🦃 Thankful for Startups, AirDrop on Android, and Claude on Campus - Friday 11.21.2025

Hello Fellow Hoos!

The semester is chugging along, midterms are over, and Thanksgiving Break is upon us. This is the perfect time to hack away on any of your ideas you’ve been tinkering on. Our office will be closed next week so, setup a venture advising meeting with us for after break if you want feedback and guidance.

If you participated in e-cup you should be receiving an invite early next week to access our new homebuilt mentoring platform that gives you access to all your Startup Kit perks (more perks/credits accessible if you were a winner). You’ll see a tab on the left menu that says Depot, click there to get your perks.

Thanks!

Brian Breslin (CLAS ‘04) Director of Student Entrepreneurship / The Foundry

Learn more about The Foundry @ UVA here.

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[](https://uvafoundry.com/event/startup-happy-hour)

📰 Innovation News

Google cracked Apple’s AirDrop and is adding it to Pixel phones

This is crazy. A security team at Google cracked AirDrop. That means that, for now at least, Google phones will show up on iPhones as AirDrop targets and the vice versa. If this is legit reverse engineering it’s totally legal and they’ve gone out of their way to front-load against Apple’s inevitable complaints about security. This one will be interesting to watch play out.

Claude on campus: How Anthropic is building a user base by launching Al clubs

Are you in an AI club? We want to know. This is a piece from Fast Company about the proliferation of student clubs focused on learning about, working with, (and getting free credits to use 😉) tools like Claude. Are you in one of these clubs? Reply to this email. We want to know.

🤯 Galaxy Brain

Cory Doctorow wants to fix the internet

Cory Doctorow has been making the rounds to talk about his new book “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It”. This is a great in depth convo less about Enshittification, and more about what we can do as a response. Listening through the entrepreneur’s lens… there are a lot of business idea in here.

Did You Know? _AgroSpheres_ a local alumni (Payam Pourtaheri, Ameer Shakeel) founded startup revolutionizing agriculture has raised over $37 Million in funding.

🗓️ Upcoming eShip Events

Foundry Pizza & Entrepreneurs Happy Hour

Join us for free pizza and bites. Meet other entrepreneurs.

When: Dec 3, 2025 5PMLocation: Crozet Pizza @ Buddhist Biker Bar - Corner

Register

Grand Prix - Minimum Vibeable Product

Join us for 2nd edition of the E-Cup Vibecoding workshop. Hands on learn how to build your app. Earn Grand Prix points.

When: Dec 3, 2025 5PMLocation: The Foundry - 9 Elliewood Ave

Register

[](https://uvafoundry.com/event/gp-minimum-vibeable-product)

That’s all for this week! Stick around for even more good stuff. And please share this newsletter with anyone you think might be interested.

No newsletter next week, so we’ll see you after the holiday!

✌️ The Foundry Crew

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