Linus Lee

Linus Lee is a research engineer, writer, and prolific builder best known online as @thesephist. He joined Dorm Room Fund's San Francisco investment team in late 2018, during his first semester as a computer science undergraduate at UC Berkeley, and remained a partner until he left Berkeley in 2021. Dorm Room Fund is a student-run venture fund backed by First Round Capital that writes early checks exclusively into companies founded by university students. At Berkeley, Lee was also a director at Cal Hacks, described as the largest collegiate hackathon in the world, and taught courses on web design and development. He grew up between Korea and Indiana; before college he worked as a software engineer at Spensa Technologies, an Indiana precision-agriculture startup that was later acquired, and served on the board of The Anvil, Purdue University's student-run startup incubator.

After Dorm Room Fund, Lee moved to New York and built his career at the intersection of AI and interface design. He was a Research Engineer on Notion's AI team, a Researcher in Residence at Betaworks, and earlier a software engineer at Replit and Hack Club. Much of his public work centers on "the future of knowledge representation and creative work aided by machine understanding of language" — including experimental tools such as a canvas for exploring the latent space of generative models and self-connecting writing tools. He has published roughly half a million words on his blog (writing since ~2014) and shipped over 100 side projects.

Since 2024 Lee has been at Thrive Capital, first as an EIR/advisor and, since 2025, as Head of AI, where he researches AI interpretability, interfaces, and deployment, and supports portfolio companies on integrating frontier AI capabilities. A recurring theme of his 2025 work is using AI to make sense of large, nuance-heavy data sets — which he frames as directly relevant to venture capital's core work of understanding people.

• Invests at the earliest stage (pre-seed/seed) into companies started by current university students — the core Dorm Room Fund mandate.
• Standard DRF checks run roughly $40K–$200K, with a single fixed deal structure rather than negotiated terms (by his own account, a deliberately simple, founder-friendly first check).
• Personally drawn to founders "making education and entrepreneurship accessible," to developer tools, and to tools for thought / novel software interfaces — areas mirrored in his own building and writing.
• Stated passion for "growing entrepreneurial ecosystems in the Midwest" and supporting technical founders outside traditional coastal hubs.
• On what DRF optimizes for, Lee has written that the biggest draw is community — "the single highest-caliber community of impressive people I've been a part of," spanning MBAs, PhD candidates, and undergraduate freshmen — signaling he weighs founder quality and network as heavily as the idea.