 Dorm Room Fund Samantha Smith has been chosen as one of the student VCs who will be investing in her peers. |
Google stemmed from a project two Stanford Ph.D students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were working on. Facebook began in Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard dorm room. Snapchat, a popular new messaging app, also began on Stanford's campus.
First Round Capital, an early stage venture firm that has backed companies like Fab, Path, One Kings Lane and Uber, is trying to find the next big dorm room company. It has created Dorm Room Fund, which selects a handful of driven students, gives them half-a-million dollars, and asks them to invest in their peers' startups. The students will be investing about $20,000 in each startup over the next two years. When they graduate, they'll find new students to replace them.
The first Dorm Room Fund group began in Pennsylvania, and those students have backed two startups so far.
Now Dorm Room Fund has found 11 students in schools across New York, from Columbia undergrads to NYU MBAs. Their task: To find the next Mark Zuckerberg.
The 11 students come from all sorts of backgrounds. They've built their own Google Glass-like products, interned for Facebook and Square, and started micro-finance firms abroad. Here's who the are, and the college startups they have their eyes on.