The Bulletin #4: Fintech, Consumer, Deep Tech, Oh My!
What We’re Reading in Venture
Articles/books we’ve enjoyed
A short dive into the world of Autonomous Finance and market maturity. Curious about why Fintech is so hot right now? This is the article for you
Understanding Consumer Behavior through Trapped Priors
I never was a big statistics kind of guy (for legal reasons this is a joke because now I’m majoring in APMA) but understanding statistics and probability is a fundamental driving force for a lot of decision making. This article provides a short dive into understanding what a trapped prior is, and how we can use context awareness to inform smarter decisions.
People to follow:
Smart people whose Twitter feeds we like to stalk
Erik Torenberg: Founder of Village Global and On Deck. Nuff said
Danny Adkins: Because we’re all Danny stans in this house. Crypto legend
Memes
Because venture capital memes are a very real thing
Video/Audio
A video or podcast about VC because reading is hard sometimes
Curious about Deep Tech, R&D, and what it means? Check out Josh Wolfe, Cofounder at Lux Capital
Brown Student Spotlight
Highlighting members of our community who are absolutely killing it
Xinru Li ‘22
Q: Who are you?
A: I'm Xinru, a junior studying music and computer science, and founder of Teaching Buddies. Before the pandemic, you can see me running around campus with a viola, a stick (baton :P), and way too much sheet music for various orchestral and musical theater productions, but now I mostly live vicariously through going down the AI-Music rabbit hole.
Over the summer, I was able to reconnect with my third grade teacher, who taught at an under resourced school in the Chicago Public School district, and learned about the vast educational inequities facing majority low-income BIPOC elementary schools during COVID-19, from lack of access to basic learning tools to a reduction in class time that is nearly equivalent to having no class at all. With some friends, I started Teaching Buddies to train and connect college volunteers to students at these schools, and to date, we've trained over 120 volunteers who gave 600+ classes, serving 150+ families around the Chicago area. We're starting the 501c3 process and building a computer platform to meet demand, as well as thinking through other ways to more systematically support the education equity issues facing our schools.
Also -- unrelated buuut -- if you're a freshman/around campus and potentially interested in playing in an ~outside orchestra~ this summer (depending on safety) message me :D.
Q: Most game changing experience/class/activity at Brown?
A: I would 10/10 recommend taking Reimagining Capitalism or Black Protest Music! Favorite piece of advice be a human being, not a human doing.
Q: Role Model/ Person you’re obsessed with
A: The role Wendy Carlos played in changing the way we hear sound and music and our perception of electronic music is super cool!
Q: One daily habit that you can’t live without (think: meditation, morning coffee, etc.)
A: I got a milk frother during quarantine and have been religiously frothing oat milk for my lattes ever since
VWV Wishlist
Here we will list all of the features and products we wish entrepreneurs would make for us
Personal CRM that actually works and syncs across email and GCal
More hours in a day (if you solve this we’ll fund you 100k on the spot)
Video based dating app.