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"Some of the biggest tech companies in the world were started on college campuses, but the students behind these startups usually have little choice but to look outside their college community for funding. \nFirst Round Capital, a venture capital firm that often touts itself as thinking outside the box, decided to try changing this by introducing an experimental fund that would give a committee of college students $500,000 to invest in their peers' startups. The Dorm Room Fund, as it's called, launched in Philadelphia in September, just in time for the new school year. Hundreds of students applied to be part of the investment team. First Round Capital eventually selected 11 students from Drexel and the University of Pennsylvania to serve as the board for the new fund.\nTwo months later, the board of students settled on their first investment: $20,000 to Firefly, a company started by four University of Pennsylvania students, which creates screen-sharing software. Since then, Dorm Room Fund has made commitments to four more startups ranging from e-commerce to education, averaging about $20,000 each. \n\"If students are smart enough, capable enough and motivated enough to start companies, there's no reason they aren't smart, capable and motivated enough to invest in companies,\" Phin Barnes, partner at First Round Capital, told Mashable in an interview. \nOn Tuesday, First Round Capital announced that Dorm Room Fund is moving out of the experimental phase and launching a new branch in New York to tap into the entrepreneurial spirit at schools like Columbia and New York University. Students can sign up to be part of the investment team starting now through March 8. The model will be exactly the same as in Philadelphia, with First Round Capital supplying the students with $500,000 in funds and then letting the students make the decisions for themselves.\n\"We feel like we've validated that a student-run venture fund is a good idea and now we are taking it national,\" Barnes said. The firm picked New York as its second city due to a high demand from students, a \"high density\" of college campuses and the strong, established startup community in the city. By the end of the year, the plan is to have Dorm Room Fund operations in three or four cities.\nLaunching the funds is only the first step in the process, though. Barnes says that First Round Capital is working on ways to \"add value to portfolio companies\" by providing mentoring and networking opportunities to the startups that students invest in, as well as offering legal and business services to \"reduce friction that exists in starting businesses.\" First Round Capital hopes to implement a formal process for these efforts later this year. \nThe greater goal of Dorm Room Fund isn't just to provide funding and encouragement to aspiring entrepreneurs, but to provide college students with more opportunities to engage with the startup community. \nWhen I graduated, I didn't know exactly what i wanted to do,\" said CeCe Cheng, Dorm Room Fund's director, noting that she worked in finance and PR for a bit before entering the startup world. \"If it wasn't for the fact that friends I made were entrepreneurs in that world, I would never have been exposed to that.\" \nCheng adds: \"Had something like this been available when I was in school, it would have exposed me to that world. There is an opportunity for kids to be exposed to startups early on.\" \nBarnes, for his part, has a similar story: He got his start in the startup world by accident after playing basketball with \"some guys\" who just happened to be working on a basketball startup called And 1. That set him on his career path. \"If you want to pursue physics, the university has lots of resources to help you test hypotheses, but I think that's lacking [for startups],\" Barnes says.\nPerhaps Dorm Room Fund will change that for incoming classes of college students.   \nImage courtesy of Dorm Room Fund"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2013/02/25/dorm-room-fund/>