Beyond the Bubble
Women that Rock: Elizabeth Knopf '07
By Kelly Peeler
March 2009
Elizabeth Knopf is this month's woman that rocks. Hailing from Scottsdale, Arizona, this former Cabot House resident was an economics concentrator and very active on campus.
Coming in to Harvard with an entrepreneurial spirit, Elizabeth and a team of other Harvard students including Michael Kopko, Dave Eisenberg, and Jorge Aviles launched Harvard's DormAid. This largely successful company currently serves thousands of students at various campuses across the country with plans such as cheap and convenient laundry and dry cleaning or appliance rentals. Although DormAid has achieved national recognition from sources such as MSNBC and the "Daily Show," the founders have not forgotten their founding principle—high quality personal services at great prices.
How did Elizabeth and her team accomplish such a rockin' feat? Pro-activity was the key to Elizabeth’s success, as she had weekly one-hour conference calls or sessions with different people in the Cambridge community discussing everything from sales and marketing to the dynamics of the education industry. She developed a network of mentors and advisors, including Lloyd Tanlu, a Harvard PhD accounting candidate, and she devoured books on starting businesses including her favorite: The 5 Dysfunctions of Teams.
If these accomplishments don’t impress you, Elizabeth is currently excelling as a venture capitalist and overall tech geek at OpenView Venture Partners where she is able to help many entrepreneurs build successful software companies. Using her networking skills that she developed as an undergraduate, she builds relationships with entrepreneurs and learns about their exciting technologies and companies, and then develops the best fit for OpenView’s investment profile. She describes her job as an exciting intersection between "consulting, finance, mixed with a cocktail party."
Elizabeth Knopf - you rock!
