Cornell has spent much of the past decade arguing that it is a startup university as much as an Ivy, and these two weeks are its closing argument. On Wednesday, Oct. 28, the most famous startup investor among its alumni lectured in Ithaca. On November 6, the university’s annual entrepreneurship conference brings a line-up of alumni founders to Roosevelt Island.
Graham comes home
Paul Graham, Class of 1986, was scheduled to deliver a lecture titled “How to Turn Yourself Into a Startup Founder” on Wednesday, October 28, from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. in Kennedy Hall’s Call Auditorium, according to the Cornell Chronicle. The event was open to the Cornell community, with registration required. Provost Kavita Bala was to introduce Graham and moderate the question-and-answer session, and attendees were invited to submit questions in advance.
Graham co-founded Y Combinator in 2005. The accelerator’s model, small cheques, a fixed programme and a demo day, has been copied around the world, and it has funded thousands of companies, including Airbnb, DoorDash, Dropbox and Reddit. Before that, Graham co-founded Viaweb, a web-based software company that Yahoo bought in 1998.
He is probably better known to undergraduates as an essayist than as an investor. His essays on how to find startup ideas, how to choose co-founders and what habits distinguish founders who succeed have become a kind of informal curriculum for would-be entrepreneurs. Several of them describe his own route from Cornell, where he studied philosophy, to computer science. The Chronicle notes that he became interested in artificial intelligence as an undergraduate, taught himself the programming language Lisp, and later earned a Ph.D. in computer science at Harvard.
The talk is sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences, the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science and the Cornell Duffield College of Engineering. That three-college sponsorship is itself a small statement: the university wants students in philosophy seminars, not only in engineering labs, to hear that founding a company is a plausible career.
Eclectic Convergence
Nine days later the action moves to New York City. Eclectic Convergence, the annual conference run by Entrepreneurship at Cornell, takes place on Friday, November 6, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Verizon Education Center at Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island. The organisers expect roughly 450 attendees, and the day combines fireside chats, short TED-style talks, a pitch contest among Cornell startups and networking.
“Each year, our speakers bring unique insights from their entrepreneurial journeys and the process of building their incredible startups,” Zach Shulman ’87, J.D. ’90, director of Entrepreneurship at Cornell, told the Cornell Chronicle. “Just as important, we create plenty of space for conversation and networking during the day. And our speakers even hold office hours and meet one-on-one with attendees.”
The line-up, as announced:
- A panel of the alumni who co-founded Course Info, the company that later became Blackboard: Dan Cane ’98, this year’s Cornell Entrepreneur of the Year; Tim Chi ’98; Stephen Gilfus ’97; and Stephano Kim ’98.
- Sam Jones ’13, chief executive and co-founder of Method Security.
- Gwen Whiting ’98, founder of The Laundress and The Fill.
- Alex Collmer ’97, founder and executive chairman of Vidmob.
- Nicole Wegman ’08, founder and chief executive of Ring Concierge.
- Aaron Holiday, MBA ’12, co-founder and managing partner at the New York venture firm 645 Ventures, who will co-host the day with Shulman.
The business stories on stage
The Blackboard panel is the headline. Course Info grew into Blackboard, whose software became a fixture of university classrooms in the United States and abroad. For a generation of students, logging into Blackboard to download a syllabus was as routine as buying a textbook. The founders’ reunion on stage is a reminder that one of the most widely used pieces of education technology of the past quarter-century started at the university that is now hosting them.
Jones offers a very different route. According to the Chronicle, he will talk about his path from Cornell to the Air Force to Palantir and then to Method Security, a cybersecurity company, and about the benefits of what he calls a polymath career. His advice on feedback is unsentimental. “Listening is always fine, but you have to ignore a lot of feedback and not let it get to you,” he said. “You are what you are betting on after all.”
Whiting brings the consumer-brand version of the story. The Laundress, the premium detergent and fabric-care brand she founded, was later sold to Unilever; The Fill is her newer venture. Wegman built Ring Concierge into a New York fine-jewelry brand. Collmer’s Vidmob works in the more technical world of creative analytics for advertisers.
Holiday, as co-host, represents the investor’s chair. 645 Ventures is one of a cluster of New York early-stage firms that back the kind of companies that will be pitching on the day.
Why it matters
The two events together show the two halves of the pitch Cornell makes to prospective students and donors. Graham’s talk is the inspirational half: a philosophy student who became one of the most influential figures in technology investing. Eclectic Convergence is the practical half: a room on Roosevelt Island full of alumni who have built, sold and financed real companies, and a pitch contest for those hoping to join them.
Cornell Tech itself is the backdrop for that argument. The Roosevelt Island campus was created specifically to build a technology and startup pipeline for New York City, and a day of alumni founders, venture investors and student pitches is the clearest demonstration of what that was meant to look like.
Registration is required for Graham’s lecture, and the Chronicle reports that registration for Eclectic Convergence is still open.
Featured image: Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, speaking at a Y Combinator session in 2009. Photo by Kevin Hale via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.
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