Internship Spotlight: Anagha Mulpur ’27, Detroit Venture Partners
Anagha Mulpur ’27 returned to her home state to intern at a venture capital firm focused on entrepreneurship and investment in Detroit.
Internship: Detroit Venture Partners (DVP), Detroit, Michigan
Hometown: Canton, Michigan
Pronouns: she/her/hers
The SOM class you’re using on the job: Executive
Go-to work lunch: 7Greens Biggies Burrito
After-work routine: Walks with my dad and cooking with my mom and sister
Favorite thing about internship city: The beautiful art murals around every corner!
During an intern event towards the end of my summer, the lights came down, and the words “MOVE DETROIT. MOVE THE WORLD” appeared across the screen in neon green. Clips of the city’s regrowth played, highlighting Hudson’s Detroit (the first new skyscraper complex built in the city for several decades), where I happened to work during the day. I was surprised to find myself tearing up.
I spent this summer as a venture fellow with Detroit Venture Partners, the VC arm of billionaire and philanthropist Dan Gilbert, which deploys tens of millions in capital every year in companies that often contain a Detroit angle in their story. Dan’s claim to fame is founding the mortgage lender Rocket, which is headquartered in Detroit; today, the Rocket Family of Companies (FOC) has expanded to encompass nearly the entire homebuying journey, sizeable real-estate holdings, sports teams, Dan’s family office (including DVP), and many related businesses.
I’m a proud Michigander, and my goal for the summer was to work in early-stage investing back home. I learned of DVP one month into SOM, by which point I’d already seen the “business and society” mission lived through experiential learning opportunities and diverse case studies in class. SOM’s best VC resource, the Meng Impact Investment Fund, showed me that financial returns didn’t have to be a fund’s only performance metric. Indeed, many of the companies I evaluated for investment while I was on Meng’s financial inclusion deal team aimed to disrupt the world through impacting underserved populations.
Still, I wrestled with the question of how organizations could combine purpose and financial performance without tipping too hard in either direction. When I started the course Executive, taught by Jon Iwata with a variety of guest speaker CEOs, I was feeling a bit jaded from prior experience. In our very first session, we spoke about the concepts of purpose, strategy, and culture—the three foundations of any company dictating the way they conduct business, what they do and don’t pursue, and what they stand for. Hearing from leaders of companies big and small, it struck me that once they’d defined their purpose and culture, they were able to articulate their strategy in a handful of words.
For anyone thinking about VC, it may be surprising that I didn’t pick another SOM class to highlight—say, Innovator (all about entrepreneurs), Sourcing and Managing Funds, or one of the electives tailor-made for aspiring investors. Though all of the above are incredible in their own right, it’s most important to me to learn what a founder stands for and how they want to create their change.
I’d met DVP’s investing team multiple times during my internship search process, even plucking up the courage to travel to Michigan’s annual VC awards dinner, which the organization partially sponsors. Despite that, on my first day driving to orientation in May, my stomach was in knots—I wanted so badly to do well. I first went to the FOC’s intern orientation, where without delay, we jumped into the company’s own purpose, strategy, and culture. What was incredible to me was I could use one FOC tagline to sum all three up: “For More Than Profit.”
Within the family of companies, no team lives this value more than DVP. My internship was the feet-first experience I craved: my colleagues opened calendars to me and six other interns, inviting us to join almost any meeting that piqued our interest. I witnessed their generosity with their time, effort, and networks to support founders, regardless of deal viability. They regularly interfaced with peers throughout the parent organization to learn about business models, real estate synergies, and potential customer fit. Most interestingly, they worked with other family offices and VC funds to strategize on how to attract entrepreneurship and increased investment to Detroit.
A typical day in the internship could include a couple of first-time founder intros; a Rocket FOC internal meeting; heads-down due-diligence work; some project research for our large market-entry intern exercise; being pulled into a fund-to-fund deal-flow chat; even finding locations for a telescope display (true story). It was the combination of intellectual challenge, socializing, and variable days that I loved.
One unique feature of this internship was that it also gave us the opportunity to gain operator experience in an early-stage company in the DVP portfolio. I worked with Signal Advisors, an organization that enables independent financial advisors to help more Americans reach secure retirement. Members of the creative team took me under their wing, teaching me balanced AI skills and design thinking to improve my visual communication. Working with this rising company helped me truly understand the impact DVP makes in the world.
These 10 weeks were the best of my professional life. As I enter my second year at SOM, my internship has inspired me to take classes I previously wouldn’t have considered, like electives on nonprofits and negotiations. Best of all, I am continuing my work with DVP and FOC through the elective course Impact Practicum, which allows students to pursue a professional project with faculty mentorship. I’ll be utilizing real-time economic development lessons from Yale faculty to contribute to Detroit’s growth once I graduate.
