A new year.
Hello! Welcome back to our newsletter. 2022 has kicked off and not without new resolutions! We at Crescent are excited for this year and can't wait to see all the wild things that the world of student-led tech holds.
This week in this newsletter, we've got a piece on EdTech, a fellowship opportunity from Coda, and cool things happening in SC and in the broader tech landscape. School has begun and as we all know, the semester's soon going to take all of us by storm. That said, we know #WAGMI, so enjoy reading!
As always, if you have any ideas about how we could improve this newsletter, please email us at ops@crescentfund.vc – and if you like what you see, we’d love it if you could share this with others.
Sincerely,
The Crescent Team
*If you’re a student building something cool, want to join Crescent, or just want to chat, reach out to us at ops@crescentfund.vc.
Crescent Partner Highlights.
On EdTech
EdTech is a beast of a market - it takes the raw ambition of emerging technology and combines it with a field that breeds the leaders of tomorrow. This is also what makes it one of the most difficult verticals to tackle - by way of being one of the largest determinants of human capital and intellect, our current education system is extremely tough to innovate and iterate upon.
However, Aung Si, one of our USC partners, argues that students are uniquely positioned to tackle the market—specifically in the realm of cohort-based courses. Cohort-based courses (CBCs) are online courses that are taught to a cohort of students by one or more experts over a specified time interval. These courses take place several times throughout the year and are taught to different cohorts each time.
Aung Si argues that by targetting professors, student founders can leverage the collegiate environment to bring a CBC product to fruition.
Career Opportunities.
Check out the opportunities we've found over this week.
*If you want a job or listing featured in this newsletter, please reach out to us at ops@crescentfund.vc.
*FEATURED FROM CODA*
Are you an undergrad interested in getting hands-on experience at a high-growth tech unicorn? We’re incredibly excited to announce that Coda is launching the inaugural Coda Growth Fellowship for undergraduate students interested in gaining experience across growth, entrepreneurship, and product this semester!
About Coda
Coda is the all-in-one doc that brings words, data, and teams together. It starts with a blinking cursor on a blank page and can grow as big as your team's ambition. People have made Coda docs to do things ranging from launching products and scaling small businesses to helping them study for tests. Coda is a Series D startup building the future of all-in-one-docs backed by top investors like General Catalyst, Greylock, Kleiner Perkins, and many more!
These are some of the opportunities within the fellowship:
Free lifetime Coda Pro
Speaker and workshop events to learn growth, product, startup ops from tech leaders
Lifetime access to Coda Fellowship Community
Get paid for generating new signups
Referrals for future internship and new grad roles based on performance
Learn more about the fellowship here!
More opportunities
Marketing Manager (Full-Time) - NachoNacho
Growth Marketing (Internship) - MergeQueue
Frontend Engineer (Internship) - AlgoUniversity
UX (Internship) - Arcules
Machine Learning Engineer (Internship) - Motional
See more postings from Y-Combinator and builtinLA.
The Southern Californian Tech Landscape.
Discover the current happenings in SC’s tech scene that Gen Z students are watching closely.
Wonder Ventures launches a $31M fund dedicated to investing exclusively in LA startups. The fund stands at double the size of its previous fund, which closed at $15M. Investors include executives from companies like Snap, Honey, Dollar Shave Club, and more.
Heal, a startup providing a new medical concierge for seniors, launches with $8M. The company is built around capturing the demand that stems from Baby Boomers and tackles solutions like monitoring and preventative care.
Riot Games donates $2M to give students in South LA access to tech education. This capital will help in the development of SoLa’s new Technology and Entrepreneurship Center.
The Broader Tech Landscape.
Here's what's happening in the broader tech landscape.
As Bitcoin prices fall, miners are beginning to 'Hodl' again. The move is "likely a result of them being prudent with their finances by holding their crypto until prices rise," says Danni Zheng, investment director at BIT Mining.
The first Web3 ETF (ticker "WIII") will soon be launched. Bloomberg analyst James Seyffart believes WIII will likely have overlaps with metaverse-related ETFs.
Elizabeth Holmes, after being convicted earlier this month, walks free until her sentencing on September 26th of this year.
That’s it for this week!
Signing off,
Crescent Fund