The College Student Who Built His Own DOGE — And Cashed In

In a launch video for the five-month-old startup The Antifraud Company, three co-founders dressed in business-casual present their entrepreneurial credentials to the camera. One, Sahaj Sharda, mentions a book he wrote on universities’ anticompetitive practices not long after graduating from law school. David Barclay, also a lawyer, says he “worked to stop Big Pharma from defrauding Medicare and Medicaid” at the Federal Trade Commission before joining the startup.

Alex Shieh, now 21, takes a different tack. “I emailed thousands of administrators at Brown University to ask them what they did in the past week and built an AI system to audit the University’s budget,” Shieh, the only non-lawyer in the bunch, says in the video.

It is telling that this is the experience that Shieh finds most worth mentioning in a video about his credentials, because in many ways, it did take him directly here. The email, which bore an undeniable similarity to those Elon Musk was sending out just weeks before to federal government workers, and the response to it from the university, triggered a national uproar in the early spring of last year. Shieh’s story went on to attract the attention and promotion of Musk, Bill Ackman and Donald Trump supporters across the country, and Shieh soon used that attention as a launchpad to success in a totally different arena: venture capital.

As one Brown student who took computer science classes with Shieh — who, like the 11 other students interviewed for this article, was granted anonymity to avoid online backlash — put it, Shieh is a “masterful rage baiter.” His very modern success story is a glimpse into how a project can take off if it generates the kind of controversy that attracts political allies with much larger platforms — and how quickly that attention can be converted into real capital.

Shieh, who was a sophomore at the time, sent the email to all non-faculty employees at Brown, their titles ranging from “lifeguard” to “admission officer” to “senior paralegal.” The “poll,” as Shieh referred to it in an interview over Zoom, was supposedly meant to validate the data on his website Bloat@Brown, which rated administrators in three domains: “legality,” “redundancy” and “bullshit job.”

Shieh’s inquiry got only around 20 responses — some substantive and some explicit. In March, the university placed Shieh under “preliminary review,” citing potential violations of Brown’s acceptable-use policy for alleged use of non-public databases, as well as Brown’s trademark policy for presenting himself as a reporter for The Brown Spectator — a conservative student publication which at the time had been defunct since 2014. In May, Shieh was cleared of all charges. 

But he had already become a celebrity. After Shieh announced his disciplinary investigation on social media, coverage quickly jumped off campus: Musk and Ackman rallied behind him on X, and The New York Times, as well as other major publications, reported on the story. With national coverage and the support of campus free-speech advocates, Shieh soon became a fixture on the right. One of the eight pieces that The New York Post published on the campus controversy was an editorial with the headline, “Brown student Alex Shieh is over the target on BS jobs and DEI — so the school is going after him.” 

In an interview, Shieh downplayed the similarities between his project and DOGE. “I’m not like some Elon Musk fanboy or something,” Shieh said. “I think I have a similar ideology to him that has been derived sort of from my own experiences and understanding of the world.”

But Shieh did eventually make the comparison himself. In the very first X post Shieh made about the project, he tagged Musk and asked, “is this how it’s done?” A couple of weeks later, Shieh drew the parallel in an op-ed on the conservative site Pirate Wires, writing that his site was “somewhere between FaceMash (Mark Zuckerberg’s college project that scraped student ID photos and let users rank who was hotter) and DOGE.” Shieh also posed for a photo, which was soon widely shared in media about him, holding a chainsaw in an echo of Musk’s recent appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Eventually, he leaned fully into the branding: In a post on X from September, Shieh wrote about how the preceding semester he sent “the DOGE email to all 3,805 (!) administrators at @BrownUniversity.”

Shieh’s computer science classmate, and another student who met Shieh through various political organizations on campus, thought that Bloat@Brown was, at least in part, intended to trigger backlash to get more attention. “I think he embraced the idea that blowback was going to happen,” Shieh’s peer involved in political organizations on campus said.

“I think that there was some element of trying to seek some attention from political higher ups,” they added.

If that was the goal, it seemed to be working; Important conservative and MAGA-aligned figures were noticing. “The parallels to @DOGE are remarkable,” Ackman wrote on X in reaction to Shieh’s April 1 op-ed on Pirate Wires. Ackman urged “@elonmusk and @DOGE” to hire Shieh. Musk also reacted to Shieh’s piece: “Wow,” he wrote on X. Ackman’s shoutout garnered 379.4 thousand views. Musk’s 7.5 million.

It might not be surprising that Shieh is no stranger to the machinations of the media. As a senior in high school, he made several appearances on Fox News criticizing affirmative action and diversity, equity and inclusion programs. In describing their relationship with or perception of Shieh, almost every one of his classmates who was interviewed for this article mentioned that one of the first things they heard about Shieh was his reputation as the Fox News kid.

Shieh thought that more than his DOGE-esque messaging, it was his history as a critic of DEI that caused many Brown students to criticize his Bloat@Brown project. “It’s all because I said affirmative action was bad, and then this is the one thing that people associated me with, and then they were prone to be suspect of everything else I said,” Shieh said.

But some acquaintances raised the question of whether Shieh had amplified this image of himself as a campus outlier for the narrative he was building. Shieh’s computer science classmate said that Shieh “vacillates between stances, if it fits him in the current political climate.”

“He got traction and he decided to pigeonhole himself into being the affirmative action guy,” this person said, “even though I don’t think he had that strong of an ideological disposition towards being anti-affirmative action.”

This student thought that the same idea applied to Shieh’s stance on administrative bloat at Brown.

In a written response, Shieh disputed these claims. He rejects the categorization of his actions as opportunistic and maintains that he has tried “to draw attention to issues that matter, like meritocracy.”

“Nobody else is willing to do that publicly, so I end up being the messenger by default,” he added. “That choice comes with reputational risk and burned bridges, which is an odd path for someone optimizing for personal advancement.”

You can see the same skills from Shieh’s days as a guest on Fox News in his interviews and arguments today. He speaks with speed and certainty, and has a preternatural ability to steer any conversation toward dogmas rooted in libertarianism and meritocracy.

One student who took a first-year seminar with Shieh said that these habits were on full display in their course, “Race and Inequality in America.” Shieh would often get called on and “deliver a very slick three-minute, obviously rehearsed, obviously practiced Fox news clip,” the student recalled.

In the summer, the morning before Shieh was cleared of Brown’s disciplinary charges, he met with staff of the House Judiciary Committee. The staffers had heard about Bloat@Brown and wanted Shieh to testify before Congress in a hearing on anti-competitive practices in the Ivy League. Ahead of the hearing, Shieh sent another email to Brown’s administrators, reposing his prior questions. He also informed the email’s recipients that he would be submitting “a list of Brown employees whose positions appear potentially redundant, unnecessary or in violation of federal civil rights laws, to be preserved permanently in the Congressional Record.” The names of those who did not respond to his questions, he wrote, would be added to his document. Shieh was not ultimately able to submit the names, he said.

It was after hearing Shieh testify in June that his future co-founder Sharda reached out to discuss what would eventually become The Antifraud Company. By then, Shieh had dropped out of Brown. Anticipating the possibility that his disciplinary investigation would lead to his expulsion, Shieh had applied to a few jobs that were known for hiring noncollege graduates, such as DOGE and data analytics firm Palantir. He was hired at Palantir, where he worked as a deployment strategist.

While there, he continued talks with Sharda, who was also in New York City and introduced Shieh to The Antifraud Company’s third co-founder, Barclay.

While Shieh intended on staying at Palantir, he decided that starting The Antifraud Company with Sharda and Barclay seemed like “a cooler opportunity.” In August, three months after testifying before Congress, Shieh left Palantir, and The Antifraud Company raised $5.1 million from Abstract Ventures, Browder Capital and Dune Ventures, Shieh said.

“I have known Alex [Shieh] for years and backed him because he has the rare combination of being highly technical and a brilliant systems thinker,” wrote Joshua Browder of Browder Capital in an email. “He is one of the few young people who has the ability to change the world.”

Shieh said the company uses “AI-powered investigative journalism” to identify instances in which “contractors are overcharging or double billing or otherwise inducing fraudulent expenditures by the federal government.” The startup monetizes such investigations through several government programs that give whistleblowers between 10 to 30 percent of the funds they help restore.

Shieh never ended up at DOGE, but he got the next best thing: Over five million dollars to build it himself. On X, he described the company as a “private-sector DOGE.”

And even more investors want in. “Since our launch, a bunch of other VCs have reached out,” Shieh said. “We’re not taking any extra money at this time, but we’re very oversubscribed.”

This rush of investors could have something to do with the hype Shieh created with the Bloat@Brown scandal.

“Over the past decade, we have seen attention become one of the most valuable assets a founder can cultivate,” Ja-Nae Duane, a behavioral scientist and professor of entrepreneurship at Brown, wrote in an email. “From a behavioral science perspective, controversy works because it triggers predictable cognitive biases in investors. When a founder dominates the online conversation, investors experience FOMO and feel pressure not to ‘miss the next big thing.’”

“If well-known figures comment on or share the founder’s story, the attention acts as social proof,” Duane wrote. Controversy allows investors to justify an investment as a “high-variance bet,” a wager that has potential for a large payout but with a low chance of hitting. This “is exactly the kind of risk venture capital is designed to take,” she explained. “In a crowded market, attention feels like progress,” Dr. Duane wrote.

Beyond his libertarian origin story and campus contrarian arc, Shieh’s effective use of Musk’s brand — from DOGE at Brown to private-sector DOGE — shows his ability to construct a narrative, the exact kind of narrative that, as Duane explained, provides investors with the sense that Shieh’s company is inevitable.

The startup has since begun hiring engineers and moved into their office in New York City, a penthouse loft in Tribeca that doubles as the residence of Sharda and a few other entrepreneurs. Shieh moved out of the space after living there briefly because it was too loud at night.

When Shieh first announced to Instagram that he was working on a startup, he edited himself into a clip from The Social Network as Zuckerberg. Their stories “had eerie similarities,” Shieh said. Except Shieh made one distinction.

“I just think Bloat@Brown was like on a bigger scope and a bigger scale. It was on national news. It led to a congressional hearing,” Shieh said. “[Mark Zuckerberg] just made like some prank website where you’re rating girls or whatever.”