ÍÃ×ÓÏÈÉú

Eros Resmini (00:00):
Who was I at Puget Sound? I had long hair. Now I have no hair. That's one start. I was an interesting kid at Puget Sound. I was very into music. I was playing in bands on campus. There was some really cool stuff happening around that. I was a mixed major. I did both music and business. So the business leadership program at the time had some really great professors that I fell in love with, but I also really loved the fact that I could, in that environment, in that liberal arts environment, also explore music and work on singing and be in choir and things like that. So I really enjoyed that. And then of course was playing in bands at night.

Narrator (00:54):
This is Greater, We Ascend, a podcast from the ÍÃ×ÓÏÈÉú about Loggers reaching to the heights.

Eros Resmini (01:06):
Alright, so my name is Eros Resmini. I'm currently the founder and managing director at the Mini Fund. It's an angel fund based in the Silicon Valley. I was a UPS 1998 graduate. Loved it there, enjoyed it there, miss it, and spent a lot of time doing startups before I got into angel work. The simple version of what I do for a living is I put money into young risky startups. I think the difference largely between angel investing and what most people are familiar with, which is venture capital investing, is we go very, very early in the process. So oftentimes the teams that we're investing in are pre-product. We're very early in the product development cycle, whereas most VCs are focused on the later stages. When the product is a little more mature, there's larger user bases, maybe even revenue.

(02:10):
Yeah. My favorite professor at UPS is a gentleman by the name of Professor Barsma. He was part of the business leadership program at the time, taught an amazing class on organizational behavior that I still think of to this day. He had a style where he really wanted to engage with every student in the room and being sort of the long-haired, hippie-looking kid in the room, I probably stood out in an awkward way, but he was very good at engaging with me and we built a relationship that lasted well beyond my Puget Sound years, which was fantastic. We had a chance to catch up over the years. Whenever I would come up north. He went on to be mayor of Tacoma and we stayed in touch after I graduated. And my job takes me up to the Northwest quite often, and there's many wonderful game studios up there.

(03:04):
So whenever I was coming up, I would always make it a point to reach out with him, and I remember very clearly one of the visits up there. He took me on a tour of Tacoma and showed me all the projects he was working on as a mayor, and it just felt really great to have that kind of a relationship with your undergraduate professor. I moved back to the Bay Area where I was born. I was born in Palo Alto. After Puget Sound, so Palo Alto was home, kind of came back to the valley, quickly moved to San Francisco, which at the time was going through the late end of the.com boom. It was a great time to be getting a job as a college graduate, actually. There was a lot of action happening, a lot of young startups, and I jumped right into that scene and then a few years later, things kind of fell apart and we had the Dot Com Bust.

(04:00):
It was one of the first big economic busts that I had experienced. So unfortunately at that time, if you were a startup guy, you were ostracized. You kind of became the black sheep of the workforce. And so it was really hard to get a job at larger corporations. So I found a few things here and there, but eventually decided to go back to school and I got my MBA from Santa Clara University, which parlayed into a MBA associate—effectively an internship—at Hewlett Packard. And bit by bit we got to a place where I was into the gaming world and all the wonderful things that I'm doing today, which are largely around video games, entertainment, and eventually investing in those categories.

(04:54):
I mean, if I was to describe a liberal arts education to someone, it's funny, I've been talking to my son about this, who's a junior in high school now and starting to think about college. I think the beauty of the liberal arts college is one, the breadth of it. The fact that you really have an opportunity to explore very many different disciplines in your four-year journey. I think in Puget Sound in particular, it was very easy to get into the classes you wanted to get into. Everything from philosophy to music that we discussed to the core business classes I was taking. I love the multidisciplinary approach that contributes to your degree. I also think that there is a culture in the liberal arts education around discussion, collaboration, and debate from those different disciplines. That is a critical skill in the startup world because oftentimes, especially in the early-stage startup world that I come from, there are so many times where you really don't have an answer. Actually, you're inventing something for the first time or you're coming up with a solution for the first time.

(05:59):
So that ability to think around a problem from multiple angles generally results into a better solution. And I think a lot of those skills are taught in the liberal arts education. I work with folks from all sorts of places. It's not necessarily just small schools. I work with kids that are literally out of high school and just talented engineers. I work with folks that have amazing degrees all the way up to the PhD level, and I work with everything in between. I think that in my world, you want to have some diversity in background. So certainly we do see small school folks for sure, but we want to see different backgrounds. I think ultimately that diversity of background does contribute.

(06:51):
I always tell people that ask me, because oftentimes I get asked the question, something along the lines of, "what was your plan that got you where you are, Eros?" and I'm not actually a big planner. I think my life is a just series of fortuitous moments and luck, and I think Puget Sound was one of those moments. So when I was going through the process of trying to find a school, went up north, and actually I was looking at UW and decided I should take a stop at this little school called UPS that a friend of mine had mentioned to me I should take a look at. And I walked around the campus and I absolutely fell in love with it, the vibe, the atmosphere, the classes I attended. I felt engaged by the professors even though I was just a visiting student. And that stuck with me. So when acceptance time came around and I got an early acceptance to Puget Sound, I took it right away and I didn't even bother really paying attention to the other letters that came in.

(08:02):
So yeah, it was sort of a moment in time where I just got lucky and stopped by a great school and decided that's where I wanted to go. Well, these days I contribute to the school financially. We actually just put a scholarship in place. I've done some speaking with the Business Leadership Program, the business school really, it's entailed me coming and speaking to a room full of business students as a guest speaker. I'm not a very formal guest speaker, so it tends to be more of a Q&A session. And the students are, of course, many students these days are interested in the startup world, startup ecosystem. And so we've just had some great conversations sharing my experiences and answering questions that many of them have. And then of course, I have many folks in college, some great friends that still live up north and we'll walk through campus together when we're on our way to a Seahawks versus Niners game or something along those lines. I think something everybody should know about the ÍÃ×ÓÏÈÉú is that it's a small, intimate environment that gives you a chance to immerse yourself in a spectrum of learning. And I think it's a place that's peaceful and welcoming and inviting for curiosity, and that's certainly what I took away from it.

Narrator (09:30):
Greater, We Ascend is a production of the ÍÃ×ÓÏÈÉú. This episode was produced by John Moe. Our theme music is by Skylar Hedblom, Puget Sound Class of 2025. Learn more at pugetsound.edu/greater.