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