Princeton's Class of 2011
An ode to my undergrad class and its entrepreneurs, from my flight to our 15th Reunion.
Welcome to issue #71 of next big thing.
I’m flying today from SFO to EWR to head to Princeton for my 15th reunion. Reunions are a big deal at Princeton. It’s one of the largest alumni gatherings in the world every year, with more than 25,000 people typically in attendance, because alumni are encouraged to come back even if isn’t a “major reunion” year (aka every 5 years).
I haven’t been back since 2017; living in San Francisco makes it tricky, our 10th was canceled due to COVID, and we’ve had weddings and kids that have gotten in the way of making the trip. So even though the weather looks awful, I’m incredibly excited to reunite with my classmates.
It is hard to believe that it has been nearly 20 years since our class started college. As I reflect on that time, I have so many special memories. Roommates who have become lifelong friends. Friends who I’ve only seen a few times since graduation. Classmates who I barely knew then but who I’ve gotten to know well since. Professors who I looked up to as role models, and who helped me become a better thinker and writer.
I studied molecular biology at Princeton. I wanted to concentrate in a subject that I felt I could only learn deeply if I studied it in college. And I also felt that innovations in molecular biology would be more likely to define my life than those in most other fields. While MOL hasn’t defined my career, I have no regrets over this decision, and the intersection of biology and computing continues to interest me as an investor.
My real learning came outside of the classroom — in the startups I worked on during college (one of which managed to keep going), and in the clubs and activities around entrepreneurship that I spent much of my time working on throughout undergrad.
Looking at what the Class of 2011 has accomplished since graduation, it is hard not to infer that there was something very special in the water on campus during our years there. We were students from 2007 to 2011: social-media-native having started to use Facebook during high school, beginning college a few months after the iPhone had launched, students during the launch of the App Store, and blissfully protected from the job market during the financial crisis of 2008-2009. We graduated and experienced a decade+ bull market, with technology spurred on by the platform shift to cloud services, and with mobile as the key new surface area for opportunity for both consumers and enterprises.
So it is perhaps no surprise that many of our classmates became entrepreneurs. But even so, the density of entrepreneurial talent in this class of just 1206 graduates is impressive. Here are 15 of them to highlight for our 15th:
Patrick Wendell, Co-Founder & VP Engineering at Databricks. Patrick dropped out of his PhD at Cal two years post graduation to co-found Databricks, the data intelligence platform for enterprises. The company is now worth $134 billion, with $6 billion in revenue run rate.
Jack Altman, General Partner at Benchmark, Founder at Lattice. Jack and I met at the Princeton Junction train station back as undergrads. I ended up investing in Lattice when my prior firm led the Series B. We ended up being LPs in each other’s funds. Then he turned into a podcaster and tech celebrity.
Oguzhan Atay, David Tsao, and Sukrit Silas co-founded BillionToOne, which recently went public on NASDAQ. We all had MOL classes together, so particularly special to see them go on to build a business at the forefront of disease detection. BLLN 0.00%↑ is close to $4 billion in market cap.
Trevor Martin, Co-Founder & CEO at Mammoth Biosciences. Another MOL major. If you’ve driven up and down 101, it’s hard not to notice the Mammoth building in South San Francisco. The company’s valued at $1.35 billion, working on CRISPR-based therapeutics.
Nell Diamond, Founder & CEO at Hill House Home. 15 years ago, Nell and I were on stage together as co-chairs of our Class Day graduation event. She went on to create a lifestyle brand, with products such as the iconic Nap Dress.
Seth Priebatsch, Founder/CEO at LevelUp. Seth and I worked on a startup together freshman year, but then he came up with a new idea, dropped out, launched SCVNGR, turned it into LevelUp, and sold it to GrubHub for $390M.
Julio Fredes, Co-Founder/CFO at Say Technologies. Acquired by Robinhood for $140M.
Chetan Narain, Co-Founder at Pepper. Chetan and I met before Princeton — his father and mine were college classmates! We then ended up living in the same dorm freshman year. He went on to found Pepper, which has scaled beyond the Series C stage.
Caroline Clark, Founder/CEO at Arcade. Caroline and I were high school and college classmates, and it’s been awesome to see her soar with Arcade.
Sarah Hoffman, Co-Founder/CEO at Maker Wine. Like Caroline, Sarah and I went to both high school and college together. Maker is served on the United flight I’m writing this post from!
Stephen Lamb, Co-Founder/COO at ZBiotics. We all need to have Stephen’s product in heavy supply for the next several days ;).
Genevieve Ryan Bellaire, Founder/CEO at Realworld. Genevieve has been on the entrepreneurial journey for many years, helping people figure out how to navigate adulthood.
Kate Adamson, Founder/CEO at Folio, building an AI-native company at the intersection of hospitality and fintech.
Brian Jeong, Founder/CEO at Hawthorne. We recently messaged after many years, and it’s been awesome to see Brian’s personal care brand out in the wild.
Sam Dorison, Co-Founder/CEO at ReflexAI. I can’t resist but mention Sam, whose company Footwork led the Seed round of a few years ago. ReflexAI is the leader in AI-enabled training and QA for high stakes call center operations.
This is by no means a complete list. Classmates like Addie Lerner, Alex Rosen, Dan May, Kyle O’Donovan, and myself have founded investment firms. Breandan Beneschott, Brooks Barron, George Xing, and Kofi Frimpong are some of the entrepreneurs who I’ve jammed with on their ideas in the years since graduation. We have classmates like Max Branzburg who leads all of consumer and business products at Coinbase, and Adam Fry, who is the core product lead for ChatGPT at OpenAI — not technically founders, but helping shape the future of some of the world’s most used products. I would be remiss to not mention that Dario Amodei, co-founder/CEO at Anthropic, was a graduate student who also graduated from Princeton in 2011 with us. And still more who I of course have no idea about, or who I’m forgetting (my apologies!).
Entrepreneurship was not a path particularly encouraged by Princeton in our era — there was only one real class for example, High-Tech Entrepreneurship, taught by legendary professor Ed Zschau (an inspiration for many of us!). It’s never been cool to be working on a startup at Princeton like it is at Stanford or MIT.
And so most of the group above wasn’t thinking about starting a company while in school. We all got to critical junctures in our careers, however, where we had a choice to make. Do we take the traditional path? Or one with a lot more risk? One that is unproven. One that many will call us crazy for pursuing. But one that could be way more rewarding. Something that, if it works, could be our life’s work.
I’m proud to celebrate my entrepreneurial classmates from the Great Class of 2011, and very excited to see many of them back at Old Nassau over the next few days.
‘11 ‘11' ‘11!
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See you at the tents!
What a stacked graduating class