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Claire Smilow has spent years scouting talented people before they become the next big thing in tech. That instinct paid off in 2019, when she was blown away by a sophomore at MIT who already had a strategic and commercial vision. Smilow played the long game in seeing his talents through\u2014and it led to a billion-dollar payoff.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The investor first met Michael Truell while conducting case study interviews for her student VC firm, Dorm Room Fund. At the time, Truell hadn\u2019t founded a company; but three years later, the venture capitalist persuaded her firm, BoxGroup, to invest in the Gen Z engineering savant\u2019s adolescent business. The firm poured $750,000 into the recent graduate\u2019s little-known start-up: an AI coding company called Cursor. And a couple follow-on checks and a few years later, Cursor swelled into an industry sensation, with SpaceX eventually acquiring the business for $60 billion in 2026\u2014a deal estimated to drive $1 billion in returns to BoxGroup.<\/p>\n
That bet cemented Smilow as the student-founder whisperer\u2014a VC whose early conviction in Truell helped deliver a roughly 650-fold return on the firm\u2019s original investment, alongside high gains from subsequent financing. As a partner at BoxGroup and the Dorm Room Fund, the 36-year-old is continuing to chase that success at America\u2019s elite schools. Smilow says she sets aside a \u201chuge\u201d amount of time mingling with the young AI natives, with an upcoming trip to Harvard University and MIT on the books\u2014the second time she\u2019s visited this year. After all, 588 U.S. alumni from the two colleges have built billion-dollar companies., representing roughly 13.1% of all of America\u2019s unicorn founders, according to a July analysis from Stanford professor Ilya Strebulaev.<\/p>\n
\u201c[College] is a fantastic place to recruit for the portfolio, and I often bring portfolio founders with me to campus,\u201d Smilow tells Fortune. \u201cOn campus you get a real sense of forward-looking technological market trends. You get to hear what students at a lot of these cutting-edge research institutions are interested in, what they\u2019re studying, what companies they want to work at\u2026It\u2019s a fantastic pulse on the market and our technological shifts.\u201d<\/p>\n
Smilow says a few entrepreneurial trends are taking over college campuses. She\u2019s been spending a lot of time looking into frontier tech, like robotics and quantum computing; and when roughly four out of 20 to 25 students brought up brain-computer interfaces (BCI) during a fall 2024 campus conversation, she took it as a signal to pay closer attention. Two years later, she says, early-stage BCI companies are already proliferating. For Smilow, the lesson is that listening to talented people can help investors spot promising markets before they become obvious.<\/p>\n
The VC explains that her strategy is less about a founder\u2019s age, and more about connecting with talent before they come into their own. Some may become founders later in life, while others may never venture into the entrepreneurial life\u2014but she says that learning about the ambitious spaces talented people are exploring is \u201cthe most authentic way\u201d to do her job.<\/p>\n
Over her six-and-a-half years at the firm, BoxGroup has backed the likes of Ramp and Clay in their early stages\u2014and now, both have reached multibillion-dollar valuations. Smilow says that the firm is founder-led, working with businesses that are almost \u201cnever proven.\u201d She\u2019s on the lookout for promising talent whose names repeatedly come up in conversations with their peers.<\/p>\n
\u201cI tend to think often the best founders don\u2019t make the best interns,\u201d Smilow said, adding that the part-time gigs are often \u201cboring\u201d for young entrepreneurs. \u201cThey\u2019re not always the most empowered positions, so I spend less time\u2014especially for early-in-their-career founders\u2014talking to prior bosses. There\u2019s value in that, but I actually spend more time talking to their peers and understanding how their peers perceive them.\u201d<\/p>\n
#BoxGroups #Claire #Smilow #scouting #college #campuses #generation #founders<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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