*Molly Fowler, General Partner of Dorm Room Fund*

Student entrepreneurship is an integral part of America’s startup scene. But when Dorm Room Fund (DRF) launched in 2012, the $20,000 investments it made in university-based founders represented a novel idea.

There’s a clear “culture around starting companies” on numerous school campuses, says Molly Fowler, a founding partner of DRF, which spun off from First Round Capital in 2021 as its own independent fund. That culture is “hard to manufacture,” which is why funds like hers have found these resources so valuable to tap into.

Twelve years after those first checks, DRF now offers funding to student entrepreneurs between $40,000 and $200,000 – along with access to a network of experts and mentorship opportunities. To date, the fund has supported more than 400 students – from undergrads to Ph.D. candidates, along with both recent graduates and dropouts.

Fowler was tapped to lead DRF in 2019. With her at the helm, the fund has helped its portfolio companies raise billions in follow-on capital from leading venture capital firms. Its success stories include Toni Oloko of Dandy, a dental startup, and Michael Truell of Cursor.

Fowler joined Sonali Basak, lead global finance correspondent for Bloomberg TV and anchor for “Bloomberg Open Interest,” at Bloomberg’s Park Avenue office in New York City on Tuesday, October 29th, 2024, for a conversation as part of the Cornell Tech @ Bloomberg Speaker Series. She shared lessons from her origins working in California politics, how DRF chooses promising founders, and what she hopes the future holds for the country’s original student venture fund.

From the campaign trail to the private sector

Fowler started her career in politics, working as a campaign manager for Congressional and City Council races in California. She worked on Eric Garcetti’s successful bid for Mayor of Los Angeles, an experience that served her well as she moved into her next vocation, which involved building teams and raising funds towards a shared goal.

“I loved it because it was so scrappy, and you were starting from nothing, and you had to build your team and manage your burn and figure out who your users are. And your candidates were your product,” she says.

As part of Fowler’s policy portfolio for then-Mayor Garcetti, she found herself working on implementing Google Fiber. An introduction to a private-sector company endeavoring to do something similar in New York City enticed her to leave the public sector and return to the East Coast, where she’d grown up.

Fowler got the call to join DRF on the recommendation of a close friend. The position fit her skillset as a former campaign field director well, Fowler thought, but she’d never worked at a venture fund. She refers to her initial time at DRF as “an accelerated bootcamp.”

“I think it’s been really interesting to see how what I learned there has already morphed so much,” she says, “even in terms of how New York is positioned in the tech world, and how much that’s changed even over the last five years.”

Dorm Room Fund’s Molly Fowler (right) talking with Sonali Basak, lead global finance correspondent for Bloomberg TV and anchor for “Bloomberg Open Interest,” on stage during the Cornell Tech @ Bloomberg Speaker Series event at Bloomberg’s Park Avenue office in New York City on Tuesday, October 29th, 2024.

Prioritizing access to talent and cutting-edge research

The concept for Dorm Room Fund was conceived in 2012 by venture capitalist Josh Kopelman, the founder of First Round Capital. Kopelman noted that many major tech companies had been launched by college dropouts, or people in close proximity to university communities, including Facebook, Microsoft, and Google.

“There’s this unfair advantage that universities give to founders who want to start companies,” says Fowler. “There’s access to talent, there’s time to build, there are places to build, there are resources, there’s cutting-edge research.”

If so many companies were coming out of these ecosystems, Kopelman theorized that students might be better at identifying their promise than the established mainstream. The experiment would be to leverage students’ connections, give them some guidance, and ask them to find the most interesting startup ideas on campus.

The company started with just half a million dollars in Philadelphia, then expanded to New York, Boston, and San Francisco. In 2020, DRF went national; a year later it spun off from First Capital into its own entity. Today, Dorm Room Fund focuses on pre-seed and sometimes even pre- pre-seed startups.

“We’re investing at the stage when a founder has a problem that they’re just completely obsessed with,” says Fowler. “One of the cool things that we’re doing is making a bet on the founder” as much as their business idea.

Finding founders “off the grid”

DRF accepts around 30 students out of some 1,200 applicants to work with the fund as part of its student investment team. As Fowler notes, the program can often be more competitive than the schools the students are attending. But working with those team members is the best part of her job, she says. “I get to work with the smartest people in the world.”

The DRF network is also wide: Since Kopelman first founded the fund in 2012, more than 350 alumni have graduated the program, a portion of whom are now partners at top-tier VC funds or founders of unicorn startups. This alumni network can be particularly useful considering how early the fund’s investees get started.

As Fowler says, funding startups in their infancy requires DRF to spend significant time and effort on support — support that is much easier to offer with such a wealth of experience on call.

“As a group, we don’t tend to rely on those [campus-based] institutional startup organizations, because we tend to find that a lot of great founders are still off the grid, building things in their dorm rooms,” says Fowler. “And that’s why we like to find them the way we do.”

As Dorm Room Fund grows, Fowler says she’s focused on maintaining the firm’s unique culture. She’s also committed to continuing to foster the culture within American universities that makes them breeding grounds for inventive startups.

“We’re looking at people who aren’t doing all the cookie cutter things that you’re supposed to do to be successful in our culture,” she says. “But they end up doing really interesting and successful things because they’re a little different.”

You can watch the entire discussion below:

This article was originally published by Tech at Bloomberg.