network strategy
I spend all my "free" time thinking about how to build community and ecosystems. It's what I do for fun.
Students
Undergrad and grad CS/ML students at the top 8 schools who are already building. Freshmen at orientation, hackathon winners, prof-nominated builders.
Where the best builders cluster.
I analyzed top startups to pull out hot spots of good talent
- Mercor
- Cursor
- Context.inc
- Paradigm
- Etched
- Haize Labs
- Distributed Spectrum
- Mercor
- Speak
- Figma
- Ethereum
- OYO
- Loom
- Cognition
- Ramp
- Cursor
- Speak
- Replit
- Chai Discovery
- Pika
- Unify
- Graphite
- Perplexity
- Cursor
- Pika
- Goodfire
- Granola
- Agency
- Figma
- Grow Therapy
- Pylon
- Saronic
- Graphite
- Alta
- A37
- Nucleus
- Whop
How I'd earn the seat.
Freshman Founder Orientation
Show up during Club Rush week with a startup-school-style program for freshmen — before Neo, YC, or Thiel do. Partner with PROD to run it on-campus.
Professor-nominated pipeline
Get close with the professors who actually co-found with their students. One warm intro from Chris Ré orIon Stoica beats a hundred cold coffees.
Own the hackathon layer
Co-host a campus hackathon with Anthropic or OpenAI. Sponsor the local CS-class hackathons.
Builder Retreat with Pride
Co-host an invite-only retreat for the top student founders. Partner with the student entrepreneurship orgs on a Founder Orientation each fall.
The professors who nominate
Warm intros from top professors are the highest signal
