As I mentioned in my last post, Entrepreneurship at Cornell and Tompkins County Area Development recently hired Development Counsellors International (DCI) to promote Ithaca as an entrepreneurial hub. The engagement is working out well. As part of the work, DCI developed a cool Ithaca infographic that is worth sharing. You can view it Ithaca Infographic.
Enjoy!
Over a year ago I posted on how entrepreneurial the Ithaca Mayor, Svante Myrick, is. Here is that older post from August 2013.
Today I spent the day with Mayor Myrick in NYC spreading the word on how awesome Ithaca is for startups. Development Counsellors International (DCI) arranged the tour, and we hit 7 media outlets, including Crane’s, Fortune, BloombergTV, Fox, The Street and the New York Business Journal. My Cornell office (Entrepreneurship at Cornell) and Tompkins County Area Development hired DCI to conduct a systematic PR campaign.
So, I am sticking to what I wrote in 2013: our Mayor is an entrepreneurial guy and he gets the value of startup creation and how it clearly impacts the local economy. It was great to have a day where we did most of our interviews together and each heard the other’s perspective. We literally did no rehearsal, and yet there was complete agreement on all points made. Nice win!
Here is one of the video clips from The Street. I will post up other stories and/or video as they come out.
A just published PitchBook ranking puts Cornell #7 for number of founders that received VC funding from 2009 through the end of July 2014, based on the founders’ undergraduate programs. See link here. Great result!! And our eship ecosystem at Cornell and upstate NY as a whole continues to grow.
Go Cornell and go upstate NY!
Cornell students are returning the campus. Freshman drop off is today. Lots of nervous looking faces!
The return of students means the return of student focused entrepreneurship events. To keep on top of the activity, I suggest you subscribe to the Entrepreneurship at Cornell (EaC) listserve. Just go to the EaC website, scroll down to the bottom and enter your email address. You will then receive emails sent to the listserve including a weekly digest of events. Typically between 3-5 emails are sent to the listserve each week.
One upcoming event that I wanted to highlight is the Cornell Entrepreneurship Kickoff 2014, which is September 9th at PopShop in Collegetown. Here is the FB page for the event. The Kickoff is going to highlight eLab (our student business accelerator). And there will be a pitch off event for student teams interested in applying for eLab too. It will be a high energy event so attend if you are in Ithaca!
Enjoy the weekend.
In June 2013 I was appointed the head of the Entrepreneurship at Cornell program office (EaC) at Cornell University. Today, Forbes Magazine ranked Cornell #4 for entrepreneurship. The ground work done by my predecessor John Jaquette paid off! We have been building the Cornell eship program for a long time, and it is wonderful to see growing external recognition. The Forbes ranking was based on ratio of (x) the number of alums and students that identify themselves as business founders and owners on LinkedIn to (y) the total student body.
You can read the online version of the article here, but when I just checked it, the overall ranking list was not showing. The print version comes out August 18th, and I am guessing it will be included. Cornell was behind Stanford, MIT and Cal Berkeley and the full ranking was 15 or 20 schools.
Cornell is obviously delighted with the article even though it misstates a few things. It alluded to the EaC office as an “innovation office that distributes $1 million a year” (well, the EaC office budget is about $1 million a year – I wish that we could distribute that much!) and also to a new Downtown student co-working space of 10,000 sf (well, that would actually be in Collegetown, not Downtown, though Cornell is a primary partner in building a separate community based incubator Downtown). But I would say the article was mostly factually accurate, which is great!
Go Big Red!
ithaca VC 