Join the Dorm Room Fund Team in 2018
Applications are open for 2018! We’re looking for the best innovators, founders, and investors still in school.
Hi. We’re Dorm Room Fund — a student-run venture fund powered by First Round Capital that exclusively invests in student-founded companies. We’re a scrappy team of 30+ students from across the country with super diverse backgrounds — from entrepreneurs to engineers to writers to chess champions. We fund our most promising peers and provide them with the resources they need to grow their startups while in school. This includes access to a powerful network of mentors and investors, as well as a $20,000 investment.
We are proud to be at the center of a community of 200+ companies that have gone on to raise $400M+ from top VC firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, First Round Capital, Union Square Ventures, and more. Read more about us in our latest feature in The Information (paywall).
We are formally kicking off the search for our next cohort of investment partners, engineering, and marketing partners, and we are looking for good people everywhere. We have four teams actively operating across the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia. Each team is made up of investment partners who are current full-time students at universities in their regional areas. Each of these teams will be evaluating candidates over the next few months.
Our distributed HQ team is looking for a student engineering partner and a student marketing partner to work with us to build out tools to support the student entrepreneurship community, provide input on investment decisions, and work with our portfolio companies to bring them to the next level. You can find more information in our post here. Applications are due September 21st.
We invite all students interested in joining the Dorm Room Fund to apply before our general deadline on November 2, 2018. That being said, we are looking to fill immediate openings for investment partners in select universities across the East Coast, and will begin interviews for those schools now. We will be making early decisions for students from Harvard, Penn, Princeton, and — for the first time — universities in the Washington D.C., Baltimore, and Pittsburgh areas by early October. To be clear, if you go to one of the schools mentioned above, please apply ASAP. Our upcoming Mid-Atlantic university roadshow is as follows, sign up here to get the latest updates on time and location:
⚡ ️September 6 — University of Pennsylvania
⚡ ️September 6 — Morgan State University
⚡ ️September 8 — Johns Hopkins University
⚡ ️September 15 — University of Maryland
⚡ ️September 16 — Howard University
⚡ ️September 22 — Carnegie Mellon University
⚡ ️September 22 — Princeton University
What’s it like to be a partner?
To get a better sense of what you’d do as a partner on the investment team, take a look at our day-to-day schedule.
- We meet with student founders to discuss their startups. Sometimes these student founders are at our school, and sometimes we travel to events to meet them.
- We diligently research markets and technologies to be able to evaluate the companies we meet effectively.
- We hold weekly investment meetings where we listen to pitches, engage in discussion, and make investment decisions.
- We write checks — we give every company we fund a check for $20,000 and access to our community and portfolio resources.
- We meet with our portfolio founders regularly and help them learn the ins and outs of fundraising, launch strategy, growth, and hiring. In addition, we connect them with world-class advisors, investors, and mentors to help them solve their key problems.
- We host events, talks, and dinners both internally at DRF and for the larger student entrepreneurship community.
- We speak at entrepreneurship events at our schools, and we tend to be judges at pitch competitions and hackathons.
What are you looking for?
We welcome students of all backgrounds to apply. You could be a freshman majoring in philosophy or a PhD student studying artificial intelligence. As long as you’re a full-time student graduating 2019 or later, you’re invited to apply to join the Dorm Room Fund team. We specifically look for the qualities below:
- Demonstrated interested in supporting entrepreneurs and passionate peers. You’re an active member of an entrepreneurship club or startup at your school and engaged with the startup community at your university or beyond.
- Passion for entrepreneurship and curiosity about new technology. You have an understanding of what’s happening in tech and VC, you love learning about new technology, you have some experience working with startups or in venture.
- Confidence in your beliefs. You’re always looking for themes, analyzing trends, and thinking critically about the future. You enjoy sparking discussion and sharing your viewpoints.
- Initiative. You have ideas for how you’re going to improve Dorm Room Fund and student entrepreneurship in your community and are excited to put them in action. You’re execution oriented and pumped to build a community with an awesome team.
Our partners spend about 10–15 hours a week minimum running Dorm Room Fund. It’s a serious commitment, but it’s also a ton of fun and a world-class learning experience. As a member of Dorm Room Fund, you’ll graduate with hands-on venture experience, cross-industry startup knowledge, and most importantly, be part of a national community of talented entrepreneurs and investors. Our alumni have gone on to do amazing work — from raising millions in funding for their own startups, to launching their own venture firms.
We’ll be making decisions by the end of September. Questions? E-mail sxu@dormroomfund.com. We’ll continue to update our FAQs. Looking forward to seeing your application!
