four years ago when she asked Connect CEO Duane Roth (who died last year) to help create an evergreen fund to provide seed funding for student-led startups. Ochoa said they didn’t get much traction until she met Schwab, who “became really enthusiastic about the concept” and worked with the university to make it a reality.
“It was clear to us that after the companies graduated from our program, they needed access [to] capital to continue to grow,” Ochoa writes. “In addition, I wanted to create a mechanism that will help sustain the operations of the von Liebig Center. A portion of the returns from the fund will come back to the Jacobs School to support commercialization.”
In working out the details, the UC San Diego Foundation became a limited partner in Schwab’s Vertical Venture Partners fund, on behalf of the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.
“We’re seeing the beginning of a new model here,” said Albert Pisano, who became dean of the Jacobs School last September. “Under the old engineering school model, we publish papers, there are patents you can buy, and researchers you can hire. Under this new model, we have all that, as well as teams of two or three students who are trained as entrepreneurs, and they are ready to go.”
As the founder and managing director of Vertical Venture Partners, Schwab will oversee investments that will target emerging companies in his areas of expertise—enterprise software, business-to-business software, and infrastructure software.
Schwab graduated from UC San Diego in 1979 with a bachelor’s degree in applied sciences, and later obtained a master’s in aerospace engineering from Stanford University and an MBA from Harvard. He began his career in software engineering at Lockheed and later joined Sun Microsystems. In 1991, he co-founded
