. We made the difficult decision to rework the cap table and financial model, and to fundamentally re-engineer our deal. This required incredible trust in each other, as we worked in breakout groups to complete the volume of work needed. At the end of the hour, we had a rapid-fire update, giving feedback and taking each new piece of information into consideration while pitching a short-exit, regional CPG brand deal to practicing venture capitalists.

The team worked as a unit, knowing that the background we each brought and the repetition from practice provided the baseline for trust. We knew the decision had to be made fast, so we outlined the pros and cons quickly and then made a decision. One of the most important things we learned was that, if you were ultimately outvoted, you had to accept that fact and get on board with the other side’s vision fast, because we had such limited time. Again, we could only do this because we trusted each other, which we did and still do.

For prospective MBA students interested in venture capital, entrepreneurship, or investing, what advice would you offer them?

A lot of opportunities in these areas are there for you at Tuck if you ask for them. While they are not explicitly part of the core courses, there are entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and investors on campus who have previously operated and practiced and now devote their time to helping students succeed. Part of the joy of these specific career paths is being able to embrace the unknown, face ambiguity, and demonstrate the incredible Tuck skill of being confident in your decisions while staying humble in the face of new information. We encourage students to stay curious, ask perceptive questions, and create a personal network of champions to help your career, no matter your desired industry or role.

For students looking to get into VC, entrepreneurship, or investing, we suggest connecting with the Center for Private Equity and Venture Capital and looking into elective classes such as Morten Sorensen’s Entrepreneurial Finance, Jim Feuille’s Field Studies in Venture Capital and Early-Stage Venture Capital Workshop Practicum, Hart Posen’s Startup Strategizing, and Mark Anderegg’s Entrepreneurship through Acquisition.