Dorm Room Fund

Congrats to Dorm Room Fund for closing $50M fund! I got my start in venture / angel investing while at Harvard with DRF, thanks to First Round Capital & more! We did some incredible investments from Cursor (acquired by SpaceXAI for $60B), Shield AI ($12B valuation) to Spyce Robotics (acquired by Sweetgreen) and more! Since then, I have invested in over 20+ startups from - Sunday Robotics ($1.2B valuation by Benchmark, Conviction) - Hatch AI (acquired by Yelp for $300M) - Mutiny AI ($600M valuation, Sequoia-backed) - MintMCP AI (Stanford, Google, Jeff Dean-backed) - Dream Labs (Nvidia World Model team) Let's go Dorm Room Fund! https://lnkd.in/gwcvBbiZ

Dorm Room Fund is in the The New York Times!!! And this month, DRF closed a new $50M fund. Huge congratulations to Molly Fowler, Madison Jacox, and the team who made it happen. A pretty incredible moment for a community I’m very proud to be part of. DRF has now backed hundreds of companies, including Cursor, Shield AI, Dandy, Hightouch, Commure, Capella Space, Vulcan Elements, TetraScience, Barnwell Bio, Metis (Acquired by DoorDash), Shinkei, and more. 100+ student investor alums have gone on to become founders themselves. I joined DRF last year to do exactly what I love: find exceptional founders early and make the case to invest. Now we’re looking for the next investors to join us. Applications for the DRF SF + West Coast team close tomorrow, October 1. You’ll source companies, run diligence, make investment decisions, and deploy checks alongside some of the sharpest students I know. Come invest with us. And if you’re a student building something exceptional, find me.

I know I'm a broken record, but Dorm Room Fund is magic because of our people. The The New York Times journalist Erin Griffith got it bang-on today: we stand on the shoulders of giants. And it's true again-- thanks to the DRF community, we've raised a ✨ very-over-subscribed new $50M fund✨, and 💜launched a new brand 💜, so we can keep backing the best student and recent grad/drop-out founders. As our people thrive, so does DRF-- 14 years in, we're lucky to count incredible founders, investors, and LPs in our DRF alumni ranks. 30% of our investors in Fund 2 are DRF alumni and their funds. And it's very on-brand that our most successful investment has been into one of our own-- Michael Truell at Cursor. Today we get an excuse to celebrate all of the amazing people that have made our success to-date possible, folks like Claire Smilow and Aryan Shah who joined as student investors and became investors in our funds. Folks like Josh Kopelman and Phin Barnes who dreamed up DRF in the first place and let us fly when it was time to go independent. Folks like Rei Wang, CeCe Cheng, and Chauncey Kerr Hamilton who shepherded us through our first iterations. Folks like Toni Oloko and Will M. and Kashish Gupta who let us invest in their companies. And people like Bill Trenchard, Ann Miura-Ko, Iris Choi, Hayley Bay Barna, Shane McAndrew, CFA, Lewis Hower, Ekwutozia Nwabuzor, Doug Bernstein, and Ben Cmejla who have helped hold the rudder at moments when things were not going quite so smoothly. Most of all, DRF works because the humans on our team care so very deeply-- so the biggest thank you to Madison Jacox, Conor Harbeck, the DRF student managing partners, and our student investors for making this magic machine so much fun to work on, every darn day. To the DRF Community: let's take a very brief, and very well earned victory lap today! And if you haven't applied to join the student investing team before Thursday's deadline, take this as your sign! #DRF4Life 💜 Article here: https://lnkd.in/gXiPKi5u

Eight years ago I met a woman in a WeWork, across the street from the Empire State Building, to talk about a job. She’d spent years running ground campaigns for political races and hardware products, she sang and she somm’d, and of all her skills and accomplishments, the most apparent thing about her was her pull. She was the kind of person you met once and wanted to know.  It turns out that instinct was not only correct, but one many folks felt. Molly Fowler is doggedly loyal, brilliant with people, and, now inarguably, a gifted investor. In 2018, it was hard to understand what Dorm Room Fund was becoming, or would become, but each year it has grown into itself due, entirely, to the people who built it, were brought together by it, and kept showing up long after they had any obligation to. And what a group of people. From Josh Kopelman and Phin Barnes at inception, to Rei Wang and Chauncey Kerr Hamilton in its earliest years, to founders like Toni Oloko, Kashish Gupta, Michael T., and Aryan Shah whose companies helped define what DRF could become, and the dozens of founders we get to work with today who make it easy to want to drop everything for this. Perhaps most importantly, the sixty students we get to work with and learn from every single day. You are the smartest, most capable, and inspiring bunch. When my 93-year-old grandfather frets about our collective future, I reply each time, “we really are going to be just fine.” Today feels like one of those moments when you get to see what all of that adds up to. We set out to raise $30 million and closed a $50 million fund. Thirty percent of our investors are DRF alumni or the firms that employ them. The people this community invested in are now investing back into it in a way that has always happened but never quite so literally. Our team, alumni, and founders make this the best job in the world. Thank you Erin Griffith and The New York Times for telling our story so beautifully. https://lnkd.in/gmtHNPvS

The DRF fam did it again: we're proud to announce a fresh, over-subscribed $50M fund and a spanky-new brand to keep backing the best student and recent grad/drop-out founders. Today in The New York Times, Erin Griffith writes that 14 years after launch, DRF's network "has its tentacles all over the artificial intelligence boom." "When there are big tech shifts, it advantages first-time builders," Molly Fowler told the Times. "It's those moments that level the playing field." The next category-defining companies are being started in classrooms, labs, and dorm rooms. Our student investors are already there, finding founders before anyone else. That's how we found Cursor. Michael T. joined DRF at MIT, and we backed his company early. This year, SpaceX bought Cursor for $60 billion, the largest acquisition of a venture-capital-backed company in history. 🔁 And the flywheel keeps turning. DRF alum Aryan Shah's first call after co-founding Metis was to Molly. DoorDash bought Metis in March, and Aryan is now an LP in the fund that backed him. Students become founders. Founders become alumni. Alumni become LPs. And they keep sending us the next great founder. 💜 Our community showed up in a big way: 30% of the fund's investors are DRF alumni or the firms that employ them. And to every investor who believed in us and in student founders: thank you. In Aryan's words, DRF is "the biggest cheat code any college student can have." To every student building something right now: we can't wait to meet you. Read the story: https://lnkd.in/gsmUH627 #DRF4Life

If you live on the west coast, the next couple days could change your life. Dorm Room Fund SF/West Coast applications are due on October 1st, and we’re stopping by Cal and Stanford over the next couple of days to meet the people who will shape the future of the fund. I joined DRF to understand venture better, learn how great investors operate and evaluate, and meet some of the most talented students around the country. Since, I’ve not only learned how to think about startups from an investor’s perspective, but also how to better evaluate what I want to build myself. The people in DRF constantly challenge my thinking and sharpen my theses, which consistently raises the bar for we are all capable of. DRF is a unique opportunity for students, in that we can write real checks, truly work with founders, and join a community that has produced founders, investors, and operators at some of the best companies in the world. A community that always looks out for its own. If you go to school anywhere on the west (as far out as UT Austin), and this opportunity sounds like something you’d like to be a part of: Learn more and apply: https://lnkd.in/g4j99VCB Come to our Cal / Stanford events! Cal (9/28): https://lnkd.in/gXdHEUSJ Stanford (9/29): https://lnkd.in/gKV_Rxfs Excited to see your applications! Reach out to me if you have any questions our would like to chat about my experience :)

For a decade, Ryo Takanashi, MBA ’25, managed one-fifth of all Japanese imports. But even as he planned around trade wars, foreign conflicts, and a global pandemic, one variable always kept him guessing: the weather. As the chief corn trader for Japan’s largest grain importer, Takanashi watched many of his best-laid plans unravel due to drought. “I was never able to answer the question, what happens when weather patterns change,” he says. Like many founders, he conceived his startup as a solution to his own problem. At Stanford GSB, Takanashi teamed up with classmate Tomo Kumahira, MBA ’25, to launch Mizu - WaterOne.ai, a platform that uses AI to turn thousands of local public meetings into a searchable database of real-time water intelligence. Aquifer, the platform’s AI agent, tracks over 10,000 meetings a month across all 50 states and Canada — turning the minutes into a searchable database. “Aquifer is, in effect, a structured database of local oral history that would otherwise be lost," Takanashi says. “No other source has assembled this corpus.” Water was the start, but Takanashi has seen demand grow beyond agriculture, from chemical suppliers to data center operators. “We’re surfacing local problems that people talk about in a public board meeting,” he says, “and we match those with people able to provide innovative solutions.” https://lnkd.in/ecqeW6eZ