🎊 All DRF 2023 recap & summer diversity tracks
ft. highlights and pics from DRF retreat, summer diversity tracks, and new VC & tech opportunities
Hope everyone has been able to enjoy the warmer weather that's finally upon us! For those of you finishing up classes and getting ready for finals season, hang in there and good luck. Remember to take time for yourself, stay hydrated, and get enough rest. Our mental and physical well-being are just as important as our academic success — so take a deep breath, find time to practice self care, and know that you're doing great!
🔟 2023 All Dorm Room Fund recap
All DRF 2023: We had an action-packed month here at Dorm Room Fund! On March 30, we celebrated DRF10, a 10th anniversary cocktail party in New York City. The event brought together alums dating back to the first-ever fund, current students, limited partners, co-investors, and friends. It was an incredible night filled with good company, laughter, and heartfelt speeches by Josh Kopelman and Molly Fowler, who shared their insights and experiences with DRF. We're grateful for their leadership and impact on the DRF community. You’ll hear more from us about the past 10 years of DRF soon, thanks to Tanthai P.
Not to be outdone, DRF10 was followed by All DRF 2023, our annual retreat held in Upstate New York. This year's event was a massive success, from the lightning talks hosted by DRFers to an all-star climate tech panel featuring Shawn Xu, Jess Mulvihill, and David Mackanic, to founder/career/investor track breakout sessions. To end the night, we had the pleasure of hearing from Kiki Freedman, founder of Hey Jane and a DRF III alum, who delivered a profound keynote.
We want to extend a heartfelt thank you to everyone who joined us at these events and made them such a success. We're thrilled to have such an amazing community with Molly and Caroline at the helm, and can't wait to see what the future holds for the founders and investors in Dorm Room Fund!
💫 other updates from around the community
Jarrod Barnes, former NYC investment partner, joined the NEAR Foundation as Head of Ecosystem Acceleration!
Spiky (DRF IV), an AI-powered sales platform, has officially gone live on Producthunt! We’re so proud of our friends at Spiky in reaching this milestone — take 30 seconds to upvote and give the product a try here!
Memora Health (DRF II), an intelligent platform for virtual care delivery and complex care management, raised $30m led by General Catalyst with participation from Northwell Health, NorthShore – Edward-Elmhurst Health, Steve Pagliuca’s PagsGroup, Andreessen Horowitz, Transformation Capital, Frist Cressey Ventures, and other strategic investors.
In their infinite wisdom, Twitter has removed the ability to embed tweets in Substack. But don't let that rain on the fundraising parade — check out the full announcement 👉 here! 👈
🚨DRF summer track applications open next week
Next week, Dorm Room Fund will be launching its summer diversity tracks, including the Female Investor Track (FIT), Female Founder Track (FFT), Blueprint, and Prism. These programs are designed to provide opportunities for students from diverse backgrounds to gain valuable experience in venture capital and entrepreneurship.
FIT and FFT will offer summer masterclasses for aspiring female-identifying student VCs and founders, respectively.
Blueprint is a 6-week program for aspiring student VCs who identify as Black, Indigenous, and/or Latino.
Prism is a summer program for aspiring student VCs and founders who identify as LBGTQ+.
If you're interested in applying, more information can be found 👉 here! 👈
📱 tech news
⚡ Buzzkill for digital media. The digital news division of BuzzFeed is shutting down, marking the end of an era of digital journalism. Once viewed as a serious contender to legacy media outlets, BuzzFeed News struggled to make money, despite receiving high accolades, including a Pulitzer Prize. The news division fell victim to the economics of digital publishing and its reliance on digital advertising and social media traffic. The decision to shut down the news division comes as part of a broader round of job cuts at BuzzFeed, which will affect roughly 60 of BuzzFeed’s 1,200 employees. The latest move highlights the uncertain economic climate facing digital media companies that were once the center of attention from media titans including Walt Disney Company and Comcast.
🌎 $60 billion climate alliance. A group of over 20 venture capital firms, including Union Square Ventures and Tiger Global, have formed an alliance called the Venture Climate Alliance (VCA). The coalition aims to make private tech investing more climate-friendly and to increase the VC industry's commitments to climate tech. The VCA has laid out guidance for its members and their portfolio companies to ensure they achieve net-zero emissions by 2050; climate tech-specific investments must save at least 100 megatons of CO2 emissions, and generalist VC firms must routinely assess their carbon footprint. The VCA has been approved by the United Nations as part of its Race to Zero campaign, which aims to amplify efforts to combat the climate crisis with new technologies.
🏦 Frank founder and financial fraud. Charlie Javice, the founder of the college financial planning firm Frank, has been charged with defrauding JPMorgan Chase & Co into buying the start-up for $175m in 2021. The US Department of Justice has filed charges of bank fraud, securities fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy against Javice, accusing her of repeatedly lying to the bank by claiming that Frank had 4.25 million student customers when it had data for only around 300,000. Prosecutors have said that when JPMorgan asked for a list of names, Javice paid an unnamed data science professor $18,000 to fabricate the other customers. JPMorgan closed down Frank in January and its CEO, Jamie Dimon, called the acquisition a "huge mistake".
🥊 Epic battle with Apple. Since 2020, Epic Games, the developer of the popular game Fortnite, has been fighting against Apple over its App Store policies, which it claimed violated federal antitrust laws. In a 2 to 1 ruling issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals, the court decided that Apple’s control of its App Store did not violate federal antitrust law. Although the court's decision mostly maintained the status quo, but it did agree with Epic that Apple was violating California's Unfair Competition Law by prohibiting app developers from directing their customers to payment methods outside the App Store, which charges a 30% fee. This decision could potentially allow app developers to steer customers to outside websites to complete purchases and avoid Apple’s 30 percent fee.
🤖 OpenAI becomes a little less open. OpenAI has announced the launch of ChatGPT Business, a new subscription tier designed for enterprise customers who require more data control and management capabilities. The move is in response to increasing regulatory scrutiny over OpenAI's data practices, with several countries launching investigations into the company's commercial services. To address these concerns, OpenAI has also added new privacy controls to ChatGPT, including the ability for all users to turn off chat history and export their data. It remains to be seen whether these changes will help OpenAI attract more enterprise customers and alleviate regulatory concerns.
📣 new tech and investing opportunities
For students who have already locked down an internship at a US-based VC firm or a startup this summer, our friends over at Inspired Capital have created a community where they’ll share curated events and opportunities. 👉 Apply here! 👈
🌱 Making a special note for any climate-tech roles moving forward because I think we’d all appreciate if our Earth continues to function for a bit longer :)
internships
TikTok: Research Intern in Music Creation (SF)
Snap: Program Manager Intern (LA)
Etsy: Brand Design Intern (NYC)
Hallow: Sales Operations Summer Intern (Chicago)
Patreon: Software Engineering Intern (SF)
Snowflake: Software Engineering Intern (SF)
C3.ai: Communications & Content Marketing Intern (SF)
Anduril: Marketing Communications Intern (LA)
Anduril: Mechanical/Aerospace Engineer Intern (Atlanta)
Anduril: Electrical Engineer Intern (Atlanta)
Anduril: C++ Software Engineer Intern (Massachusetts)
full-time
BDT & MSD Partners: MSD Growth Analyst (SF)
Techstars: Investment Analyst (NYC)
Caffeinated Capital: Investor (NYC & SF)
MongoDB Ventures: Investment Analyst / Associate (SF)
Designer Fund: Investment Associate (SF)
Primary VC: Senior Associate (NYC)
Bessemer: Senior Associate (SF)
🌱 CarbonChain: Carbon Emissions Analyst (NYC)
🌱 CarbonChain: Software Engineer (NYC)
Notion: Product Manager, Growth (SF)
Atomic: Product Manager (Multiple Locations)
DoorDash: Growth Specialist (SF)
Hebbia AI: Product Designer (NYC)
Datadog: Data Analyst (NYC)
Applied Intuition: New Grad - Software Engineer (SF)
Applied Intuition: New Grad - Product Application Engineer (SF)
NVDIA: AI Engineer, Generative AI Foundation Model Research (SF)
Formally: CTO/VP of Engineering (SF / Bay Area)
Job description: Formally (DRF IV) is on a mission to make legal processes accessible for everyone using secure portable data, behavioral psychology and generative AI. Our early team is small and agile, with an exceptionally high bar for talent and culture. Currently, we are three full-stack engineers, a UX-focused designer, a scrappy salesperson, an in-house immigration attorney, and our CEO, Amélie. We anticipate tripling our headcount over the next year to support the generally available launch of our product. We have passionate early paying customers including law firms and companies like Commvault. We are looking for the following in our CTO/VP of Engineering:
Strong full stack web development experience
Significant technical leadership and management experience
Someone with experience scaling engineering teams from 4 to 40 without too much overhead who also has the ability to lead a larger organization and build strong processes
Someone with experience building secure/privacy forward systems
Ideally, someone who is scrappy but clearly communicates trade-offs around scalability and speed and knows when to focus on product stability
Ideally, someone who is mission aligned (cares about immigration, legal tech, access to justice)
Issue written by Andrew Xu and thumbnail designed by Kia Uusitalo
More DRF fun: Twitter + website + company application. Send job opportunities, feedback, requests, and hot takes to info@dormroomfund.com 🚀