I AM ROWAN
Hey! I'm Rowan Frew. I'm the founder and CEO of Chesterbrook.
Previously, I co-founded several businesses while attending Northeastern University, scaling one to $470k in revenue.
I also run a volunteer organization that helps kids learn how to swim. I bring in local highschoolers looking for volunteer work and connect them with parents looking for reliable swim instructors.
Checkout my Press!
My Story
I'm a 22 year old ginger from Virginia. My family consists of WW2 pilots, artists, marketing professionals, and marine biologists. Growing up, my parents told me to be someone who makes things, not consumes them.
The pool is a major part of my life. I spent every summer swimming with the McLean Marlins as a kid, and I still show up to the same pool every year to play and to volunteer my free time teaching the next generation of little swimmers.
Water polo found me at 10. At 17 our Capital Water Polo team merged with Navy and we took 5th at Junior Olympics. That same year my 4x800 track relay broke two school records, medaled at States, and made Nationals. I don't run anymore, but I kept playing water polo at the collegiate level at Northeastern.
Outside athletics, community matters a lot to me. I ran my high school's National Honor Society chapter senior year and sat on student council. At 17 I started recruiting younger high schoolers to join my network teaching kids how to swim, and I still run the organization today bringing on new highschoolers to help teach each summer.
In 2022, I enrolled at Northeastern University on the Dean's Scholarship with a passion for finance. I passed the SIE freshman year and interned at UBS with the Hando Adams group in wealth management. Junior year I took school off and moved to Athens for six months to work at Piraeus Bank on the corporate IB and financial markets side. The work was great. The detours were better. I drank a beer with a Ukrainian soldier at Oktoberfest, talked my way into the Vatican to see Pope Francis, and lost my wallet in Austria and had to sleep on park benches for four days before finding my way to family in Denmark (Bigggg low point).
When I got back to America I lost my love for finance — the culture didn't do it for me. Entrepreneurship did. My friends and I started building. HouseFly first, a roommate-matching app that failed but taught us a lot. Then ZoneIQ, software for real estate developers, which actually worked. I closed my first 6 figure deals and helped scale the company to nearly half a million in revenue my senior year. I graduated Northeastern in 2026 and started Chesterbrook, an AI strategy firm for commercial real estate and property management. I'm CEO, building the team, and having more fun than I probably deserve.
Thanks for reading.