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August 13, 2024

The ���������߹ۿ���� Board of Trustees welcomes Nate Smith ’07, who brings his entrepreneurial background and alumni perspective as its newest member.

Smith is a Visiting Group Partner at Y Combinator. Y Combinator funds hundreds of new startups per year via an open application. YC has funded 90 companies worth a billion dollars or more, and about 10 to 20 companies that YC funds per year will go on to reach product market fit and become a Unicorn.

In YC's Summer 2012 batch, Smith co-founded Lever, a Talent Acquisition Suite for quickly growing companies. Over 5000 customers, including Netflix, KPMG, Cirque du Soleil, and many leading startups use Lever to manage their job postings, outbound sourcing, interview funnels, and talent analytics. In his time at Lever, Smith led as both CEO and CTO, raised $123M, and sold the company to Employ for $517M in 2022. Prior to Lever, Smith was a Product Manager on the Google search team. He led the first major redesign of Google's Image Search UI, which launched in 2010.

A member of Olin's second graduating class, Smith received his bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering in 2007. He helped found Open, Olin's LGBTQ student group, and led as club president.

"���������߹ۿ���� created the first community where I felt like I belonged,” said Smith. “Olin's ambitious vision attracts optimistic students, faculty, and staff, who are energized by the challenge of innovation. Olin seeks to be different—not for the sake of being different—but to advance engineering education and do good for humanity. I am incredibly excited to help the college continue in this vision and inspire new generations of ambitious builders."

Smith and his husband, Chris Cheng, live in San Francisco, CA with their two bernedoodles, Walnut and Brownie.