Katie Xu’s journey from student investor to startup leader shows what Gen Z’s fluency means for venture.
When a college sophomore with 100 thousand TikTok followers tells you she’s not chasing virality, but testing market pull, you pay attention.
Katie Xu isn’t your typical student investor. She’s a content creator, creative strategist, and operator who’s built both audience and income from the ground up. But more importantly, she’s an early signal of what the next generation of founders will look like: fluent in distribution, allergic to permission, and building in public by default.
At Dorm Room Fund, we back students like Katie not just because they have great instincts. We back them because they are the insight. Her path, from lip-sync videos in her childhood bedroom to launching creator brands at Night Media, isn’t a one-off. It’s a glimpse into how the next generation will build companies.
Below, we unpack Katie’s journey and what it tells us about the future of founder-market fit, distribution-as-product, and why Gen Z’s content fluency may be its greatest startup edge.
1. From Platform Native to Product Native
Katie’s love of content didn’t begin with strategy. It began with VideoStar effects, green screens, and a hand-me-down tripod. By age 10, she had a YouTube channel. By high school, she was editing stop-motion videos during lunch. She didn’t call it storytelling. She called it fun.
But it wasn’t until a TikTok-focused internship in San Francisco that she saw content creation as a growth function. There, she built viral shortform videos by day and freelanced for early-stage startups by night. The difference? She wasn’t making videos for attention. She was testing what pulled.
That lens shaped everything that followed: audience as signal, not vanity. It’s how she helped launch creator-led brands at Night Media. It’s how she scaled Duke’s Creator Lab from zero to 60 members in a semester. And it’s how she now leads marketing at Cluely, one of the fastest-growing startups in the country. Her instincts for storytelling and distribution didn’t just open the door. They’re helping shape the company’s trajectory.
That’s not just a fun fact. It’s a new bar for what founder-market fit can mean. The savviest early-stage builders aren’t just designing for their users. They were the users.
2. Distribution Before Incorporation
Katie didn’t need a brand to start building. She used content as a wedge. During a self-directed gap year, she built a freelance studio supporting early-stage founders with video editing, content strategy, and audience growth. At the same time, she rebooted her personal channels, growing to over 100 thousand followers across TikTok and Instagram.
But the goal was never just virality. Katie used shortform content to test market pull: Which storylines sparked DMs? Which edits triggered shares? Which messages actually converted?
She saw firsthand how platforms were shifting, from social channels to full-blown marketplaces. As she put it: “Three years ago, nobody saw how startups and entrepreneurs could turn social media into a full-time business,” she said. “Now it’s clear. Storytelling can move product lines, even build entire companies.”
When she returned to campus, she brought those skills to Night Media, the firm behind creator-led product launches like MrBeast’s Feastables and Tone by AMP. There, she joined the incubation team launching creator-led businesses.
That’s not a coincidence. It’s a blueprint. For a generation of builders, distribution isn’t just marketing, it’s the proving ground for product. It lets you test positioning, build community, and pull demand long before you have anything to sell.
3. Community as a Go-to-Market Strategy
When Katie returned to Duke after her gap year, she didn’t just pick up where she left off. She helped relaunch Creator Lab, a club focused on storytelling and entrepreneurship, with a rallying cry: “We believe in the power of storytelling.”
Within weeks, she and her co-leads were printing flyers, slipping them under dorm doors, and pulling in students from across disciplines. Engineers, business majors, artists, and content creators showed up. Over 60 students joined in a single year.
Creator Lab hosted guests like NBA Commissioner Adam Silver (there to talk not about basketball but brand) and built a culture around self-expression, creative confidence, and taking your ideas seriously.
The secret wasn’t just marketing. It was momentum. Katie understood that community doesn’t scale because of branding. It scales because of shared identity, ownership, and mission.
For early-stage operators, this isn’t just a case study. It’s a playbook. Before you buy ads or spin up a waitlist, build your inner circle. If your community believes in your story, they’ll do the distribution for you.
4. The Creator-Operator Dual Threat
Katie isn’t just a creator. She’s an operator with reps in launch, growth, and brand strategy.
At Night Media, the agency behind creator giants like MrBeast and Kai Cenat, she joined the incubation team involved with product launches from the broader creator ecosystem, including brands like Feastables, MrBeastBurger, and Karl’s Gummies. Her role: translate creative vision into consumer-facing brands. She learned what it looks like to build at scale, behind the camera and under the hood.
That experience sits at a rare intersection: where content fluency meets commercial execution.
Now, at Cluely, she’s doing it again. As Head of Marketing, Katie owns the full-stack marketing org: building narrative arcs across launches, driving community engagement, and helping drive Cluely’s UGC program to over 100 million views to-date.
This is more than a résumé milestone. It’s a signal. The best young operators don’t just understand how to go viral. They know how to ship product, shape brand, and move revenue. That combination isn’t just rare. It’s a moat.
5. The Dorm Room Fund Edge
Katie didn’t show up on our radar because she had a résumé full of polished brand names. She stood out because of her builder’s instinct: her track record of turning ideas into traction, and her sharp eye for what resonates. That’s what earned her a coveted spot on Dorm Room Fund’s student investment team.
Now, she doesn’t just sit in on pitches. She asks sharp questions. She shares product feedback. She spots early signs of breakout potential. And she brings something else: a creative lens that sees both the story and the signal. Rare at any stage, rarer still in a college student.
“Dorm Room Fund accelerated my journey by exposing me to how successful companies grow,” Katie explained. “It gave me a front-row seat to the hustle, clarity, and conviction it takes to build something from scratch.”
That exposure didn’t just shape how she evaluates startups. It shaped how she shows up as an operator: how she sees around corners, manages ambiguity, and supports founders not just with instincts, but with frameworks.
If you want to understand what the next five years of tech might look like, look at who’s already building, already distributing, already leading. Katie didn’t just signal that shift, she helped define it. We saw it. We felt it. And we’ll be watching what she builds next.
We want to hear your story.
Katie’s journey is just one example of the insight, ambition, and creative edge we see in our students. At Dorm Room Fund, we don’t just invest in startups, we invest in the people shaping what comes next.
Written by Aaron Anandji, Head of Editorial and Madi Jacox, Principal
Founders: Apply for funding
Students: Apply to join our investment team, applications open Friday, August 1st
Stay in the loop: Follow us on X, LinkedIn, and subscribe to our newsletter