Startup Projects are designed to provide students replicable lessons of founderism and foster lifelong, serial entrepreneurial behavior.
Students become technical co-founders who embark on a natural startup experience that includes identifying nascent markets, selecting co-founders, incorporating companies, engaging advisors and customers, crafting and articulating a compelling startup story, confronting ambiguity, and using technical expertise to rapidly prototype new products. Traditional classes are replaced by team meetings, appointments with experts, and hack days: in each setting students execute on what has been learned from Cornell Tech courses. Startup Projects are self-directed experiences that are executed over the course of a semester and consist of three phases: Envisioning, Teaming, and Building.
The first phase is dedicated to empowering students to view the world through an entrepreneurial lens. Students collectively evaluate several nascent markets and as a group select one to be the theme for that semester (e.g. virtual currency, Google Glass, etc.). The group is inspired by industry experts and venture capitalists, who join the students in this discussion. The theme selection process is introspective and collaborative, giving students an organized platform to think critically about how breakthrough startups are formed.
Through group discussions, students learn about each other’s shared passions and complementary skillsets, and organize themselves into teams focused on product ideas that address opportunities in the selected theme. Cornell Tech connects those teams to experts, customers, and organizations related to the theme. While we encourage teams to pursue opportunities in the selected theme, teams that are particularly passionate about different themes can choose to pursue those opportunities.
The third phase focuses on hands-on startup experiences. Each team incorporates a real startup, implements standard operating procedures, executes against milestones in a self-directed and iterative environment, and is supported by an advisory board that provides expert advice and mentorship in four key areas: technology, product, design and legal. The advisory board consists of a Cornell Tech faculty advisor, an external advisor recruited by the team, an assigned design consultant, and assigned legal counsel.
Key milestones include building a “pretotype” for the purpose of understanding product usage and customer value, and building a functioning prototype for the purpose of testing technical feasibility. To accelerate progress, students participate in three hack days and have access to local developers who provide code reviews throughout semester. The culmination of the experience is a presentation to prospective stakeholders and the Cornell Tech community during Open Studio.
Students complete Startup Projects as co-founders with contacts that include experts, designers, VCs, and lawyers. As a result, students expand their career opportunities to include a direct path to entrepreneurship—either by continuing to build their startup or by replicating the actions performed during the semester toward a new venture.
Cornell Tech and other organizations also benefit from Startup Projects. The student teams’ exploratory and entrepreneurial actions concentrated in a single market theme contributes to public knowledge about what is required to pursue a startup in that market and accelerate startup creation. Additionally, the design of Startup Projects provides Cornell Tech with a predictable way to keep the campus connected to cutting edge trends and technology.
More information on Startup Projects can be found on the Startup Projects wiki: