Richard Witten

Update on My New Role @Columbia

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If some of you were wondering why I've been so slow on email for the last few months or more likely- where the heck I've been of late- here's a quick update:

I'm happy to say I've recently been appointed as Director of Entrepreneurship @ Columbia University. Our mission is to take the whole university to the "next level" and establish the conditions wherein startups and the culture of startups are encouraged throughout the university. Obviously there's a ton involved with stimulating cultural transformation- but a large part of that is helping cut through all the silos and encouraging the various schools to work towards the same goal. As we all know Entrepreneurship is multidisciplinary by nature and great founding teams by definition are comprised of people with complimentary skill-sets.

In the short time we've been operating we've had great speakers to campus (including Jack Dorsey: video here), tons of events and programming, have launched VC office hours, legal startup office hours, immigration office hours and are planning Columbia's first entrepreneurship festival for the Spring. We've also unleashed an elite layer of startup-school/acceleration for some of our more advanced startups called CSuite. Some heavyweight Columbia alums are helping move the needle for these teams- including Amol Sarva, Inaki Berenguer, Jared Hecht, Brandon Kessler and many others. 

I'm also just so fired-up to be working with some incredibly accomplished colleagues. These guys think big and just make stuff happen:

  • On a day-to-day level I work with Emeritus trustee Richard Witten, a former vice-chair at Goldman Sachs, who really initiated the push for this initiative @ Columbia 
  • Our Board is just incredible: the legendary Bill Campbell, Ben Horowitz, Chris Dixon and others of this ilk to give us direction and advice along the way.

We just launched the website. Check it out when you have a moment and if interested feel free to sign up to receive periodic updates. Follow us on twitter here.

Lastly, I'm still blogging here and still teaching my startup classes at the Business School where I enjoy working with so many talented and enthusiastic Columbia students.

I'll keep you posted as all this develops.

Hope all is well, Dave

@jack during his visit to Columbia. cofounder of Twitter and Square