Founder Field Day

By: Ramana Nanda and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf and Nathaniel Burbank

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Synopsis: Branded as the "Millennial firm for Millennials," Mike Rothenberg founded Rothenberg Ventures (RV) in 2012 while earning his MBA at the Harvard Business School (HBS). Over the following twenty-four months, Rothenberg raised $20 million and built a venture capital firm that made dozens of seed investments in technology-focused startups. Pitched as an event that could pack a year's worth of networking into a single day, Founder Field Day was perhaps the firm's largest bet to date. On a spring day in May of 2014, as some 300 invited founders descended on AT&T Park in San Francisco, one attendee, Fran Hauser, had a much larger decision to make than just selecting which sessions to attend in the day's 7th and 8th "innings." Rothenberg had recently asked Hauser to join RV as a partner and investor, and invited her out to the Bay Area to consider the offer. Hauser, who had left her role as the President of Digital for Time Inc.'s Style & Entertainment Group three months earlier, wondered if Rothenberg's inexperience would prove to be a drawback or a strength.