Location: San Francisco Bay Area, CA (with regular travel to target university ecosystems)
Reporting Structure: Reports directly to the Managing Partners; part of a lean team of nine
Company Description
Afore Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm focused on investing in technology companies at the pre-seed or "invention" phase.
Afore doesn't just invest early; it defines what early means. The firm helped shape pre-seed into the default first institutional round for founders and continues to lead that category today. When founders are just an idea, a deck, or a prototype, Afore is often the first call.
Quick facts:
- $750M AUM across multiple funds
- Leads rounds with conviction—investing $2M+ pre-everything
- Portfolio companies have raised $3B+ in follow-on funding
- 200+ portfolio companies across B2B and B2C
- Trusted early partner to founders who go on to build category-defining companies
Some of the most category-defining companies start not in a boardroom, but in a dorm room or a hacker house. Afore is building a dedicated Foundry function to find the most ambitious technical students before anyone else does — and to be the first institutional believer in them.
The Role
Afore is looking for a Founder in Residence to build and own its University program. This person will live at the intersection of student builders and early-stage venture — identifying, engaging, and supporting exceptional technical students across top engineering and startup universities, well before they're on anyone else's radar. This is not a traditional investing role: it's a network-building, talent-scouting, and community-building mandate for someone who already moves fluidly through student founder ecosystems.
Responsibilities
- Build and own Afore's presence across a target list of university ecosystems (Stanford, Harvard, MIT, UIUC, Georgia Tech, UT Austin, Waterloo, and other strong engineering/startup schools)
- Identify and build relationships with the most ambitious technical students at each target university, often before they've started a company or gained visibility
- Design and run recruiting pipelines capable of surfacing ~10 standout founders per cycle, multiple times a year
- Tap into and build relationships with existing source pools — hacker houses, student startup communities, university VC/accelerator programs (e.g. Dorm Room Fund, Contrary, Z Fellows), and former student founders
- Create and run programming (hacker houses, fellowships, campus events, founder dinners) that gives Afore early, authentic access to student builders
- Represent Afore on campus and within student founder communities as a trusted, embedded presence — not a visiting investor
- Feed qualified, high-conviction student founders into Afore's broader investment pipeline
- Own this initiative end-to-end with significant autonomy, reporting directly to the Managing Partners
Is this you?
- You're deeply embedded in student founder or hacker culture — not observing it from the outside
- You can walk onto a campus you've never worked with and find the 10 most ambitious technical students within weeks
- You've built real networks and communities before — hacker houses, student programs, founder groups — and people showed up because of you specifically
- You think like a scout and operate like an organizer: scrappy, high-energy, and relentless about follow-through
- You don't need a traditional investing track record — what you need is proof you can find talent before it's obvious
- You're energized by being close to the earliest, rawest stage of company building — before there's a deck, sometimes before there's even an idea
- You're a current or former startup founder
Preferred Qualifications
- Current or former startup founder
- Recently graduated or still closely connected to the student ecosystem
- Engineering or technical/hacker background strongly preferred
- Demonstrated experience organizing hacker houses, student communities, startup programs, or founder networks
- Strong existing relationships across multiple top universities
- Track record of identifying ambitious students or founders before they were well known
- High energy, entrepreneurial, scrappy, and self-organized
- Comfortable building a program largely from scratch with minimal oversight
What Makes Afore an Exciting Place to Be
- Invests in people before ideas — often pre-product, sometimes pre-idea
- Helped define pre-seed as the default first institutional round for founders
- Leads with conviction: $2M+ checks pre-everything
- $3B+ in portfolio follow-on funding, $12B+ combined valuation (Hightouch, Gamma among them)
- ~3 of 5 portfolio companies skip seed entirely, straight to an $80M average Series A
- Access to 200+ investors through Afore's Spring and Fall showcases
- Network spans operators from OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and DeepMind
- Same instinct behind Afore's Founder-in-Residence cohorts, now extended onto campus
Perks
- Ground-floor role in building a new function at a category-defining firm
- Direct access to the most promising technical talent at the earliest possible stage
- High ownership and real decision-making responsibility
- Close collaboration with a small, high-performing team
- Exposure to a wide range of universities, communities, and emerging builders
- Carry within the fund