Back to School Season
The New Student Team at Rough Draft Ventures
Our mission at Rough Draft Ventures is to back the most ambitious and talented founders who are creating technologies that will improve the way people live and work. Each fall, Rough Draft Ventures brings on a new student team to support entrepreneurship at the university level.
Over the past two years Rough Draft has experienced incredible growth led by our student leaders including:
· Zach Hamed, a student on our first Rough Draft team, is now running a Rough Draft Ventures-backed startup called Bowery in NYC.
· Kasey Uhlenhuth, a Harvard graduate now headed to work at Microsoft and accepted into Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Prior to this, Kasey interned in venture capital at Volition Capital and ran Harvard’s venture capital group HCVP.
· Katie Siegel, an engineering intern at Mailbox and Square, as well as the co-founder of HackMIT.
· Delian Asparouhov, founded his startup Nightingale while a student on our first Rough Draft team, and received funding through Rough Draft. Delian has since received the Thiel Fellowship and a part of Y Combinator’s Spring 2014 class.
· Emma Tangoren, a student on our first Rough Draft team, with experience at Foursquare, Uber and Etsy. She now works full-time at Kickstarter.
Over the summer, we worked hard to identify the best and brightest students for our team to ensure that they could find ways to collaborate with the most promising campus startups in the Boston area.
The 2014–2015 Rough Draft Ventures team is a great representation of the future of the technology industry. This year’s Boston-based class includes five women and four men from a wide variety of academic pursuits. From undergrad and business school students, to PhD candidates, our student team members come with a wide breadth of backgrounds and have professional experience with leading global companies such as Google, Facebook, Square, Box, Y Combinator, JP Morgan and many others. The experience and network they have gained will enable them to support and work alongside the up and coming student-led startups.
The 2014–2015 class continues to support the tech leaders of tomorrow. Here are the ‘14 — ‘15 Rough Draft Ventures student team members:
· Merrill Lutsky: Merrill is a junior at Harvard College. He founded Posmetrics, a Y-Combinator backed company that was started as a student on-campus during the HackHarvard winter accelerator and later acquired by Revinate. Merrill is also a product consultant at Square.
· Lisa Wang: Lisa is a junior at Harvard College, a new addition to the Rough Draft Ventures team but not to the VC community. She spent her summer at Cue Ball, a Boston-based boutique venture capital firm. In addition to her experience in venture capital, Lisa is an Android developer and the CTO for Harvard Student Agencies – the longest lasting student run business within Harvard University.
· Paul Hillen: A senior at Boston College, Paul has spent a significant amount of time within well-known tech companies and startups, including Square, Box and Jebbit in marketing roles. In addition to his corporate experience, Paul serves as the chair of the Boston College Venture Competition.
· Cambria Davies: Cambria is a Junior at Boston University and has experience as an SEO intern at 451 Marketing, an influential local marketing agency. Cambria is an entrepreneur at heart and one of her projects, a Thanksgiving Homestay Program, helps international students connect with local families for holiday stays. She also directs the BU entrepreneurship council.
· Jennifer Zhang: Jennifer is a junior at MIT. This summer, she spent her time developing iOS apps for Facebook’s FacebookU program at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park. Jennifer is the co-director of HackMIT, one of the largest student hackathons.
· Nimi Katragadda: Nimi is in her second year at Harvard Business School. Previously, she spent time at Google doing Product Marketing for small business advertisers and also helping on a project to expand WiFi in the developing world. Currently, Nimi is involved with several on-campus organizations including Harvard i-Lab and West Coast Club.
· Frank Wang: Frank is in his third year at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he is pursuing his PhD in computer security. Previously, Frank spent several years as a research assistant for multiple different professors while at Stanford University, focusing on computer engineering, cyber security, and more. In addition to his academic career, Frank has had the opportunity to work as a software engineering intern at Google and as security research intern at Facebook.
· David Oates: David is returning to Northeastern University as a junior after spending last year working for HubSpot. There he was the lead designer for the company’s Signals product.
· Alex Freeman: Alex is a senior this year at Babson College. She has extensive venture capital and startup experience, thanks to her stints at General Catalyst & Warby Parker.
We created Rough Draft Ventures to empower young talent to drive the next phase of technology and product innovation. Backed by General Catalyst Partners to foster entrepreneurship and technology development at the university level, the RDV team is creating a community of student founders across Boston. We couldn’t be more excited about this year as we believe we have found an incredible team of students who will identify and accelerate the development of ideas that will change the world.
