Meet the Boston RDV 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 in Boston — hackathon organizers, entrepreneurship club leaders, code club organizers, and more. Of those students, we select ten to join our program as Venture Fellows.

RDV Venture Fellows are ambassadors for RDV and fellow entrepreneurs on campus, helping to identify and support student founders. 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.

This year we’ve got computer scientists, founders, product managers, and more. Let’s meet the crew!

Annabel Strauss is a senior at Brown University concentrating in Computer Science. She has spent summers as a software engineer at Instagram and investment analyst at Insight Partners. After graduation, Annabel will return to Facebook as a Rotational Product Manager. Annabel is passionate about women’s empowerment, particularly in tech, which motivated her to found NYC’s first conference for high school girls interested in the industry. At Brown, Annabel is a member of the Brown Entrepreneurship Program. She enjoys getting to know student founders on campus and talking to them about their ventures.

Tanay Jaipuria is a second-year student at Harvard Business School. Tanay began his career as a consultant at McKinsey where he worked on strategy, operations and due diligence projects primarily in tech and media before working as a product manager at Facebook where he primarily worked on new advertising formats and News Feed ranking. This past summer, Tanay worked on the investing team at Andreessen Horowitz focusing on early-stage consumer tech companies. At HBS, Tanay is a director of the VCPE club and enjoys getting to know student founders on campus.

Sumukh Setty is a junior at Babson College, studying entrepreneurship. He is currently the CEO of TILE, the world’s largest conversation series with hundreds of chapters across fifty-plus countries. In addition, he serves as President of eTower, the student entrepreneurship community at Babson. Previously, Sumukh founded Teendemy, an online education platform designed to teach teens life skills not taught in college and grew it to 20 courses and 2500+ students. He also curated and led two TEDx events at his high school, and has been recognized as a Bank of America Student Leader.

Allison Tam is a Master’s student at MIT, studying Computer Science with a concentration in Artificial Intelligence. This past summer, she worked at Google Brain, gaining expertise in production-scale machine learning engineering. Her open-source contributions to TensorFlow Extended are now used in companies across the world. Previously, Allison also explored her interest in the markets as a summer investment analyst at Point72, where she focused on evaluating healthcare start-ups. On campus, she currently researches machine learning algorithms for drug molecule optimization. She is passionate about new promising technologies and can’t wait to help make them a reality.

Quinn Litherland is a junior at Northeastern University and started his career in product at Mogo Finance, a financial services startup changing the way Canadians manage their financial health. At Northeastern, he started a personal electronics company and is the President of the NU Entrepreneurs Club, a student-focused entrepreneurial ecosystem with 1,000+ members. Additionally, he’s on the Northeastern Men’s Track & Field team and represented Team Canada at the Pan American Jr Games. Quinn is now leading the Partnerships team at ProfitWell, a bootstrapped subscription intelligence platform in Boston. At RDV he hopes to support young entrepreneurs and innovators through building a stronger community across college entrepreneurial communities.

Emma Sokoloff is currently in her second year at Harvard Business School, prior to which she worked in marketing at high growth consumer startups. She began her career at Beats by Dre, where she managed global brand marketing campaigns, ultimately through its acquisition by Apple. She then joined Casper as the third member of its Customer Acquisition Marketing team. During her MBA she has worked in early stage venture capital with Nextview Ventures in Boston (Spring ’19) and Forerunner Ventures in San Francisco (Summer ‘19.) She is excited about entrepreneurship in the consumer space and is committed to investing in diverse founding teams.

Amanda Deng is a junior at MIT studying Electrical Engineering and Computer Science with a minor in Management. Amanda serves as the External Relations Chair on the Society of Women Engineers executive board and the VP of Communications of Pi Beta Phi. She was the Director of Corporate Relations on the 2018 HackMIT organizing team, bringing together 1,200+ college students and 50+ company sponsors to hack on innovative technology. This summer, she worked as a software engineer and product management intern at Microsoft, building on top of the Office Add-ins platform. Previously, she interned at Greylock Partners and Karuna Health, a health-tech startup backed by First Round. Amanda is energized by meeting new people and is ready to invest in genuine individuals with a love for what they do.

Adam Fisch is a Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, advised by Regina Barzilay. His current research interests are in transfer and multilingual learning in natural language processing, as well as in applications related to open-domain question answering from unstructured text. Adam is a current NSF graduate research fellow. Previously, he was a research engineer at Facebook AI Research, working on machine reading at scale. Prior to Facebook, he completed his B.S.E. at Princeton University in Mechanical Engineering in 2015.

Neil Band is a senior studying Computer Science and Economics at Harvard College. His areas of focus include systems machine learning, computational biology, and business strategy. He worked as a Data Infrastructure and Natural Language Processing intern at Kensho, and as a Software Engineering intern at Lyft where he modeled user lifetime value. Neil co-founded Verticulture to provide impoverished urban communities access to high-yield, nutritious greens through cheap and modular hydroponic planters. He researches neural network memory optimization at the Harvard Data Systems Laboratory and machine learning in therapeutic design for his senior thesis. With RDV, Neil is excited to provide resources to aspiring student entrepreneurs.

Thanks for getting to know us! If you have any questions, comments, or just want to say hi, feel free to reach out.

And if you’re working on a venture and want to chat, go to “Apply” on our website, www.roughdraft.vc!