Fall 2024 Semester Review

Eclectic Convergence, Cornell Entrepreneurship Summit

This semester, CVC attended the Eclectic Convergence Cornell Entrepreneurship Summit in New York City on November 15th. The day started off with opening remarks from Zach Shulman, Director of Entrepreneurship at Cornell as well as the faculty advisor for CVC. Members also attended fireside chats with several speakers. Our favorite fireside chat was with Liza Landsman (‘90), an NEA partner who currently serves as the CEO of Stash, a fintech company. During her session, she talked about her journey as the former president of Jet.com, where she built the company up before it was acquired by Walmart in 2016.

After the fireside chats, there was a networking lunch where students got the opportunity to network with Cornell alumni, current Cornell Tech students, and current undergraduates interested in the entrepreneurship space. There was also a pitch competition where several Cornell start-ups (ArmaBio, Kubbly, SmartHER, Elm AI, and Gallox Semiconductors) all presented their ideas to a panel of judges. The day ended with a few more fireside chats from Aaron Holiday (‘12 and co-founder of 645 Ventures), Scott Belsky (‘02 and Chief Strategy Officer/EVP of Adobe), and Mark Tatum (‘91 and NBA Deputy Commissioner).

What did our members think about the conference?

Favorite part of E-Ship?

Pitch competition. It was interesting seeing the startups and what other people at Cornell are building. I like how they weren’t all software like what we do at CVC. One of them was a medical start-up for drone medicine delivery and another one was a semiconductor one. There was a broad range of startups. - Sam Shridhar

What is something you learned from E-Ship to apply to your career?

Talk to everyone. Getting your name out there opens doors because you never know who you talk to, who they are connected to, and how that can help you with your future. - Sam Shridhar

Describe E-Ship in two words

Intriguing, inspiring. - Nihaal Konda

What is the coolest company you saw at E-Ship?

I liked Elm AI, because it illustrated how the research we are doing in CVC is relevant to the real world. Our whole new member class did a deep dive into the supply chain tech industry. So, seeing how Elm AI leveraged AI to simplify workflows like other companies we identified as potential areas of investment was a cool experience. - Nihaal Konda

Pictures of the members at the conference & exploring NYC!

After the conference, CVC held an alumni social at SPIN where old and current members met up!

Events

CVC hosted three main events this semester. The first was a teaching session for term sheet negotiations with VCs from Armory Square Ventures and corporate lawyers from Akerman LLP. The event spanned two days, with the first day covering the fundamentals of term sheet negotiations and the second day being a live term sheet negotiation competition. Thank you to Zach Shulman, our advisor, for helping to organize this event!

The next two events that CVC hosted were part of its Inclusion in Investing series, which was open to the general Cornell student body. The first event was a virtual fireside chat and Q&A session with Meghan Cross, a Partner at AmplifyHer Ventures, which invests in high-growth start-ups led by women. She has over 15 years of experience in venture capital and has written for Forbes and TechCrunch. She highlighted her non-linear path to get there, as she graduated from Cornell with a degree in Fiber Science. The second event was a virtual fireside chat and Q&A with Lana Vetter, a Managing Director at Blackstone’s Real Estate group. After graduating from Cornell from the Hotel School, Lana has had an impressive career path as she talked about her journey to becoming an MD in only 5 years!

Hear from our DEI Chair, Grace Qi, who hosted these events!

What do you hope people take away from these events?

The idea that you don’t have to come from a certain background or a certain major background to be somebody who is what people expect to see in this career, to be in this career… When you are going down these paths, there are people that have walked through it before you, and these people have walked this path and want to turn around and also help you with it.

What’s your favorite thing about hosting these events?

I think clubs and other institutions like that at Cornell are very inaccessible. Being able to have these kinds of events be a getaway for people who aren’t in a business club or aren’t even thinking about these kinds of careers in the first place makes me happy. I think accessibility is a huge problem, and we have a lot of gatekeeping, so with this series, I’m really happy to see that kind of get broken down.

Projects

CVC members worked on a total of five projects this semester with the following clients: GreyMatter Capital, Artemis Ventures, FirstMark, Citi Ventures, and Eventual.

Below are some short descriptions of each project:

GreyMatter Capital: The project involved doing market research into novel deep tech applications for mental health and AI tools for healthcare.

Artemis Ventures: The project was centered on conducting in-depth competitor analyses for their portfolio companies and deep dives into various fintech applications.

FirstMark: The project’s goal was to research the industry of voice agents with a particular focus on the verticals of healthcare, customer service, sales, and HR.

Citi Ventures: The project focused on the Site Reliability Engineering industry, looking at the industry landscape before and after the rise of Generative AI as well as emerging technologies in the field.

Eventual: The project members worked with CVC alum Jay Chia to research the big data tools market and conducted user interviews to identify developer pain points, ultimately providing strategic recommendations for Eventual’s core product.

Hear from Akhil Iyengar, a PM, on his experience working with FirstMark this semester!

What was your favorite part of the project?

I liked reviewing all the reports each of the analysts had done on all the verticals at the end of the semester. The really cool part about that was that the research and analysis being done on different parts of the vertical was being put together in a really cohesive way. I found it pretty compelling.

What did you learn about the industry through this project?

Voice agent technology is still pretty nascent. There are a few start-ups that have found pretty strong product market fit, but the vast majority of start-ups, at least in the application layer, are still trying to figure out the best way to position the technology to focus on very strong use cases within each of these industries. I think it’s a rapidly evolving space, and within the next few years, there are going to be a good group of start-ups that really succeed within each of these different verticals that we focused on, and tracking their progress will be really exciting.

Hear from Saksham Sood, an analyst, on his experience working with Eventual!

What was your favorite part of the project?

My favorite part has to be talking to CVC alum Jay Chia. Getting with him on call and learning about his perspective on the industry was really cool because he is a really smart guy. He has years of experience in this space, and he has a really nuanced take on the industry and the different players in the industry.

What is your biggest takeaway from the project?

Through my user interviews, I spoke to a bunch of people and found that people I spoke to in EY and Databricks had an almost polar opposite perspective in data processing. The EY person had to manually edit a lot of her stuff, and her working with data was super rudimentary compared to the Databricks guy, which I found really interesting, the industry isn’t moving at the same pace.

What was the hardest part of the project?

Even though I am a CS major, I didn’t know much about data processing and databases coming into this project. That initial hump of learning what Eventual does and why that’s different from other tools in the market was the hardest thing. It was really technical, required a lot of research, and had me learning a whole new side of CS and how that works.

By: Sam Shridhar, Nihaal Konda, Sasha Masson and Jenny Chen