Internship Spotlight: Sanika Bhave

Name: Sanika Bhave

Major: Canfield BHP, Plan II Honors, Management Information Systems 

Previous internship: Venture Capital Intern at Crosscut Ventures

Topics of Interest: clean tech, social entrepreneurship, intellectual property law, art history

For students interested in the intersection of business, technology, and social good, Sanika Bhave is a student worth learning from. As a Venture Capital Intern at Crosscut ventures, Sanika had the opportunity to spearhead various projects, from developing LA’s first free regional tech job board to helping run a social impact fund. 

Crosscut is an early-stage fund based out of Santa Monica, California. Because of the pandemic, Sanika worked remotely, but still had the opportunity to learn from leadership and develop skills throughout her summer.

“I worked under Nick Kim, who is the head of platform (at Crosscut),” she said. “Part of what I did was help spearhead Crosscut’s platform initiatives, like making sure our mission, what we stand for, and our past successes are known to the broader tech community.” 

One of the projects she worked on was something called Interchange, LA’s first free regional tech job board. Sanika said the idea behind Interchange was to reduce barriers to entry in the area.

“Silicon Beach is very much a real thing, and we want to retain top tech talent in LA, but also attract people to come to live there,” Sanika said. “The launch of Interchange was really cool. There’s no paywall, no barriers– whether it be income, racial background education, etc. Now (everyone has) a fair shot at being employed by the best and brightest. Working on that was really cool.”

In addition to working on Interchange, Sanika had the opportunity to interact with founders through Crosscut Connect, the central repository used to provide founders support. 

“Last week we had a webinar with Brian Makita, who is the head of performance marketing at Warby Parker,” Sanika said. “We also talked with art portfolio companies and marketing departments about how performance marketing has evolved at Warby Parker since COVID and how those strategies might apply to our portfolios as well.”

More so on the venture capital side, Sanika also supported the management of the 2020 Summer Lab Fund, a fund born through a partnership between PledgeLA, HBCUvc, and Crosscut Ventures. Sanika said the fund allocated $15,000 in non-diluting funding to six tech-based startups that were founded by students or alumni of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). 

“I got to be a part of developing the application and sending it out, doing due diligence on all those applicants like having one-on-one product demos, and then eventually picking our finalists to receive that funding,” Sanika said. 

Sanika said her experiences through student organizations at UT have helped her understand the different aspects of business in a unique way, paving the way for her to become involved in venture capital. 

“It really wasn’t until I joined SELL Fellowship sophomore year that I started to understand that there are different layers to business and you can insert yourself into whatever layer you want and also apply that intersectionality to other fields. For me, the intersection of impact and entrepreneurship is something I know I want to pursue for the rest of my life,” she said. “After experiencing entrepreneurship through SELL and other orgs, like my own side projects, I realized I wanted investment experience and to see what it looks like on the investor side, which is what spurred my decision to go and recruit with VC firms.”

Outside of organizations, Sanika felt that her Canfield BHP classes also helped her throughout her internship, especially Professor Douglas Hannah’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship class (MAN 327H). 

“From both a personal growth standpoint and an intellectual growth standpoint, when I’m sitting in meetings and hearing all of these companies pitch and then talking about their design thinking, user testing, what it means for their core product to work, I get it,” she said. “I don’t think that before I understood entrepreneurship or business on a deeper level until I took that course. (Canfield) BHP really emphasizes hands-on learning in the best way possible.”

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