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Cory Levy

Cory Levy is an entrepreneur and early-stage investor in the New York and San Francisco tech scene, known for founding Z Fellows and co-founding After School, and for angel investing in more than twenty startups with an emphasis on backing first-time technical founders [1][2][3]. He studied computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign before dropping out, having earlier attended The Emery/Weiner School, and gained early exposure to venture capital through high-school internships at Founders Fund, Union Square Ventures, and Techstars [3][5][6]. His most prominent early venture was After School, a private social network built specifically for teenagers, which he co-founded and served as chief operating officer; the app let students verify their high school and post within a closed network resembling Twitter for their own school, and it grew from zero users to a presence in more than 80 percent of U.S. high schools within about a year and a half [3][9]. Levy has described After School's growth as driven by the inherent virality of school-based networks, while emphasizing that safety required proactive, largely human moderation of every post before it became visible, supplemented by a partnership with Crisis Text Line that connected students expressing distress to trained counselors, a feature he said had been used by more than 100,000 teens [9]. After School was later acquihired by Ancestry [3].

Since January 2021, Levy has run Z Fellows, a fellowship and investing platform aimed at identifying and funding technical founders early [4][7]. Through this platform he has conducted interviews with investors and entrepreneurs, including a conversation with Zynga founder Mark Pincus in which Pincus discussed his long-standing "Earth" concept for frictionless creative expression, his early investment in Napster, and a browser-based rendering project called Stem Studio, alongside advice to young founders about preserving financial independence to sustain long entrepreneurial careers [11]. Levy also produces a separate interview series, First Text, featuring guests such as Naval Ravikant, Justin Kan, Albert Wenger, Ann Miura-Ko, Tilman Fertitta, Niko Bonatsos, Aloe Blacc, Phil Stutz, and Catherine Hoke, spanning topics in venture investing, entrepreneurship, and mental health [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23].

Beyond his investing work, Levy has engaged with commentary on alternative-city and "network state" concepts, interviewing Balaji Srinivasan on the Network State Podcast and separately discussing Balaji's Network School project, a physical community launched in September 2024 that Levy said had drawn participants from more than 100 countries in its first year by trying to replicate the culture of San Francisco's tech scene elsewhere [10][12][24][25]. In that conversation, Levy argued that Western institutions were in "denial" about simultaneous economic, military, and political decline, pointing to gold and Bitcoin's appreciation against the dollar as evidence of currency devaluation and suggesting that building new parallel institutions, rather than reforming existing ones, was a more viable path forward [10]. He has also conducted a further interview with Naval Ravikant in 2025 [24].

Investments

  • CSwsh

    A fan engagement platform that uses AI to capture and organize user-generated content from live experiences

Education

Media & appearances

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