College Students Flex Their Power in A.I. Investment Frenzy

Fourteen years ago, a venture capital firm created a program for college students to invest in their peers, called Dorm Room Fund.Some dismissed the effort as risky and a little bit crazy.

After all, could you really trust students to make good investments?Now the fund’s network has its tentacles all over the artificial intelligence boom.Dorm Room Fund’s alumni have gone on to establish major A.I.companies like the coding start-up Cursor and the defense tech company Shield AI.

Others have become investors at top firms including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners.They share deals, advice and industry banter.This month, Dorm Room Fund raised a new $50 million fund to keep investing in companies created by college students and the 500 members of its alumni network.

That is four times the size of its last fund, a sign of how much investor attitudes about the program have changed.Silicon Valley investors have long courted college students, including paying them to drop out, as Peter Thiel’s Thiel Fellowship famously does.But the wooing has gotten more aggressive in the A.I.

boom, where dropouts and recent graduates are finding overnight success in growing numbers.Last week, Andreessen Horowitz announced the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, a free and unaccredited one-year program in San Francisco for high school graduates to “learn at the speed of Silicon Valley.” The start-up accelerator Y Combinator last year introduced Early Decision, where founders who are accepted to the accelerator can “defer” joining until after they graduate from college.“When there are big tech shifts, it advantages first-time builders,” said Molly Fowler, 39, a partner at Dorm Room Fund, which is based in New York.“It’s those moments that level the playing field.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

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