The ability to take calculated risks is one of the most critical skills required to build a highly successful career. However, there is a common misconception that holds people back. It’s easy to think that risk-taking is the key part of the equation (the ability to jump off a cliff and not look back). While some people do take extraordinary risks, leverage their lives, and “put it all on black” hoping to win, the people who are consistently successful over time have a completely different approach.

There are three consistent behaviors that extremely successful people exhibit. First, they work hard to generate a solid base case. This means that no matter what, the “failure scenario” is acceptable (and probably better than average). It may not be the desired outcome, but it’s not disastrous personally or professionally. Second, they work their tails off to generate opportunities that have increasingly large upsides, while maintaining the acceptable fallback scenario. Third, they take lots of micro risks over time. None of these mini decisions are high risk nor extraordinarily difficult, but they add up to put these people in a totally different league from those around them.

Let’s look at an example. Mark Zuckerberg (temporarily putting aside complaints about his style, Facebook’s latest stock price, etc.) is one of the most successful technologists and business people of the last 10 years. In order to achieve that success he had to take a wild risk – dropping out of school to start Facebook. Damn good thing it worked or he would have been screwed, right? Well, let’s take a look at that. Mark never actually took a giant risk. First he decided to build a website in his spare time (no risk, maybe he gave up a couple beers and half a letter grade in one of his classes). Then he incrementally went deeper, devoting more time to his project, getting others involved, pulling together scrappy funding to pay for servers, etc. Each step was a micro risk with a perfectly acceptable fallback. Then he moved to Silicon Valley for the summer. He didn’t drop out of school. He didn’t dive into some unknown project. He took something that was already working and devoted a summer to scaling it. At the end of the summer he had great traction, a clear view of the opportunity in front of him, an experienced partner (Sean Parker), and a chance to raise $500K from Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman. He then made a very calculated decision to take a leave of absence and continue working on Facebook.

He worked his tail off generating an upside opportunity that drastically outweighed the downside. The worst case was a delay in graduating from Harvard (he could always go back) with experience under his belt that would make him more employable than any of his classmates (even if Facebook failed). He could make a salary from the initial funding, save on tuition, and chase the phenomenal upside that was right in front of him, all while preserving his ability to get a job (the point of going to Harvard in the first place). The decision to take that “risk” was actually a no brainer. Working his butt off to create the opportunity – that’s what separates the doers from the dreamers.

Mark is clearly an outlier, in terms of natural talent, dedicated execution, and luck. Luck plays a major role in the magnitude of the outcome. However, people who are wildly successful put themselves in situations where they are going to succeed no matter what. The only question is when and how big. They do this by taking constant micro risks and working diligently to create opportunities that other people don’t have. Anybody can bet on black and get lucky. But consistent success comes from stacking the deck so that no matter what you’re guaranteed to move forward and succeed. From the outside, it looks like luck and risk-taking. But behind the scenes there are rarely overnight successes. It’s not risk-taking that’s important. It’s the mindset to put yourself in a situation where the “risks” are actually not very risky – but the upside is phenomenal.

If you want to make a change in your career, take a micro risk today. Devote 20 minutes and a little bit of planning to whatever it is you want to pursue. Do that for 3 weeks straight and you’ll be amazed how far you can get, without risking anything. So many people point to the “high risks” associated with ventures, changes in your career, etc., as an excuse to not make progress. Get rid of that excuse, take tiny steps and tiny risks, and over time create opportunities for yourself where you can chase upside without jumping off a cliff.

If you think your situation is different and you can’t make incremental progress towards your dream without jumping off a cliff, I challenge you to email me with a description and I bet I can find a lightweight, low risk way for you to start moving in the right direction.

Further reading: The Startup of You by Reid Hoffman.

I actually find this exercise to be therapeutic. It’s not often that you can back away from the daily noise and think about what you want out of your career (and life). Most of the items on your list will be expected. But there are frequently thoughts that will surprise you, either because you didn’t realize how important they are vs what you actually look for in a job, or because they’re fairly simple to make happen in your current role. This list will naturally ebb and flow over time so practice it once a year (or whenever you want to make a change).

Below is the list I put together in a hotel room in Silicon Valley in the summer of 2012. I had just sold my startup, was looking for something new, and had a final round interview with LinkedIn the next day. Things happened quickly and I wanted to make sure I was making a good long-term decision. It’s raw and messy, but shows you what was most important to me at that juncture in my career. The most surprising thing to me was that salary didn’t show up. I love money and the sweet things it can buy, but assuming my compensation is fair and helps me reach a few specific financial goals – it’s not the biggest driver of what makes my life fulfilling.

I have a lot of thoughts about business school and honestly think that today’s traditional 2-year MBA is ripe for disruption. So I decided to write a series of posts called MBA Madness. The main goal is to help prospective MBA applicants weigh the pros and cons of going to business school, make the appropriate decisions for their personal situations, and if appropriate – choose the right schools. I’ll start the series by discussing the 4 key things you get out of business school.

Knowledge
The first and simplest thing you’ll get out of an MBA is knowledge. This could be deeper knowledge in one specific area (investment banking, investment management, consumer marketing, etc.), broader knowledge across a variety of subjects, or most likely a combination of the two. Most people will enjoy surface-level exposure to a bunch of subjects and then go deep in one field they wish to pursue. In terms of objectively weighing the return on your investment, I would say that broadening your knowledge is valuable if you don’t have a basic understanding of business concepts already (mergers and acquisitions, financial statement analysis, core aspects of consumer marketing, operations, etc.). If you do have a core understanding of businesses and different types of financial transactions, this aspect of an MBA wil be nice (reinforcement of things you already know) but not a killer investment.

If you don’t have a lot of business and financial knowledge already, the broad exposure and training is a big plus. But realize that you can get a lot of the surface-level knowledge for cheap these days through Wikipedia, ebooks, Udemy, MIT OpenCourseware, etc. It’s almost always deep knowledge in an area of specialization that will matter down the road. If you want to go to business school to get a “general education” I would quote a line from Good Will Hunting: “You just dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a f’ing education you could have gotten for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library.” Focus on your specialization and how that will accelerate your career growth.

Analytical Skills
We need to be honest and realize that the value of knowledge has dropped exponentially over the last 20 years. There used to be a giant disparity between the highly educated and the less educated in terms of access to information and knowledge. If you went to a top business school in the 1980′s you literally gained access to an inner circle of knowledge and power that was inaccessible to those on the outside. Now with the vast array of rich resources on the web, information has become ubiquitous. The cost to search a meaningful percentage of human knowledge has dropped to zero. What has not dropped to zero is the ability to take large quantities of data, analyze it, extract key insights, develop a point of view, present your arguments, and drive progress forward. Those analytical skills are highly valuable and will not be forgotten. So think about skills over knowledge. World-class skills have not been commoditized. Every field is different so you should focus on the exact skills you need for your desired career.

There are various ways to develop skills. An MBA is one way, but not necessarily the best. It highly depends on what you want to do. Make sure to look at this deeply and analyze business schools based on their likelihood to materially advance your skills in your desired field of expertise. Going to Haas to get into Wall Street or going to Wharton to get into marketing in Silicon Valley are probably not the best decisions. Business schools focus on core competencies, just like you should. Remember that.

Networking
Networking is probably the most differentiable aspect of full-time business school. Networking is an annoying word, but I would look at it in two ways. The first is developing natural relationships with classmates that will give you ties to various leaders in the future (breadth of your network). The value of this depends on how many of your classmates become leaders in their fields and on how much you enjoy spending time with them (finding a cultural fit with the school and your classmates should not be overlooked). In day-to-day life you develop a lot of respectful acquaintances, but the best way to develop deep friendships is by going through hell together. If you look at tight bonds between people, they’re developed when soldiers go to war, when sports teams practice their hearts out in pursuit of a championship, when co-founders start a company against all odds, when classmates stay up all night to finish a brutal project and surpass their peers, etc. I found the stress of business school to be far lower than many people make it out to be (particularly after going through engineering school as an undergrad), but I actually think that a certain amount of heat is positive in terms of the bonds it builds. When the pressure is on and you’re trying to get a project done, while searching for a job, and holding down personal commitments, that’s when you develop real relationships with your classmates. I don’t think many deep bonds are built during easy and boring times.

The other side of networking is building relationships with people who are already in the field you’re pursuing, be they alumni of your business school or just successful professionals you want to impress and get guidance from. I think of this as launching yourself into the field. Create a hit-list of top people you’d like to talk to or meet. Introduce yourself. Be very respectful and diligent about the way you reach out to people (more on this in a later post, as I think it’s very important). But be somewhat shameless. Get yourself out of the building and into the industry. Go to events. Start side projects to show people you can do the work. Showing is always more powerful than telling, and generating a discussion around a project you’re passionate about is much more interesting than “You’re awesome and I want to be just like you.” I would argue that today, in almost any field, there are really effective ways to start side projects outside of your classwork or day job that teach you the business, show others that you’re willing to take initiative, and differentiate you from everyone else. Don’t just be another MBA grad. Be the best at what you do and show it. Think of it less as “networking over cocktails” and more as diving into a field and enjoying the ride. Business school is great for this because there are lots of guest speakers (some schools have a tremendous advantage in this category), you can devote time to getting out and meeting people, and you don’t have a boss breathing down your neck every day (you’re the master of your own priorities).

Leadership
Last, but definitely not least, is leadership. Developing the skills to become a leader is the most critical part that will determine how far you get in your career. Being great at everything else, but sucking at leadership – will distinctly limit your growth. Developing yourself as an effective leader will drive your ultimate career success. However, when it comes to business school, this is the area where MBA programs are the absolute weakest. The reason is simple. Becoming a leader is 80% action and 20% analysis and discussion. Business school is the opposite – it’s 80% analysis and discussion and 20% action. You can talk in a group about what a CEO should do in a given situation until you’re blue in the face. It won’t help you a bit when you have to actually execute a strategic decision that affects an entire team, convince a top producer to work for you, or execute a layoff for the first time. Everything I learned in business school meant nothing compared to going through the human experience of starting and building a company. You learn quickly in the real world that strategy is 10% (at most!) and execution is 90%. Business school is not effective at teaching you execution because that’s not what you do on a daily basis while you’re there. You can only learn how to execute in a leadership role within a company by doing it. A quarterback goes to the film room as part of his prep, but 90% of his growth as a leader is earned on the field. Think about it. Do you want a quarterback who spent the last two years leading a team on the field, has played under the lights on Monday Night Football, and has dealt with the ups and downs of a human organization? Or do you want a quarterback who spent the last two years in a prestigious film room (business school)? The film room is nice for developing knowledge, analytical skills, and networking, but it does not teach you leadership. Business school has some proxies for leadership and can prep you to take on leadership roles, but when you graduate and hit the field is when you’ll truly develop your leadership abilities. Watching film and reading case studies is studying the past. Throwing passes under pressure with a game on the line – that’s defining the future.

I don’t want anybody to read my critiques as pro-MBA or anti-MBA, because ultimately they’re neither. But what they are is my attempt to very honestly and objectively provide a framework for you to measure the potential return on your investment if you want to go to business school. It’s a highly personal decision that is different for everybody. I actually think it’s inappropriate to even ask the question – “Should I get an MBA?” The real questions are “What do I want to do with my career? What do I not have now that I would like to have in order to get there? What are the different options and paths I can take to cross the gap between where I am now and where I want to be? Is an MBA one of those effective paths? If so, does it make more sense for me than any of the other paths, weighing all pros and cons?” More to come in future posts…

If you’re choosing a job with a long-term view (hopefully you are), you will quickly accelerate your career if you work with smart, successful people.  You’ll learn from them.  You’ll grow.  You’ll help build the future of the industry you’re in.  Having the ideal job description should be a far distant priority. If you prove yourself, you can move into new roles at a good company, but you can’t quickly change a weak company into a great one.

I would rather take out the trash for Reid Hoffman or mop floors for Larry and Sergey than be an  SVP at a meaningless company with a mediocre team. In my first job out of college (I worked for Cypress Semicoductor in Silicon Valley) I ended up moving back to the east coast for personal reasons.  One of the directors gave me a powerful piece of advice: “always surround yourself with the most clever people you can find.”  I didn’t completely understand the power of that statement at the time, but it is extremely true.  I like the use of the word “clever” vs. smart because it’s not rocket science intelligence that always leads you to the next big thing, but rather the cleverness to quickly adapt in changing situations.  So when you’re looking at a job, find a place with clever people where you’ll be happy for the long-term.  Then figure out what you’ll actually do on a daily basis and use it as a launching point for bigger and better things.  If you were an engineer at Google during the early days or a product manager at PayPal during its hyper growth, do you think you’d be whining about the job description you had at the time, regardless of what they asked you to do?

People used to pay thousands of dollars for the Encyclopaedia Brittanica. Then they paid $50 for Microsoft Encarta, which included rich media and easy navigation. Now Wikipedia is free, updates itself in real-time and (although imperfect) has made those before it completely obsolete. Perhaps the future of case studies is free, open source material that is routinely updated and built with a natural layer of social interaction.

I went to business school in the fall of 2008 (aka the financial apocalypse). The entire world was changing so some of our case studies were literally rooted in ideas that no longer held true. If case studies were open source, collaborative works, they could be updated in real-time and adjusted as necessary. It would also enable more current events to be modeled as case studies. Studying history is interesting and we should all do it, but understanding the present and thinking about the future is what will ultimately generate success in your career. The time required to write, publish, and distribute case studies limits the number of case studies about business problems that are happening right now. Open source case studies could provide much fresher content, while reducing the cost of education.

MIT started a movement that’s shifting in this direction via Open Courseware. Sebastian Thrun is pushing a disruptive model with Udacity and Fred Wilson is using MBA Mondays to provide free learning experiences to a large community of followers. Creating high-quality content takes time, energy, and expertise, but the momentum is already visible. If Wikipedia can become what it is today, then it’s entirely possible that some day we’ll have a rich resource of case studies that are powerful learning tools and are completely free.

I think that a resume should be a slightly more detailed version of your LinkedIn profile, but LinkedIn should tell people 90% of what they need to know to judge initial interest. There are four core aspects to deciding if you are a good fit: your general background (school, jobs, etc.), what you have specifically accomplished (products built, sales generated, rankings in school, promotions), what you are capable of (extrapolating past success to future endeavors), and your personality (fitting the culture of the hiring company). Below are my guidelines for making these four points come across strongly. Remember, succinctness is key. Your goal is not to list as many jobs and responsibilities as possible. Your goal is to make a strong impression that defines why somebody should hire you. The fewer words you use to make that impression the better. “First man on the moon” doesn’t take 3 pages, but says an awful lot. Get as close to that as you can come.

Include a Picture
Managers don’t hire resumes or credentials, they hire people. If they see a picture you become a person instead of a resume. Make sure it’s professional and one of your better shots, but the point is not how you look (though it’s funny how much personality can come through in a picture). The point is to make it slightly personal. Studies have shown that people are more drawn to blogs where the writer includes a head shot of themselves. You start to feel connected with the person even though you’ve never met (just like you feel connected to your favorite TV characters when you know they’re not real). Seeing faces matters.

Include a Little Personality
You have to work with your colleagues every day, most weeks you see them more than you see your family. Personality matters. Share it. Own it. Just don’t overdo it. This is a balancing act where you want to describe what makes you tick (aka be interesting) without posting too much information. You want a career where you’re being compensated well, doing something that you excel at, AND doing something that you love. If you state what you love doing there is a much greater chance that you’ll find gratifying roles throughout your career. If you don’t know what you love doing, then you should focus on that, experiment, and figure it out. People change over time so this will be a moving target and that’s natural.

Describe Your Differentiation and Value
At the surface level, there are lots of people just like you. So if you’re an engineer, what specifically sets you apart? If you’re in sales, what aspect of your career gives you a slightly unique angle? Think about this carefully. You can get jobs with just the base requirements, but breakout careers are built on differentiation. There’s a reason why LeBron James is worth more, he’s different from the rest of the pack. Companies don’t have game tape to see how you’re differentiated, so you need to explicitly tell them. Do it in 2 sentences or less.  Put this front and center in the summary section.  Literally tell them why they should hire you.

Make Frequent Updates
You can set LinkedIn to not notify your connections every time you edit your profile. This gives you the freedom to make frequent, small updates, without flooding people’s feeds. Then you can change the setting if you switch jobs and want to broadcast your move. By keeping your profile updated and edited over time, you’re always putting your best foot forward. You’ll be ready when that breakout opportunity comes your way. The biggest moments are frequently unexpected, so always be armed and dangerous. Let everybody know what you’ve accomplished and what sets you apart.

Make it Authentic
Don’t be an “energetic, go getter who leverages synergies to deliver value.” Use real words to describe who you are, what you do, and where you’d like to go. Being honest with yourself is where it all starts. Honesty makes a powerful statement and will help put you in the right place. The corporate world is compared to a rat race because so many people act like lemmings and follow a herd mentality. Here’s the great thing, you don’t have to follow. You can lead your career down the path that brings the most success and happiness to you. Reid Hoffman’s book The Startup of You does a great job illustrating how to think like an entrepreneur during your career. This mindset can help you generate opportunities that build and take advantage of your abilities and experience, while being mindful of market realities. Just remember, success without happiness isn’t really success, is it?

As a proud member of the crazy ones (entrepreneurs who run businesses and have families), I have seen my share of chaos. Yet raising a family comes with a sense of purpose different from anything else I have experienced. While I try to teach my son, he teaches me just as much in return. Here are ten things a toddler can teach you about running a business.

1. Communicate with short, clear messages
When a toddler learns to talk, you don’t teach them long, complicated sentences. You start with the basics. The funny thing is, you can communicate most critical messages with very few words. You don’t have a five page reason for why you buy Apple products (they’re simple and beautiful), eat at McDonald’s (it’s cheap and convenient), or shop at Zappos (they have great customer service). So don’t give a five page answer for why somebody should buy your product, work at your company, or invest in you. Keep your messages short and clear, that’s what makes them powerful.

2. Create a fun environment
Kids quickly take on the vibe around them. If you’re mad and stressed, they’ll be mad and stressed. If you’re happy and excited about life, they’ll have high spirits and everything becomes easier. I can’t claim that they’ll want to sleep when you want to sleep (parents only wish), but you absolutely set the tone. The same thing goes at the office. Too many companies seem intent on creating workplaces where people are miserable. Make things fun, lighten up the mood, and take care of your team. Everybody will be happier AND more productive.

3. Repeat yourself ad nauseam
Repeating yourself as a parent gets old, but if you’re ridiculously consistent you’ll generate the right habits over time. BMW is “the ultimate driving machine” and I don’t know that because they told me once, twice, or three times, I have seen it and heard it everywhere for years. Now I can’t forget it (notice that the message is short and clear). It sounds silly, but repeating your messages constantly, everywhere, is what ingrains your branding in people’s minds so that you become unmistakable.

4. Reward people frequently
Wall Street bonuses are probably the worst way to reward performance. They are giant, unpredictable lump sums paid at the end of the year. There is little transparency, lots of politics, and no loyalty to stay the day after the deposit clears. Would I reward my son after 3 weeks of good behavior? Goodness no. He should be rewarded right away. Adults really aren’t any different. Here’s the secret, the rewards don’t have to big! Take your team to an awesome lunch, buy them iPads, congratulate them in front of their peers. Sometimes it’s simply the act of rewarding people that matters, not the dollars that change hands.

5. Have a plan for everything
After having a kid, I became a lot less capable of flying by the seat of my pants. I used to wake up 20 minutes before leaving the house and as long as I showered, dressed and grabbed my wallet everything else would fall into place. With kids, you plan ahead for everything, coordinate schedules, and make contingency plans. That mindset holds well for running a business. Identify what you need to accomplish every day, week, and quarter. Discuss the opportunities and potential road blocks and plan for all of them. If you practice audibles with your team then you simply need to call the right play during the game and everybody knows what to do.

6. Understand that nothing will go as planned
Plans are wonderful and you should make them. But…life’s never that simple. There’s a balance between making plans and quickly adjusting when everything changes. Successful stock traders win not because they make better bets, but because they recognize their mistakes quicker and minimize losses. Top football teams win because they have a solid game plan and then make the right in-game adjustments. Treat your business as a game in progress. Your work is never done and you’re always ready to adjust when necessary.

7. Practice what you preach
Don’t feed somebody grilled chicken every day and talk about a nutritious diet while you eat french fries. It’s simple and extremely easy to see. Lead or don’t lead. But if you choose to lead, lead with your actions first.

8. Be authentic
Faking it doesn’t work. Kids are very perceptive and remind you to stick with your true personality. This should carry over into your professional life as well. Forge a career that you are truly passionate about and work at a company where you fit the culture. Otherwise you’re stuck faking it and that never leads to long-term success or happiness.

9. Build true loyalty and it will not be broken
Few bonds are as strong as a parent and a child. People will do anything for the family members they love. Build that relationship stronger and stronger over time and nothing will break it. The same is true for building teams. If your team is full of people who think of themselves first and have no loyalty, you’re setting yourself up for failure. It’s the tightly knit teams that stand up for each other and win the tough battles. Loyalty isn’t built overnight and it doesn’t come free – you have to earn it. So earn it.

10. Remember that shi$ happens
That’s right, it happens. As a matter of fact, it happens all the time! Sometimes you have to clean up after a mess and move on without letting things bother you. Don’t take yourself too seriously. That’s one of the secrets to life.

Picture two college classmates, let’s call them Bob and Sally. Bob is fairly successful and is making $150K/year by the time he is 35. Sally is extremely successful and is making $1.5M/year by the time she is 35. What was the difference in their career trajectories? It did not matter that Bob made a 20% higher salary out of school. Sally sacrificed on starting salary to learn, grow, and find the place where she could succeed over the long haul. This happens all the time. Being on the best long-term track is soooooo much more important than the size of your current paycheck, especially when you are young.

Why do most career services offices have this backward? I have nothing against career services offices or the people that work there, but they are stuck in a bind. It is very difficult to measure the long-term happiness and success of your graduates. It is easy to measure your graduates’ employment rate and first-year compensation. So that is what people measure and it is the key metric used in magazine rankings every year. Students are naturally pushed to take jobs when they are available and to think about pay in a stronger way than they should.

To maximize your long-term success, you need to identify what you truly want and then pursue it with a vengeance regardless of what people tell you. Sometimes you have to accept advice from various sources and then draw your own conclusions and pave your own path. Greatness has never been achieved by following rules and proceeding in other people’s footsteps.

Entering my second year of business school, I turned down a job offer at a consulting firm where I interned during the summer. I wanted to start my own company and decided there was no time to look back. I not only turned down the job offer, but took one of their employees with me. A manager from the firm ended up quitting his job to join my startup. I then proceeded to graduate and make $25K/year as we got the business off the ground and searched for funding. Let’s just say I didn’t earn a gold star in the recruiting category for that move. But I am exponentially more prepared to succeed now that I have experienced the adventure of launching a business. I have learned how to build a team, how to hunt down customers and earn credibility, how to raise funding, how to build a scalable product, how to deal with tricky management issues, how to work in a rapidly changing market, how to build successful partnerships, and ultimately how to create and run an organization.

Regardless of my personal financial outcome as a result of Seamless Receipts, I am confident that this experience will pay huge dividends throughout the rest of my career. But it was tough at the beginning. I had to think different and resist outside pressures. I encourage you to do the same. Don’t suffice for a good career. Shoot for greatness. Throw your starting salary out the window and do something awesome regardless of the compensation. You’ll be better off for it no matter what happens in the short-term. You may not make it on your first shot, but in my opinion subscribing yourself to a lifetime of mediocrity is the biggest risk you can take. Pursuing a passion on the other hand, I don’t see much true risk in that.

As a technology entrepreneur in NYC (Founder and CEO of Seamless Receipts) and a proud holder of two Cornell degrees (Engineering and MBA), I’m clearly biased. But I’m more excited about this partnership than anything I’ve heard about in awhile. Good technology and startup ecosystems need four key components to be successful: a superb pipeline of talent, a culture that promotes idea generation and risk-taking, an ecosystem of partners and mentors, and access to capital. Stanford and Silicon Valley have mastered this model and Cornell is going to launch a giant spark into an already thriving startup ecosystem in New York. Cornell will bring to New York a $150M venture fund to support early stage companies, 20K jobs to build the infrastructure, 8K sustainable jobs for faculty and staff, and top talent from around the world who will be encouraged to start and grow companies in New York City. The future of our economy clearly relies on innovation and the proliferation of new ideas. Nothing will support New York City’s future and optimism more than building the next Facebook or Google in Manhattan.

Looking at New York City, all of the components of a startup ecosystem exist today (talent, culture, ecosystem, and capital) but talent is clearly the piece that holds NYC back from being as transformative as Silicon Valley has been for the past 50 years. Cornell will inject a pipeline of talent that will generate new businesses and drive the growth of current companies (who are all desperately trying to hire engineers). Bloomberg expects the program to increase the number of engineers finding jobs in NYC by 85%.

In return, Cornell has all the components of an entrepreneurial education except the ecosystem. There is an honest disadvantage to starting a company in Ithaca (ice hockey games are great, but the number of successful alumni who have built and sold companies in the Finger Lakes region is definitely limited vs. New York or Silicon Valley). Trust me, I’ve done it. So putting a permanent program in New York City will bring to Cornell the one missing piece in its entrepreneurial endeavors – a subway to New York so students can visit Google, Facebook, tech entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists on a random Tuesday afternoon. The 50K Cornell alumni in New York City will serve as a perfect launching ground for the program’s ties to the New York economy.

I see the partnership between Cornell/Technion and New York City as a perfect marriage. I couldn’t be more optimistic about the future and I look forward to taking part in the initatives that will come.