How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
Student entrepreneurs can rejoice: NYU recently announced that it would create a venture capital fund to support student and faculty start-up companies.
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Tech start-ups link with NYU students
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Students listen to a lecturer during one o the Summer Tech Workshops.
At the start of August the fund was in the process of raising needed capital. So far it has raised more than $2 million after the sale of a successful company that had been spun out from NYU.
Later this year, proceeds raised will be invested in start-ups. The fund will then be replenished when start-ups are successfully sold.
The fund will be managed by Frank Rimalovski, who previously co-founded the venture capital firm New Venture Partners, which specializes in "spinning businesses out of corporations."
"There's a lot of stuff going on in the life science, green technologies and traditional information technologies here," Rimalovski said. "Thanks to the fund, there will be even more. There's clearly a lot of activity here: a lot of students and faculty doing a lot of interesting and entrepreneurial things."
NYU has been at the center of many successful start ups, including several in the health field, such as Sugen, Smart Therapeutics and TouchCo.
However, NYU has not yet had the same mass success of a Facebook or Google like peer institutions Harvard and Stanford universities have. Rimalovski is hopeful that the new start-up fund may change that.
Trevor Owens, a Stern senior and an officer of the club Tech@NYU, said he's excited about the fund.
Owens previously organized HackNY — a conference where people across the city were invited to showcase their start-up ideas. Currently, he's working on a project called Gogo Chinese, an iPhone and iPad application that will help children learn Chinese.
"The fact that we have someone dedicated to fostering entrepreneurship, someone who is basically at the top of the university structure, means that a lot is going to get done," Owens said.
Rimalovski will not be involved in the day-to-day operations of the start-ups that the fund invests in, but will offer oversight into the business practices.
"We want to be as helpful as we can in providing the capital, which relates to another mission of the fund: to help provide the connective tissue," Rimalovski said.
Owens thought the perfect time to create a start-up was during college, noting that students typically are not tied down to a family.
"At our age, we have nothing to lose," Owens said. "I hope that students have that opportunity."
Matylda Czarnecka, a second year graduate student in CAS, is also an officer of Tech@NYU. Czarnecka was excited to see the venture actually begin.
"When it really gets rolling it's an opportunity for students to start new projects and see them to come to fruition," she said. "It's a huge boost to the start-up community."
