First Round Capital Expands $500K, Student-Run Investment Arm Dorm Room Fund To Silicon Valley
VC firm First Round Capital has steadily expanded its The Dorm Room Fund from Philadelphia, to New York. And today, the firm is heading west with its latest Silicon Valley and San Francisco Bay Area-based initiative, which is a $500,000 fund run by an all-student investment team to invest purely in student-run startups in the area. You can find out more about the Bay Area Fund here.
We’re told the first Dorm Room Fund Bay Area Investment Team is composed of 10 students from Stanford and Cal Berkeley. As we explained previously, First Round puts around $500,000 into a fund student startups in the area. The student-run investment team source investments and make decisions unilaterally to invest in startup ideas. As students graduate, more will be added.
The average each investment is around $20,000, and is structured as an uncapped-convertible note First Round signs off on every investment and is available to the student group to consult on questions, but this is largely run by the students. In fact, First Round will conduct a training for the group with the goal of helping them to understand investment philosophies and scout out interesting ideas and businesses independently. Any carry made by the investment (i.e. if the startup is acquired) is put back into the universities.
The Silicon Valley team is composed of Mediha Abdulhay (UC Berkeley), legendary investor Vinod Khosla’s son Neal Khosla (Stanford), Ryan Jung (UC Berkeley), Bastiaan Janmaat (Stanford), Ruby Lee (Stanford), Adam Goldberg (Stanford), Rick Ling (UC Berkeley), Anjney Midha (Stanford), Amanda Bradford (Stanford) and Jeremy Fiance (UC Berkeley).
Philadelphia Dorm Room Fund launched last year and already has committed 9 companies so far including Dagne Dover, Firefly and Whamix.
As we’ve mentioned in the past, it’s good for the startup ecosystem to help students find capital to get their ideas off the ground. Not only is it a great way to actually find interesting ideas that could be the next Facebook or Google, but even if these ideas don’t end up turning into products, First Round is finding and fostering promising talent.
Read more: First Round Capital Expands $500K, Student-Run Investment Arm Dorm Room Fund To Silicon Valley
WordPress theme fix | Elance Job
I would like someone to add a blog page to my current WordPress theme. There are also some minor design changes that need to be done. Person would need to be good at WordPress and can do the job within 2 days. I would also like a Facebook page and…
Category: IT & Programming > Blog Programming
Type and Budget: Fixed price (Less than $500) Escrow
Time Left: 14 d, 21 h (Ends Apr 20, 2013 15:19 pm ET)
Start Date: Apr 5, 2013
Proposals: 31 (High $351, Low $44, Avg $202)
Client Info: 21 jobs posted, 81% awarded, $9,060 total purchased, Payment Method Verified
Client Location: palm bay, Jamaica
Preferred Job Location: Anywhere
Desired Skills: Web Design WordPress
Job ID: 39938868
Phase 2 Space | Elance Job
This project is to cover the next reiteration and development of spacepet.com
This includes:
- Facebook Integration
- Search by skill
- add skill
Category: IT & Programming > Website Design
Type and Budget: Fixed price ( $500 – $1,000) Escrow
Time Left: 14 d, 22 h (Ends Mar 26, 2013 06:29 am ET)
Start Date: Mar 11, 2013
Proposals: 6 (High $1,096, Low $840, Avg $937)
Client Info: 60 jobs posted, 70% awarded, $14,620 total purchased, Payment Method Verified
Client Location: Causeway Bay, Hong Kong SAR, PRC
Preferred Job Location: Anywhere
Desired Skills: CSS PHP Ruby Ruby on Rails WordPress
Job ID: 38868700
Watch The Grand Lighting For ‘The Bay Lights,’ The $8.8M Art Project Backed By Some Of Tech’s Biggest Names
Watch live streaming video from acmelive at livestream.com
Official livestream begins at 8:30pm PT
The Golden Gate Bridge has been an artistic landmark since it was finished in 1937, even serving as a modern-day muse for tech industry visionaries such as Jack Dorsey. But its plainer stepsister, the six months older San Francisco Bay Bridge, is finally about to have its long-awaited moment in the spotlight.
That’s thanks to ‘The Bay Lights,’ a project kicking off this evening at 9:00pm PT that will turn the Bay Bridge into the world’s largest LED light sculpture every evening for the next two years. The project, headed up by technologist and artist Leo Villareal, will illuminate the 1.8 mile western span of the bridge with 25,000 LED lights individually programmed with unique algorithms to show a never-repeating display — it’ll be viewable from San Francisco and points north, but not to drivers crossing the bridge. The Bay Lights will be illuminated each night from dusk until 2:00am through 2015.
It’s a clearly ambitious project that first took root more than two years ago. It came to fruition in large part because from the beginning it caught the eye of some of technology’s biggest names, people and companies who invested money in the project and supported its regulatory approval. It’s all privately funded, and should cost some $8.8 million in total to keep the project going until 2015; $6 million of that has already been raised and put toward the installation itself. To date, The Bay Lights’ investors including Bay Area tech luminaries including Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, SV Angel founder and longtime investor Ron Conway, Y Combinator partner and former Googler Paul Buchheit, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, and others.
TechCrunch TV had the opportunity to talk with Villareal a bit about the technical aspect of The Bay Lights at a press event this afternoon, so more coverage on that will come tomorrow morning. For now, you can check out the live stream of The Bay Lights grand lighting event in the embed above — the event will begin officially at 8:30pm PT and the piece will switch on at 9:00pm PT.
And below is video from Xconomy of Villareal working on the Bay Lights and testing the project earlier this year:
Original post: Watch The Grand Lighting For ‘The Bay Lights,’ The $8.8M Art Project Backed By Some Of Tech’s Biggest Names
Google reveals plans for 1.1M square foot ‘Bay View’ campus near San Francisco Bay [Updated]
![cn image.size .s google rendering building mountain view 1 11 520x245 Google reveals plans for 1.1M square foot Bay View campus near San Francisco Bay [Updated]](http://cdn.thenextweb.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2013/02/cn_image.size_.s-google-rendering-building-mountain-view-1-11-520x245.png "cn image.size .s google rendering building mountain view 1 11 520x245 photo")
Google has revealed that it is planning to construct a 1.1 million square foot campus, dubbed “Bay View,” to be located in Mountain View, but “closer to San Francisco Bay.” Update: Statement from Google at foot of post.
To make this a reality, Google has teamed up with NBBJ, a Seattle-based architecture firm which Vanity Fair calls “a somewhat more conventional choice” than the architect Google originally intended to work with back in 2011.
According to the manager of Google’s real estate, David Radcliffe, Google has a history of converting workspaces to its own needs, but has never constructed a building from scratch — something both Apple and Facebook have invested heavily in lately
As shown below, the upcoming campus will consist of nine different structures, all looking like “bent rectangles.” Radcliffe tells VF that ”no employee in the 1.1-million-square-foot complex will be more than a two-and-a-half-minute walk from any other.”
Update: Google has provided us with the following statement:
We are beginning construction on our new Bayview Campus, which is a key to our growth and another sign of our commitment to the area. As this project progresses, we’ll continue to work closely with NASA, the community and the City of Mountain View.
The complete rendering, via NBBJ:
![Google BayView 730x410 Google reveals plans for 1.1M square foot Bay View campus near San Francisco Bay [Updated]](http://cdn.thenextweb.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2013/02/Google_BayView-730x410.jpg "Google BayView 730x410 photo")
You can see a giant, high-res version here.
Continue reading here: Google reveals plans for 1.1M square foot ‘Bay View’ campus near San Francisco Bay [Updated]