The House Fund Welcomes Two New Part-Time Partners
We are proud to welcome Annie Tsai, Former CCO at Demandforce and DoubleDutch, and Arjun Arora, Former Founder and CEO of ReTargeter, to our team as Part-Time Partners.
In these roles, Arjun and Annie will mentor The House Fund’s founders, source deals, conduct due diligence on investments, and drive the next wave of great Berkeley startups. With their involvement and tremendous networks, we are excited to double down on building support for Berkeley’s massive alumni base of over 500,000 living Golden Bears spread out across the country and internationally.
Arjun and Annie join Brett Wilson, Former Co-Founder & CEO of TubeMogul, who has been promoted to Venture Partner from his previous role as a Part-Time Partner, existing Part-Time Partner Jason Wang, Former Co-Founder & CEO at Caviar, and our incredible group of Faculty Partners behind AI@The House, who also meet with new entrepreneurs, support our portfolio, and help us build and operate The House Fund.
Our relationships with these individuals go way back (at least relative to my lifetime). When we started raising The House Fund I in 2015, one of our first true believers was an entrepreneur, executive, and investor named Annie Tsai who invested personally in our fund and became a mentor to myself, The House Fund, and our portfolio founders. Annie and I instantly connected given we were both Interdisciplinary Studies majors at Cal, and it was clear from our first meeting that she has a genuine curiosity about people and the world. Hence, it’s no surprise that Annie is a pioneer and world-class thought leader in Customer Experience, Customer Success, and Marketing delivering impact across companies from startups to public companies. We couldn’t be more excited to bring this expertise to the Berkeley community and our portfolio startups.
I first met Arjun in 2012 when I was a Junior at Cal after he was a guest speaker in a Sutardja Center entrepreneurship class IEOR 191. We would continue to bump into one another at Cal and Silicon Valley events throughout that year, and just through observation and word of mouth, it was clear Arjun was someone who founders gravitate toward. He also clearly bled blue and gold. It came as no surprise that he’d go on to successfully sell his first business, angel invest, continue to grow the 500 Startups franchise, and now is In Residence at Expa.
When we launched the Part-Time Partner program, our vision was to bring to bear Berkeley’s best operators and technologists to support The House Fund and our founders.
Brett Wilson went above and beyond his commitment to our firm, putting in nights and weekends like us and our founders — even as he was in the midst of selling his company to Adobe for $540M. Brett holds true to his principal of always Going For It, and constantly challenged us to think bigger over the last two years. So we did, asking Brett to take a giant step forward as part of our team, crafting a role for Brett which significantly increases his time spend with The House Fund. Outside of investments and portfolio support, we are excited to leverage Brett’s world-class company building expertise to continue to building our firm.
Berkeley founders have created and defined markets, and continue to do so, creating billions in market value and impacting well over one billion lives. Our investment in building and scaling our world class team of 10 Part-Time Partners, Faculty Partners, and a Venture Partner enables us to activate Berkeley’s successful founders and technologists who have built leading companies and created this huge value and impact many times over.
At The House Fund, we focus our time and resources within the incredible talent base of Berkeley alumni, faculty, and students to build community and real relationships at the earliest stages with the next great Berkeley founders. We invest first with conviction and aim to be the hardest workers on a founder’s cap table. Our newest team members are ready to dig in and look forward to hearing from you.
Welcome home Arjun & Annie!
– Jeremy
The House Fund is a pre-seed and early stage venture capital fund investing in Berkeley’s top alumni, faculty, and student startups. Read more about our team, portfolio, and more at www.thehouse.fund
