The Columbia Technology Founder’s Track (CTech) represents a university-wide collaboration between the Business School’s Eugene Lang Entrepreneurship Center, the Engineering School’s IEOR Department, and Columbia Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Design.

About CTech

Founded by Dr. Song Li, PhD ’92, CTech gives technical Columbia MBA and Engineering students the tools to become world-class entrepreneurs by providing them with curriculum, mentorship, and networking opportunities, guiding the launch and growth of Columbia-founded technology startups. 

Eligibility

CTech is a selective, cross-disciplinary program open to first year Engineering graduate students and rising second-year MBA students with technical backgrounds who are dedicated to launching and growing a tech-enabled startup while at Columbia. 

Prerequisites: 

• For rising second-year MBA Candidates: 

  • Currently enrolled in or completion of (CTech 101) Foundations of Entrepreneurship prior to applying, or an exemption from this course.

  • STEM undergraduate degree or relevant work experience in a technology company/role.

• For first year SEAS Candidates: 

  • Completion of (CTech 101) Entrepreneurship Bootcamp (IEOR 4570) prior to applying, or an exemption from this course.

Program Components

For MBA Students

• Enrollment in (CTech 201) “Launch Your Startup” during the upcoming fall semester (3 credits)

• Direct experience in a tech startup in the spring semester (3 credits). This requirement could be satisfied by one of the following: 

  • Acceptance to and completion of the (CTech 301) Greenhouse Accelerator program

  • Completion of an approved accelerator program during the spring semester

• Attendance of the Dr. Li Distinguished Technology Entrepreneurship Speaker Series

• VC coursework or VC-related experience. This requirement can be satisfied by one of the following:

  • Enrollment in Foundations of VC and/or VC Seminar

  • A CTech-facilitated VC immersion project

  • Acceptance and participation in the VC Fellows program (administered by the VC Club)

For SEAS Graduate Students

• Enrollment in either (CTech 201) IEOR 4998 “Managing Technical Innovation”  with Prof. Jerry Neumann or B8519-002 “Launch Your Startup” during the upcoming fall semester (3 credits).

• Direct experience in a tech startup in the spring semester (3 credits). This requirement could be satisfied by one of the following: 

  • Acceptance to and completion of the (CTech 301) Greenhouse Accelerator program

  • Completion of an approved accelerator during the spring semester

• Attendance of the Dr. Song Li Distinguished Technology Entrepreneurship Speaker Series

• VC coursework or VC-related experience. This requirement can be satisfied by one of the following:

  • Enrollment in Foundations of VC and/or VC Seminar

  • A CTech-facilitated VC immersion project

How to Apply

Admission to CTech is by rolling application, or by faculty recommendation. We encourage serious applicants to apply as soon as possible so that accepted students can plan for required coursework. 

Note: If there is more than one student in the same startup who qualifies for CTech and wants to apply (e.g. each cofounder is either a rising second year MBA with a technical background or a SEAS Masters student), team members should apply separately.

The open application dates for the current Track are as follows:

• CBS: Applications are currently open and will be accepted through September 7, 2020 by 11:59 pm

• SEAS: Applications are currently open and will be accepted through September 7, 2020 by 11:59 pm

Interviews and admission decisions are rolling on a 4 to 6 week cycle.

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Questions? Please reach out to Lara Hejtmanek at LTS11@gsb.columbia.edu.

CTech Team Leaders

Dave Lerner
Director

Dave's Bio

Dave was appointed Director of Entrepreneurship at Columbia University in 2013. In his years with Columbia Entrepreneurship he’s helped launch the Columbia Startup Lab, the Columbia Design Studio, Startup Law Studio, CTech and a host of new tech programs and curricula throughout the university’s many schools. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship at Columbia Business School where he teaches the Greenhouse Accelerator Program, the Launch Your Startup class and at Columbia Engineering where he teaches the Entrepreneurship Bootcamps to incoming Masters students.

By background he’s an entrepreneur (2 exits) and angel investor in 100+ companies. His personal blog, www.davelerner.com/blog, explores the worlds of university entrepreneurship, angel/venture investing, and startups and he’s a frequent contributor to many other publications, including Business Insider, whose SAI group recently named him both one of the “top 100 most influential New Yorkers in the digital business community” and “one of NYC’s top 100 early stage investors”.

Lara Hejtmanek
Senior Associate Director 

Lara's Bio

Lara is Senior Associate Director in charge of on-campus events, programming, and curriculum for the Eugene Lang Entrepreneurship Center. Lara has experience as an angel investor, focusing on early stage social enterprise companies.

Prior to joining the Lang Center, she worked at several early stage companies in strategy and planning roles, and has over 20 years of experience in digital marketing. Most recently she founded and led the Insights & Planning practice for 360i – named the #1 digital agency in the country by AdAge for four years in a row – serving major brands for clients in CPG, travel and retail. There she led her team in bringing together consumer insights with emerging technologies to identify high impact opportunities for clients, spanning social media, mobile, search, paid media, and overall brand strategy. Lara holds a BA in Art History from Vassar College and an MBA from Columbia University.

Daniella Raposo
Assistant Director

Daniella's Bio

Daniella Raposo is the Assistant Director of the Columbia Startup Lab, overseeing all programming, events, educational resources, community building activities and day-to-day operations of the Lab. She is the bridge that connects the Columbia Startup Lab to Columbia University, fostering Columbia’s longstanding spirit of collaboration and entrepreneurship.;

Prior to joining Columbia Entrepreneurship, Daniella held a variety of different managerial roles, executing community-building strategies in both the nonprofit and education sectors. Daniella holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Ithaca College.

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Meet the Current Cohort 

Sara Adam ’20BUS
Co-founder and CMO of Nestig
 

Sarah's Bio

Sara Adam is the co-founder and CMO of Nestig, a nursery brand for modern parents. Prior to starting her MBA at Columbia, she worked in e-commerce for companies in the Amazon portfolio, including Diapers.com and Amazon’s baby registry team. As part of these organizations she developed expertise in acquisition marketing, consumer insights and merchandising.

William Baek ’20BUS
Founder of HangFive

William's Bio

Will Baek is a second-year MBA student at Columbia. While at CBS, Will founded an astrology-based dating app called HangFive to offer a better mobile dating environment for female users. Prior to MBA, Will worked in product management and finance. Will has a BS in Information Systems from Carnegie Mellon University.

Alessandra Cestaro’20BUS
Founder and CEO of Lifessance

Alessandra's Bio

Alessandra Cestaro is the Founder and CEO of Lifessance, and MBA Candidate at Columbia Business School (Class of 2020). Originally from Milan, Italy but now living in New York. Before Business School, Alessandra spent 3 years at McKinsey, where she met her co-founder, Giacomo. Together, the duo is working to launch Lifessance. Lifessance is a subscription service that provides personalized health & wellness programs (nutrition, workout, mental health), based on your DNA. Its mission is to empower clients to become their healthiest Selves.

Agapitos Diakogiannis ’20BUS
 

Agapitos's Bio

Agapitos Diakogiannis is an entrepreneur-in-residence at FJ Labs. Previously he held consulting and operations roles at BCG and Rocket Internet, working in total in ten countries. He is a big basketball fan and an avid skier. Agapitos is an engineer by training and is currently an MBA candidate at Columbia Business School.

Giacomo Levi ’20BUS
Co-founder of Lifessance

Giacomo's Bio

Giacomo Levi co-founded Lifessance, which provides health and wellness programs to its clients, based on their DNA. Before joining CBS, Giacomo spent 3 years as a consultant at McKinsey & Company’s Milan office, where he mainly focused on Travel, Transport & Logistics, Advanced industries & IoT, and Retail Banking & NPL. Giacomo has an engineering background, but also has a strong passion for sports. At his alma mater, Politecnico di Milano, Giacomo was captain of the tennis team. 

Zheng Li ’20BUS
Founder of Smart Highlights

Zheng's Bio

Zheng Li is currently pursuing his MBA at Columbia Business School while starting his company Smart Highlights. Zheng has over 10 years of experience on developing high-performance and reliable software. He was the lead developer at Bitfusion.io (acquired by VMWare) in building a software layer that virtualizes heterogeneous hardware such as GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), enabling elastic attach/detach of GPUs for applications like machine learning. Prior to that, Zheng was a senior compiler software engineer at NVIDIA, developing its back-end optimizing compiler, a critical software component responsible for generating machine code for all NVIDIA’s GPUs. Zheng holds a BE in Materials Science and Engineering from Tsinghua University, a MS in Materials Science and Engineering from University of Pennsylvania and a MS in Computer Science from University of Texas at Austin.

Peter Malinvern  ’20SEAS
Founder of PowerGarden 

Peter's Bio

Peter Malinverni is driven by our collective need to transition to a sustainable, fair economy. His BS in physics from SUNY Binghamton '18 and MS in electrical engineering from Columbia '20 reflect his capacity to solve problems using first principles. That's why when Peter had the idea for PowerGarden while disassembling the circuit breakers in his friends basement, he knew it could change the world. Since then, as part of both the CTech and Entrepreneurial Greenhouse programs, he has been fanatically building a platform that will enable the advanced energy economy we will need to "kick the habit" of fossil fuels.

Guilherme Picciotto ’20BUS
Co-founder and CEO of Nestig

Guilherme's Bio

Gui Picciotto is the co-founder and CEO of Nestig, a nursery brand for modern parents. Prior to that, he worked at e.Bricks Ventures, one of the largest venture capital firms in Brazil where he was responsible for investing and managing portfolio companies across multiple verticals, such as FinTech, SaaS and consumer. Before his time in venture, he worked Investment Banking at both UBS and Itaú BBA, where he participated in the origination and execution of multiple Capital Markets and M&A transactions.

Viktor Zhai ’20BUS
Founder of Kitchen Z

Viktor's Bio

Viktor Zhai is the founder of Kitchen Z, a tech-enabled Chinese fast casual restaurant for the next generation. Prior Columbia Business School, Viktor worked for Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong, giving investment advice and trading coverage to Asian family offices. Viktor graduated from University of Hong Kong with BBA (acc&fin).

 

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