RDV 2016: Expanding to NYC and Backing 100 Student-Founded Startups
This year has been an important one for us at Rough Draft Ventures, General Catalyst’s university-focused program building and empowering the largest network of young founders. In 2016 we expanded our support to student startups in New York, grew our portfolio to over 100 companies, and launched a new program, The RDV Academy.
Tapping into New York’s Emerging University Innovation Ecosystem
As top universities in New York begin to expand their entrepreneurship & computer science programs over the next few years, the New York community is primed for even greater innovation. While Boston and Silicon Valley garner most of the headlines, Greater New York has quietly emerged as a magnet for some of the strongest student founders including Warby Parker (Penn) and Clarifai (NYU). With a credo of “students backing students,” we’re extending our network to support the next generation of great companies emerging from the region’s universities, starting with Columbia, NYU, University of Pennsylvania, Wharton, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, and Cornell Tech.
Our student team in New York represents many of these leading research institutions and brings a range of relevant experience from high-growth startups including Stripes Group, Blue Apron, Moven, Rent the Runway, Cadre, and Facebook.
This team has connected with and helped grow a new network of dorm-room founders based in and around New York. A few highlights from our NYC-based portfolio companies include:
Fresco News, a platform for crowdsourcing news content for global outlets directly from mobile devices out of NYU.
Vidrovr, video tagging and indexing using computer vision and machine learning out of Columbia.
Svrround, a VR company building 360° live-video streaming solutions out of NYU.
Stash, a smart online bookmarking tool out of Cornell.
100 Companies Strong
To-date, we’ve backed more than 100 companies founded by student entrepreneurs emerging from Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, Babson, Olin, Tufts and Brown, among others; many have gone on to raise follow on capital from leading VCs.
Notable success stories from the RDV portfolio include Mark43, a public safety startup that has gone on to raise its series B round and expand its platform to include a computer aided dispatch system for first responders, Rebagg, an online resale marketplace for designer handbags that recently raised its Series A round of funding, and Instabase, a computing platform for data, applications, and programming that has raised seed funding.
Fourteen of our student founders have been named Forbes’ 30 Under 30 honorees and 16 have been selected to leading accelerators, including Y Combinator, MassChallenge and TechStars, and the Thiel Fellowship.
Coming Summer 2017: The RDV Academy
Most recently, we’ve launched The RDV Academy, a summer program to support technical students who are excited about startups, but aren’t ready to start a company themselves. The RDV Academy will match select rising sophomores and juniors with engineering teams in Boston and New York including B12, Black Duck Software, Catalant, Drift, M. Gemi, HubSpot, Kensho and Oscar Health.
Top candidates will be invited to a “Startup Trek,” where they will visit companies and participate in one-on-one interviews and mentoring sessions. The RDV Academy will provide students with a hands- on learning experience throughout the summer, illuminating existing opportunities at fast-growing startups on the east coast, while providing companies access to top technical talent at the university level. Members of The RDV Academy will gain a deeper understanding of how to grow and scale as a part of an engineering team, while experiencing each company’s culture first hand.
Applications are open until this Thursday, December 22nd at midnight EST. If you’re a sophomore or junior with a technical background, we encourage you to apply!
To 2017 and Beyond!
We’ll be hard at work in 2017 to continue our mission to build and empower the largest network of student founders. If you’re a student looking to take your idea, startup, or project to the next-level, drop us a line and let’s explore what we can build together…
