Meetup In 3 days
November
Thursday
15:00–17:45 2026 · Chicago time
You sign up with the host. foundercal only links to it.
The collab nobody saw coming. Limited run. Chicago gets it first.
Browder Capital × Sunshine Lake opens Campus Tour '26 at the University of Chicago. After Chicago, Josh takes it to Columbia, Penn, Princeton, Yale, Harvard and MIT. You get the original pressing.
THE LEGEND: JOSH BROWDER
Josh started DoNotPay at 18 to fight his own parking tickets, left Stanford as a Thiel Fellow, and raised from a16z, Founders Fund and Coatue. Now he runs Browder Capital, with Sequoia as an LP: 150+ companies including Figma and Mercury, and 100+ founders under 25. He wrote a pre pre seed check into Greptile when it was making $20 a month. Not a typo. Greptile just raised its Series B at $750M. Rumor has it there is a spare room at the Four Seasons where founders live until they raise.
THE HOMECOMING: DON STALTER AND SUNSHINE LAKE
Don (College '04) is the founder and GP of Sunshine Lake, a pre seed and seed fund that writes the first check into dark horses: founders forged by extreme origins, building the systems the world runs on. Don was early in Kalshi, Deel, Headway and Assured, now worth over $60B combined, and Sunshine Lake was the first investor in Entire, the new company from former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke. Before investing, he helped take Airbnb international and sold his first company within months. Sunshine Lake plugs founders into its ecosystem from Silicon Valley to Silicon Alley, with Speakeasies around the world. Advisors include UChicago Computer Science chair Mike Franklin.
THE DROP, THURSDAY NOV 5
3:00 to 4:30 PM: Founder conversations and office hours. Sit down one on one with Josh and Don. Bring an idea, a deck, a demo, or just your nerve. First come, first served.
4:45 to 5:45 PM: The talk. How to get funded before you graduate: how Josh and Don decide on a first check, what made Kalshi, Deel and Greptile look obvious only in hindsight, how to get in front of the right investors without a network, and the questions you are not supposed to ask. Then open Q&A.
Speakeasy rules: off the record, no slides, no fluff.
WHO SHOULD COME
Undergrads and grad students who are building, or about to. Engineers, researchers, dropouts in waiting. If you have ever thought about starting a company before you graduate, this is your afternoon.
THANK YOU!
Co-hosted by UChicago's Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and UChicago's Data Science Institute. Thank you Samir Mayekar, Erika Mercer, Professor Mike Franklin and Professor Steve Kaplan.
Seats are limited. RSVP to hold yours.
Full text on Luma .
5807 S Woodlawn Ave, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Open in Maps ↗
Founders pitch
Investors in the room
Investors in the room
