Cornell Tech grad students John Quinn, Noshin Nisa, Kiyan Rajabi, and Carolina Peisch talk before their Startup Studio class.
- Cornell Tech is a new graduate school in New York City that wants to "build a better digital future."
- The Studio Program, the school's core curriculum, helps students build a company from conception to prototype.
- Over Cornell Tech's six-year history, 40 startups have raised around $32 million in funding.
"We are definitely not the startup school," Daniel Huttenlocher, the dean of Cornell Tech, said to me recently. One might be forgiven for thinking so.
Cornell Tech, $4, the oldest university in Israel, was born from a public competition launched $4 to develop an elite graduate school of engineering and applied sciences in New York City.
Bloomberg aimed to $4$4 and develop the kind of virtuous cycle that exists between $4. His administration estimated that the school would generate $23 billion in economic activity, 8,000 permanent jobs, and hundreds of new companies over the next several decades.
The school, now in its sixth year, is a new kind of graduate school - multidisciplinary, hands-on, and explicitly tech-focused - that is still building its reputation.
While it teaches a combination of graduate course heavyweights - business, computer science, law, and electrical engineering, among them - it also has newly-invented disciplines. Connective media, for example, aims to combine computer science with $4. Like all startups, it's nothing if not ambitious.
"Our core value is about building the future," said Huttenlocher. "We want to build a better digital world that has a focus on humanity and on the things that matter to people."
For Cornell Tech, that future is dependent on bringing its vision of world-leading research on digital technology and innovative, impactful companies to fruition.
Last year, the school moved into its permanent home on Roosevelt Island, a gleaming campus of high-tech buildings. We visited recently to get an inside look.