


Icehouse Ventures

Icehouse Ventures
Icehouse Venture is a New Zealand-based startup accelerator and early-stage venture fund that aims to help entrepreneurs and startups turn their ideas into successful businesses.The company provides mentorship, investment, and networking opportunities to startups in various industries, including technology, healthcare, and consumer goods. IceHouse Venture was founded in 2001 and has since helped launch and grow over 200 companies, with a particular focus on supporting innovative and disruptive startups.
SKILLS LEARNED
Discover Your ToolkitKey topics and competencies students will acquire and develop during their learning journey.Build and Launch a Startup
Build and launch your startup in front of one of the largest venture capital funds in ANZ with over $500m assets under management.

Mentoring by Successful Founders
Be mentored throughout the program by successful founders, YCombinator alumni and Venture Capital investors.

Annual Startup Showcase
The winning startup will get a Flights and Accommodation included trip to join Icehouse Ventures in New Zealand for their annual startup showcase and ...

PROGRAM OUTLINE
Discover Your Weekly Program Journey4-week roadmap to define each stage of a virtual work-experience program.Ideate
- Ideate on startup ideas with the potential for massive scale with key focus areas in: FinTech, B2B software, Consumer Technology, BioTech/MedTech, Crypto/Web3 and Generative AI.
- You will address key questions for your startup idea such as market size, customer segment, business model, go to market strategy, technical feasibility.
- If you apply as a solo founder you will be matched with 1-3 other students as co-founders.
Build
- Using lean methodology, you will spend the next 2 weeks building your minimal viable product (MVP).
- The goal will be to build an MVP as fast as possible in preparation to validate your startup assumptions next week.
Validate and Test
- You will go to market with your MVP and test with potential customers.
- The goal will be to get one paying customer and/or letter of intent.
Pitch
- In the final week you will pitch to a panel of angel investors, venture capitalists and other founders for the final.
- You will build your startup pitch deck and prepare to talk about your discovery journey.
WHAT OUR STUDENTS SAY
Our Students Success Stories



This program opened my eyes to what life would be like when I enter the workforce - it was an amazing experience.



It was such an exciting program and I felt that I gained skills I would never have got in school. I do think that by doing this I have a much clearer understanding of what I want to do in the future



It’s a great opportunity to take a step into the career path, specifically business. This can really help you when you are applying for college.



I would do this (internship) whether I was sure of law or not..I genuinely had so much fun, and the case study was just so interesting! Analyzing a hypothetical, real-like case was so interesting. I would recommend it.



I learned to learn in this process. I had to read and research, and I believe in the university there will be a lot more harder concepts so it definitely helps.



Overall it’s been very good, I learned a lot about consulting. It was really fun to work in a group to find different kinds of solutions and do research.



My overall experience was really good. I met some really good teammates and the content delivered by the mentor was really good and eye-opening. It’s definitely going to help me in my future. It was really interesting and really helpful.



It’s a starting guide or a starting point for people (students) who are interested in law. Because I recently chose law to pursue as my career, and this program helped me to understand it on a higher level.



The seminars were well-ordered in their complexity and depth so everything is well sorted out until the end. It was a really interesting experience because we got to talk to higher executives from the company as high school students.



Final pitch was the part I really enjoyed the most. It taught me how to create a proper business proposal. It was a really good process of researching and thinking. It really adds value to my life.



The content for the cohort was quite interesting and solid.



It’s been very productive. All the module sessions were really helpful to learn what consulting is, it helped me in my pre-college program in Columbia and it shows a direct translation from the program to real-life university experience.



This program gave me an introduction to engineering and gave me a good start to understand how it works. It exercises teamwork to complete a project which is quite similar to what it’d be like for an actual engineering job!



To someone who’s unsure if they want to pursue law, this program can provide them a good guidance of whether they can see themselves being a lawyer.



Benefits that I got from the program were getting a real life work-experience for the first time and the recommendation letter that looks great in your CV. Lastly is the bonus on business knowledge



I gained theoretical knowledge and a chance to apply them to real-life situations like building a car. It’s very useful because we don’t experience that in high school.



I was always interested in consulting and the PwC program gave me an exceptional opportunity to kickstart my career in the field. Now consulting is a career that I definitely want to go down and I'm excited to continue pursuing it at Columbia!