“It’s amazing to be in a school that allows you to take advantage of being in New York,” Vilela said. “There’s something about the pace and person that New York attracts—it’s a driven individual who wants to be able to explore multiple interests.”

What she didn’t expect was that she’d get to explore a completely different interest as well—all while she made connections and secured a full-time position at Deutsche Bank.

Vilela, who’s a senior in the Gabelli School, said her background as an international student from Brazil helped inspire her to major in global business. But minoring in art history wasn’t something she saw coming.

“It’s one of the things that would have never crossed my mind if it wasn’t for the core curriculum,” she said. “Fordham is so good at giving us the opportunity to be exposed to and pursue disciplines we are passionate about. You don’t have to give up one over the other.”

After she took an introductory art history course, Vilela studied abroad at Fordham London, where she took a course on art and architecture. All the classes, she said, met in museums.

“It trains different parts of your brain,” she said of studying art history. “It wires you, in a way, to be very detail-oriented. Your critical thinking gets honed to a very sharp degree. It hones in a part of your brain where you’re constantly questioning things.”

From Art to Investment Banking: Asking the Right Questions

Vilela said she used some of those skills to stand out as when she interned at Deutsche Bank.

“Especially at a junior level you’re expected to ask questions,” she said. “I think the art history part my brain was incredibly helpful in that.”

Vilela will start as a sales, trading, and structuring analyst at Deutsche Bank following graduation. She credits Armani Nieves, GABELLI ’21, with helping her in the recruitment process. Nieves helped create networking events as a student, such as Finance Diversity and Inclusion Night.

“He mentors students from Latinx backgrounds into the investment banking recruitment process, said Vilela, who as part of her major is pursuing a concentration in global finance and business economics. “He connected me with Fordham alums who were incredibly supportive and helped me prepare for my interviews.”

Vilela said that she’s seen this level of support throughout her time at Fordham.

“Everything is so much smoother because everyone’s in it together.”

Business for Positive Change

Vilela also said that she appreciated the Gabelli School’s focus on business with a purpose.

“I got accepted into Ignite Scholars Honors Program—it’s for people who have a social entrepreneurship background who want to use business to affect positive change, which is very cool,” she said.

She also serves as an Angel Fund fellow at the Fordham Angel Fund, where she works to connect with Fordham entrepreneurs and vet their applications for funding.

“What’s cool about it is it’s not an undergrad club; it’s people from the Law School, MBA students, and undergraduates,” she said. “It’s also a really nice opportunity to learn from your peers—that’s what I love the most about it. You put a business student and a master’s in social work student and a law student together—the types of questions we’re asking these companies are very different.”

“We were kind of shocked by the numbers that came out of it,” said Manning, who will graduate in December. “On average, I think something like 85% of the seats were just left empty.” And this was before the pandemic.

Manning walked away from that experience knowing that he wanted to do something to help the industry that he loved.

“I want the theater experience to stay alive—even with the combative forces from streaming services and other difficulties, especially with COVID,” he said.

That’s how Cinesave was born. The company, which was just chosen as the first investment by the Fordham Angel Fund, aims to help small independent theaters track and analyze data about when people are attending and help them make decisions about pricing, marketing, and other strategies.

“He’s thought of movie theaters—which I think is a very clever idea—as an airplane,” said Albert Bartosic, GABELLI ’84, head of the Fordham Foundry, which oversees the Angel Fund. “Once you push the button, the movie starts showing whether there’s two people in the seats, or whether there’s 1,000 people—it’s still the same cost.”

Bartosic said that by using dynamic pricing to get more people in the seats, theaters could not only benefit from ticket sales, but also the extra purchases of food and drinks.

Cinesave received $15,000 to start, and can earn an additional $10,000 if the company hits certain milestones. That would add up to the total that the Angel Fund can invest in a company—$25,000.

Fellows From Across Fordham’s Schools

The Fordham Angel Fund began about two years ago with an initial investment of $100,000 from Fordham and the Gabelli School of Business. Since then, the fund has been reviewing applications and working with founders. Cinesave was the first company chosen.

The fund has two main parts to it—students who work as venture associates, known as the Angel Fund fellows, and an investment committee, made up of a board of professional venture capitalists and angel investors. The Angel Fund comprises about 16 students from across all of Fordham’s undergraduate and graduate programs. The group allows them to gain hands-on experience in the startup and venture capital world.

“They’re out there looking for investment opportunities—they’re interviewing founders, they’re talking about companies, they’re assessing whether or not the company is ready for funding,” Bartosic said. “It’s a long road to find the entrepreneur, find the team, cultivate that relationship, understand the business, do the due diligence, and then finally, present to the investment committee.”

Jennifer PoChue, who also goes by J.A. Thomas in her writing, was one of the fellows from the Angel Fund who brought Cinesave to the group’s attention.

“There really is a sense of community in film, and that’s where my passion for the Cinesave project stems from,” said PoChue, who is working toward a master’s in social work at the Graduate School of Social Services.

Convincing the Angel Investors

The investment committee, which is the other half of the fund, is made up of five investment professionals who work as venture capitalists or who are angel investors in other companies.

“What they do at the meeting, in the nicest possible way, is ask annoying questions and [try to]shut down the idea,” Bartosic said with a laugh. “That’s their job—they can’t write a check to fund everything that comes through the door.”

Bartosic said that it’s a testament to Cinesave’s founders and the company’s model that the committee was convinced to invest in them.

Chan Park, a senior business administration major at the Gabelli School, oversees the fellows as the fund’s Rose Hill director of operations. He said that Manning’s commitment and idea are what sold the committee on Cinesave.

“They mentioned a lot about having a product that actually changes or helps solve an issue,” he said. “Cinesave really does that—it tackles an issue the movie theater industry hasn’t been able to solve.”

Manning said that participating in Foundry programs such as the Pitch Challenge helped prepare him for the process of applying to the Angel Fund.

“It’s always a challenge to take the ideas you have and communicate them properly to people who are important,” he said. “What [the Foundry mentors]did was strip down my business to a more reasonable pitch that focused on the parts that actually drew in people’s attention.”

Manning said that Cinesave plans to start with helping theaters first before potentially moving to a customer-facing model.

“We’re going to give these tools to theaters so they can evaluate how their company’s doing, and basically build smart ways for them to discount their own tickets,” he said. “As we evolve, we will eventually open up to that front-end consumer side.”

Ideally, at that stage, consumers would then be able to purchase discounted tickets from their site or app.

Manning said that the initial investment from the Angel Fund would go to startup costs such as incorporation and legal fees, advertising, and underwriting the costs of a website and payment-processing server.

Gaining Experience

Bartosic said that the students, both on the Cinesave side and the Angel Fund side, gained valuable hands-on experience.

“It’s a great experience for entrepreneurs to be able to see what it’s like to go through the process,” he said. “And it’s a great experience for the Angel Fund fellows to see what that’s like in terms of bringing a company to the investment committee and learning how venture capital works.”

Park said that he’s been able to see what works and what doesn’t from the investment committee’s view.

“I was really excited about a deal last semester that I thought was going to get funded, and the investment committee just disagreed with my views, which I think was great. I looked at the deal one way, but they looked at it a different way,” he said. “And through that, I got to learn a ton.”

This fall, the University committed $100,000 to a new fund called the Fordham Angel Fund. Overseen by the Fordham Foundry, it will provide seed money to businesses run by current undergraduate and graduate students.

Donna Rapaccioli, Ph.D., dean of the Gabelli School of Business, said the fund, which will commit investments of up to $25,000 in individual businesses, exemplifies application-based learning and industry connectivity, which are key elements of the college’s approach to education.

“Launching the angel fund is another great opportunity for our students to get exposure to the real-world practices of an investment committee, and a chance at real-time decision-making with tangible outcomes,” she said.

“It will provide the added benefit of seed capital for worthy businesses that will add value to society.”

Al Bartosic, GABELLI ’84, the Foundry’s executive director, said the fund is in many ways the pinnacle of offerings that the Foundry can offer.

“We started with the basic mentorship, then we put a pitch challenge together; we’ve been doing that for four years. Last year we put our Ram’s Den competition, which was then called Venture Up!, together; we’ll be doing the second one this month,” he said.

“We wanted to give students an opportunity not just to get mentorship and guidance, but also, what a lot of them need is cash to work with their businesses.”

A Volunteer Effort

The backbone of the fund, which is open to students from all of Fordham’s nine colleges and schools, is two committees of volunteers staffed by students, alumni, and experts in venture capital including academics and working professionals.

The investment committee that will evaluate potential companies is made up of Kevin McQuillan, whose son Chase graduated from the Gabelli School in 2017; Vipin Chamakkala, GABELLI ’10; Donna Redel, LAW ’95; Jerry Wong, program director of the Gabelli M.S in Global Finance; and Bronson Lingamfelter.

“These are people who live, work, eat, breathe, and sleep venture capital or startups,” said Bartosic.

The task of locating companies that might be worth investing in, meanwhile, falls to members of the second committee, the Angel Fund Fellows. Though the position is also open to all undergraduate students,tthe first cohort is made up of Gabelli School students:  seniors Tigerlily Cooley and Christian Pankovcin, and juniors Luis Navarro, Julia de Xavier, and Matthew Nguyen.

The fellows, who have been searching for investment-worthy companies since September, will present the investment committee with 15 potential investment opportunities this month. In January, the investment committee will whittle that list down to four or five finalists who will be invited to present their plans in person.

Bartosic said he expects that at least one company will receive funding. In March, the fund will refer that company to the Law Schools’ Entrepreneurial Law clinic, where law students will conduct their own due diligence.

“The goal is to give these fellows a taste of how a venture fund really works, so they understand that it’s not all just opening a business up, riding around on a skateboard, and feeling good about things. The due diligence is really the hard work,” he said.

Learning How Venture Capital Works

The fellowship program was an obvious fit for Tigerlilly Cooley, a global business honors program student at Gabelli Lincoln Center. She’s currently interning at venture capital fund Future/Perfect Ventures, and before that, she was a Venture Capital College Fellow at the Female Founders Fund. She also interned at Sony Music and currently fronts her own band, Bleachbear. The two fields are not so far apart, she said.

“I like meeting with people. I like client-facing things where you talk to other people. I have a band, but I’ve been thinking a lot about the business element of it. I kind of think of that as my startup,” she said.

McQuillan, a member of the investment committee, said he was excited by the opportunity to help students learn the ropes of the venture capital industry. It’s one he knows well, as he’s currently a general partner of OCA Ventures and the founder and general partner of Focus Opportunity Fund. He credited Rose McSween, Ed.D., senior director of development at the Gabelli School, with bringing him on board.

“We sat down one night and talked about how kids want to learn about starting businesses, and how Fordham needs to start one of these funds. She got a bunch of people to volunteer their time, and I was one of them,” he said.

“One of the key responsibilities in life is, you should help the next generation, and share your successes and failures so they don’t make the same mistakes. I’m doing this because I want to help the next generation. The motivated ones are the ones I get the most excited about.”

Bartosic said that when it comes to choosing companies, the Angel Fund will require them to meet standards such as the Environmental, Social and Governance Criteria (ESG), and those set forth by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASBE), but otherwise fellows will not be steered to specific industries.

“There’s a small subgroup of students that are steadily working away on their businesses while they’re at Fordham. We’ve seen them, we’ve identified several of them, and we’re sure there are lots and lots of them that never come to the Foundry,” he said, adding that Fordham entrepreneurs can be found beyond the Gabelli School.

“I just ran into someone from the Graduate School of Social Service who has a business, and we didn’t know about it, and she was like, ‘Can I get some help?’ So people are out there, doing these things.”