Meet RDV NYC Class of 2020!
Each year at Rough Draft Ventures, General Catalyst’s student founder-focused program, we meet hundreds of students who are shaping entrepreneurial communities across campuses nationwide — hackathon organizers, entrepreneurship club leaders, code club organizers, and similar. Of those students, we select a handful to join our program as Venture Fellows.
RDV Venture Fellows are ambassadors for RDV. They are often entrepreneurs themselves who help to identify and support other student founders on campus. They work closely with student groups and collaborate on events and programs to bolster the student entrepreneurship community. Every other week, Venture Fellows hear pitches from top student founders and make recommendations for backing the highest potential companies.
From self-taught engineers to non-profit founders, we are very excited to announce our 2020 NYC Venture Fellows!
Chris Harper: Chris is a second-year MBA student at Columbia Business School where he co-leads the CBS VC Fellows program. As a fellow, he built a thesis with General Catalyst investors on services for millennial families. He is an MBA Associate at Red Sea Ventures and works with NYC-based startups as an InSITE fellow. Prior to CBS he built prize competitions for public and private investment in tech at Luminary Labs, modeled trading risk at Goldman Sachs, and studied History at Yale.
Alan Yao: Alan Yao is a senior at Columbia University studying Computer Science. At Columbia, he is a senior adviser for the Columbia Organization of Rising Entrepreneurs and the founder of an immersive entrepreneurship program for first-year students. Alan has worked at Warby Parker as a software engineering intern and most recently at Fundera as a product managing intern. In his free time, Alan enjoys playing violin covers of pop and rock songs.
Laura Sillman: Laura Sillman is a second-year MBA at The Wharton School. At Wharton, Laura spends her time focused on strategy, innovation and entrepreneurship. She is also currently a Wharton Venture Partner, where she built an investment thesis on the health and wellness industry, which was presented to top-tier VC firms in New York and San Francisco. Laura works with two fitness companies, Rumble and SplitGym, on a variety of growth, strategy, business development and general brand/management initiatives. Prior to Wharton and Rumble, Laura worked for a first-time venture capital fund, was an investment analyst at BlackRock, and graduated from the Stephen M. Ross School of Business with a BBA in 2014.
Genevieve Liu: Genevieve Liu is a junior at Yale majoring in Data Science and Ethics, Politics & Economics. After her father passed away in middle school, Genevieve developed the first social media for teens who have lost a parent: SLAP’D (Surviving Life After A Parent Dies- www.slapd.com). SLAP’D went on to place third in the Chicago Booth School of Business’s 2016 Graduate Social New Venture Challenge, as well as garner hundreds of thousands of users. Currently at Yale, Genevieve is the chairwoman of the Tsai Center for Innovation, where we manage a board of over 25 individuals from across Yale’s schools. In her free time, Genevieve loves teaching yoga!
Saurin Patel: Saurin Patel is a senior at The University of Pennsylvania. He is in the M&T program studying Mechanical Engineering, Entrepreneurial Management and Business Analytics. At Penn, Saurin spends much of his time working on initiatives to improve the school on the Wharton Dean’s Advisory Board. He’s also passionate about fintech but is always interested in learning about new and unknown spaces. In the past he worked at fintech startups Narmi and EquityZen, spent last summer doing product at Capital One, founded a startup in the consumer fintech space, and is excited to be joining Twitter as an APM next fall. In his free time, Saurin enjoys spending time with friends, playing tennis, and playing percussion.
Devin Lewtan: Devin Lewtan is a senior at NYU Gallatin where she is creating an individualized major in Human Computer Interaction. She’s passionate about exploring the power of conversation, whether it be human to human or human to machine. She has been working at Troops, a Slack-funded Slackbot for sales teams, for two years. A self-taught engineer, she’s worked across every department at the company, ultimately joining the engineering team full time. At school, she is the Vice President of Women in Computing, hosts a dinner series around non-traditional learning, and connects students to startups weekly. In her free time, she enjoys painting, solving puzzles, and cooking sweet potatoes.
Aleeza Hashmi: Aleeza Hashmi is a first-year MBA at The Wharton School. She is fascinated by the Future of Work and the implications of social network theory on technology adoption. Prior to Wharton, Aleeza was at Microsoft where she worked across multiple products and teams, including Azure analytics, Office monetization, and M365 Strategy (Office, Windows, Security, and Enterprise Mobility Services), partnering with engineering leaders to determine feature prioritization and development. She also served as an advisor and judge at Microsoft’s Hackathon, the largest privately-run hackathon in the world. This past summer, she was on the AI Product Strategy at UiPath where she developed a tiered pricing model for new cloud-based products. She studied History of Science at Harvard and is a former co-founder of Cobu (formerly known as Doorbell Communities).
Daniella Cohen: A sophomore at Princeton, Daniella Cohen started working at Facebook in 2016 after graduating high school and has returned twice to work on education technology and social + emotional learning (SEL) projects. In the summer of 2018 she was an associate at Techstars and joined The Clear Cut, a portfolio company, as their Head of Content. At Princeton, she is the co-director of Princeton Female Founders Club,Women in Entrepreneurship, Israel TigerTrek, and is the singles captain of the figure skating team.
Jacob Effron Jacob is a second year MBA student at Wharton passionate about healthcare, fintech and AI. He was most recently a Product Manager at Flatiron Health where he helped community oncologists improve how they run their practices and participated in the First Round Product Program. He previously worked for a solar startup selling small off-grid systems in Tanzania and as a healthcare and economic development consultant at McKinsey. He is an MBA intern at Maverick Ventures where he work on healthcare and technology venture and growth deals.
