USC x SF: Inside Startups
7/8 Update: We are now at capacity and running a waitlist.
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Join fellow USC students interning in SF for an evening with Trojan founders and VCs.
Hear from USC alum founders and VCs on their paths, what they’ve learned building and backing companies, and how they think about startup opportunities from both sides of the table.
Food, drinks, and good people included.
USC Alum Speakers
✌️Cindy Hao is a co-founder of Reevo, an AI-native GTM platform, and a founding partner of ZV, an incubation fund backed by Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. She graduated from USC with a BS in Business Administration and holds a MBA from Wharton. Reevo is ZV’s first incubation and has raised $90M in two years to take on Salesforce with an end-to-end sales platform. Before ZV she incubated startups at Atomic, the venture studio behind companies like Hims & Hers.
✌️David Hodge is the Founder and CEO of Standard Fleet, a fleet management platform with 100K+ connected vehicles. He graduated from USC with a BS in Computer Science and Business Administration. Before Standard Fleet he founded Embark, sold it to Apple, ran their Maps App team. He also angel invests across software and aerospace in companies like Relativity Space, Astranis, and AstroForge.
✌️Wilson Kyi is a Partner at Basis Set, one of the first venture firms built specifically for AI, with $850M AUM. He graduated from USC with a BS in Industrial and Systems Engineering and holds an MBA from Harvard. Before investing he was an operator with founding roles at DiDi's food delivery product and CloudKitchens, plus growth and retention work at Square. Today he focuses on vertical AI applications and on building "AI Mafias," backing top builders spinning out of leading AI labs.
✌️Amy Lin is the Co-founder and Managing Partner at Outcast Ventures, a new talent-first VC. She graduated from USC with a BS and MS in Computer Science, having taught herself to code at age 10. Before Outcast she founded and sold Blendspace, a YC-backed edtech company, then spent eight years at one of the largest seed funds NFX ($1.5B+ AUM, 220+ investments) scaling their AI + data platforms.
Host
Outcast Ventures is an early-stage venture firm built on the belief that founding teams matter more than founding ideas.
Outcast invest $500K–$1M at pre-seed and seed. Some teams are already formed. Others form through Catalyst.