Afraj Gill
Founding Member of CreatorDAO
San Francisco Bay Area
Overview
Work Experience
President
2025 - Current
We’re dismantling the >100-year-old real estate commission model — putting money back in the hands of buyers. Zown has helped first-time homebuyers purchase over $350 million in real estate in <12 months. Grateful to be working alongside a mission-driven, passionate group of people doing their life's work. More to come.
Advisor
2024 - 2025
Recruited Zown into C100's Fellowship program. Helped raise financing from Moxxie Ventures in San Francisco, and joined as president to help the company scale.
Executive in Residence
2023
Partnering with founders/CEOs from seed to pre-IPO. Our early-stage program, now in its 14th year, has graduated 20 unicorns, including Ada, ApplyBoard, Wealthsimple, and Sonder. We also run a Growth Program for companies with $10M+ in annual revenue and a scale-up program for those surpassing $100M. I support founders in their scaling, fundraising, and operating challenges. Collectively, our members have built companies valued at over $100 billion, including Roblox, Cloudflare, and Instacart.
Limited Partner
2024
400+ YC alumni investing in the top YC startups.
Founding Member & Advisor
2024
A membership community for founders, top operators, and investors. a16z and Initialized back DAO. Fellow Founding Members include Garry Tan, President/CEO of Y Combinator; Qasar Younis, founder of Applied ($6B+); Jeff Schneble, CEO of Human Interest ($1B+), Brett Gibson of Initialized; Marcelo Lebre, founder of Remote ($3B); Josh Buckley of Buckley Ventures ($1B+ AUM).
Advisor to CEO
2023
Strategic advisor and general helper to CEO and founders.
Angel Investor
2021
Founders I have backed at the earliest stages have gone on to raise capital from investors like a16z, General Catalyst, YC & YC Continuity, Lightspeed, Coatue, Penny Jar, In-Q-Tel, KKR, Village Global, Matrix Partners, Lachy Groom, Shrug Capital, Global Founders Capital, and other awesome folks.
Founding Advisor & Fractional Executive
2023 - 2024
I recruited Stability AI into On Deck before it received venture funding and prior to the launch of Stable Diffusion and the explosion in AI. Later brought on by the executive team to help the company operationally scale and support the business development team after its $100M round.
Partner
2021 - 2023
On Deck scaled to 300 employees globally and raised >$100m from Founders Fund and other top investors across a fund/equity. Over 1k startups have been founded and launched at On Deck, collectively raising more than $2b. Our accelerator fund, ODX, invested in over 230 companies worldwide. I served as a confidant and coach to dozens of CEOs on operational scaling, fundraising, and go-to-market, and helped scale the company as one of its leaders.
General Manager
2020 - 2021
Leadership role in the ventures arm of one of the largest financial institutions in the world. Worked with leadership to implement new products that would drive step-function improvements for our customers. Now under one umbrella, RBCx: https://www.rbcx.com/
Founder
2017 - 2020
During my tenure, we raised from Haystack and Trucks, early backers of Instacart, DoorDash, Joby Aviation, etc., and did a strategic partnership with the world's fourth largest automaker. Drop aims to solve the First-and-Last-Mile problem in the $200B+ public transportation industry. Now private equity-backed, and profitable and growing in 50+ markets across the US/Canada. I'm proud of the impact we had, the team we built, the staying power of the company, and the team in place that continues to steer the ship towards the vision we built the company on. I remain a large shareholder of the business.
Education
Bachelor of Commerce
2011 - 2015