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How I Raised Angel Investments for a Pre-Launch Startup using just Twitter..as a New Grad
By: Gefen Skolnick (she/her)
Who am I?
Let me introduce myself. I’m Gefen and my pronouns are she/her.
I’m a 23-year-old first-gen immigrant.
I’m visibly queer, and I identify as a lesbian.
I spent three years in community college at Santa Monica College, where I spent half those three years working fulltime at AMC Theatres cleaning up bathrooms and the popcorn you leave behind when you leave the theatre. Please pick up your trash after a movie, whenever we finally get to enjoy theatres again! I spent the latter half of community college teaching kids robotics, and also took on a software engineering internship where I learned very quickly — I don’t want to be a software engineer.
There are so many stigmas against community college students, and I’m an active advocate for these students, but I’ve also been working on diversity, inclusion, and equity initiatives for underrepresented (or underestimated as Arlan Hamilton would say) people for the past 5 years. I’m going to write a separate lengthy post about community college students so I won’t go into too much detail here, but long story short — community college students are incredibly underresourced.
In between community college and UCLA, I got accepted to an accelerator program to work on an ed-tech startup. I spent some time hacking away on solving problems in the university ecosystem and decided to attempt to build an app that adds a social layer to learning management systems like Moodle, Blackboard, and Canvas. This experience propelled me further into the world of startups, in fact immediately after I became a lead venture partner for Contrary Capital. Contrary Capital is a pre-seed venture fund backed by the founders of Tesla, Reddit, and Twitch that identifies the world’s top early-career engineers, designers, and product minds, connects them with a close-knit, career-long support community, and invests in companies they start or join.
Sidenote: If you are in college and want to start a company one day, I highly suggest trying to connect with the Contrary Capital venture partners on your campus or just reach out to me directly if…
