J. Skyler Fernandes is a General Partner at VU Venture Partners who founded Venture University, an investor accelerator that trains aspiring VCs and angels through a fund-backed apprenticeship model—an unusual approach among venture capitalists. He has built a teaching-oriented brand by creating widely-used educational content like startup pitch deck courses and regularly speaking at conferences to share investing frameworks publicly rather than keeping them behind closed doors.

• Operating an investment accelerator with an extremely high volume sourcing model to find top startups. Teams sift through thousands of deals per cycle to find a select few, indicating a highly competitive review process for founders. For example, during cohort 12, a team of fifty global participants reviewed over five thousand companies to ultimately invest in just three to five.
• Focusing on a broad spectrum of technology verticals rather than remaining confined to a single niche. Deal sourcing teams are deliberately divided by specific industry sectors to cover a wide surface area. As an example, specific teams are built around distinct startup categories like consumer, enterprise, fintech, frontier tech, healthcare, and proptech.
• Celebrating tangible commercial traction and significant funding milestones of backed startups. Showcasing real world deployment of technology is a recurring theme that founders should note when pitching. A notable example is repeatedly highlighting Grabango for successfully raising a thirty nine million dollar Series B and launching a physical checkout free retail experience in partnership with Giant Eagle.
• Demystifying the venture capital process to help startups understand what funds actually look for in a pitch. Sharing advice aimed at clearing up common misconceptions between founders and investors. For instance, pointing out the false positives in the venture capital game and sharing articles to help founders better align their fundraising strategies with realistic investor expectations.
• Organizing unique ecosystem events that flip the traditional pitch dynamic. Startups can benefit from attending these gatherings to see exactly how investment decisions are made and to network directly with decision makers. A prime example is the recurring reverse demo day, where the investment team presents their own investment thesis and due diligence on the selected startups directly to attendees.