We propel young technical founders.
‍First Text helps ambitious technical founders at the earliest stages with mentorship & funding over text.
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Our Story

“When I was 19 studying CS at UIUC, I was funded by Keith Rabois over a tweet. Now I’m returning the favor over text.”

-Cory Levy (Founder of First Text)
First Text
We help ambitious young technical founders by connecting you to your first mentors and investing pre-seed capital.
TEXT CORY
Text Cory
About Us
First Text helps ambitious young technical founders. I was funded over a tweet and now I want to help and fund others over text.

We want to propel you into a proven network of founders, operators, and investors. We’ve assembled world-class experts to hold office hours, giving you unique access and dedicated time to get feedback and advice.

We will pick 10 impressive people every month to meet our mentors.

We work with students, dropouts and recent grads from:

Cory Levy

● Angel investor in 20+ startups + mentor at
Spearhead
● Co-Founder of After School, a teen social network with ~20m users. Acquihired byAncestry● Forbes 30 Under 30 in Consumer Technology and Dorm Room Founders
● Board of Directors of the international non-profit DoSomething.org
● In high school, interned at Founders Fund, Union Square Ventures, and TechStars
● Studied CS at UIUC
Program Mentors

Marc Randolph 


Co-Founder of Netflix

Justin Mateen

Co-Founder of Tinder

Steve Huffman

Co-Founder of Reddit

Jawed Karim


Co-Founder of Youtube

Ashton Kutcher

Sound Ventures

Keith Rabois


Founders Fund

Chris Farmer

Founder of SignalFire

Naval Ravikant


Founder of AngelList

Kevin Hartz


Co-Founder of Eventbrite

Beth Turner

SV Angel

Sean Rad

Co-Founder of Tinder

Laura Behrens Wu

Founder of Shippo

Shivani Siroya


Founder of Tala

Max Hodak

Co-Founder of Neuralink

Lucy Guo


Co-Founder of Scale.ai

Programs
OFF RCRD Podcast
Uncovering the hidden, behind the scenes thoughts and actions of successful people.
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Office Hours
Meet with top founders, operators, and investors to get feedback.
Learn More
Prodigy Text Challenge
Drop out of school.
Quit your job.
Get personalized mentorship.
‍
Text us:
1) What you’re building now and why?
2) What non traditional things you were doing as a kid?

Get $150k (limit 10 per year)
TEXT CORy
Prodigy Text Challenge
Drop out of school.
Quit your job.
Get personalized mentorship.
‍
Text us:
1) What you’re building now and why?
2) What non traditional things you were doing as a kid?

Get $150k (limit 10 per year)
send text
Success Stories

Matthew DiMarcantonio
CS at Brown
“After texting what I was working on, Cory intro'd me to Naval Ravikant and Kevin Hartz. They are both now mentoring me and investing in my company.”
Runik Mehrotra
M&T at Penn
“I texted Cory about my company Vise AI. He then introduced me to Keith Rabois at Founders Fund. Keith invested. I didn't need a demo day to raise a seed round."
Alex Fine
CS at Stanford
“I love to tinker and code. That didn’t stop at Stanford. A text to Cory led to mentorship from $1b+ startup founders.”
‍

We help ambitious young technical founders and introduce your first mentors.

Marc Randolph

Co-Founder of Netflix

Sean Rad

Co-founder of Tinder

Jawed Karim

Co-Founder of YouTube

Ashton Kutcher