When I was a student in Columbia College ten years ago, interest in tech was just emerging from the deep freeze of the dotcom crash. Enrollment in introductory computer science courses doubled each of my four years. I was a board member of our student entrepreneurship club, CORE, as our membership swelled from 700 to over 2,000 students—no doubt bolstered by a generation that had watched The Social Network growing up.
A decade on, excitement about pursuing entrepreneurship, innovation, and applied science or engineering is deeper and broader than ever. CS is now the most popular undergraduate major. Relevant student groups have grown and thrived, including CORE and ADI, and new ones have emerged around topics including neurotech, space, and venture capital, while the stalwart Spectator has become a significant source of practical product and engineering experience.
In 2014, a plausible goal was simply to connect the few of us around Columbia who were interested. Since then, our independent alumni group, Columbia in Tech, has grown to over 1,500 subscribers. Today, we feel confident in setting a more ambitious vision, and in sharing a pledge to support it:
Our Vision: Columbia can be among the best universities for impact in tech. We can start by building leadership among our liberal arts and Ivy League peers—and becoming the talent hub for New York tech.
Our Pledge: We will contribute at least $100,000 to vision-aligned initiatives led by students and alumni, via CIT Grants.
Our Advantages
The best university for technology doesn’t just produce the most patents. Columbia’s strengths are not only in fundamental science and engineering, but also in integrating new technology with human needs, nurturing courage and independent thinking, and in our residency amongst the most dynamic city and economy on earth.
Columbia is a well-rounded institution, but we have particular strengths in key societal challenges of the coming decades. As bioengineers explore how we can read and write the code of life, the industry leadership of our faculties in biology, medicine, and public health is an incredible advantage. With training from our new climate school, graduates can not only shape regulatory markets and emissions standards, but understand the opportunities of a carbon-neutral economy. Among many other fields, our Business School has consistently produced influential graduates in financial services, where traditional markets and methods face competition from cryptocurrencies and decentralized networks.
The University has always been in dialogue with the City around us, and it’s increasingly clear that New York is flourishing as the alternative to Silicon Valley. A decade ago, DoubleClick’s $3B acquisition by Google was New York’s largest tech exit; over the years, that’s been steadily eclipsed by public tech companies in ecommerce (Etsy), databases (MongoDB), developer tooling (Datadog), healthcare (Oscar), enterprise (UiPath) and small business (Squarespace) software, among other fields. In 2010, New York attracted $1.2B in venture capital; in 2023, NYC startups raised $10.7B+ in the first eleven months of the year.
Doing Our Part
Having lived in San Francisco for much of the past decade, I can say with confidence that even in the era where so much communication is digital, proximity to Silicon Valley is crucial to Berkeley and Stanford’s influence in technology. Similarly, the continued success of New York tech will be a massive opportunity for Columbia. When you can catch a bus or train during the school year to build work experience, and when alumni can easily bring their networks, knowledge and opportunities to campus, students graduate with an immense head start.
There is a critical ingredient that enables all of this: Columbia can only be the top university for technology if it is also one of the best-connected communities. Our volunteer group, Columbia in Tech, has spent the past decade starting to connect alumni working in the field. We host panels, social events, office hours, annual reunions in New York and San Francisco, among other forums to build genuine relationships and share knowledge and connections. We recently started a fellowship program, aiming to give high-potential new graduates a head start in building industry context.
There’s a lot more we hope to build, and we want to collaborate with and support other individuals or groups in the Columbia community. To help support any of you who have ideas and energy, we are committed to direct $100,000 over the next decade to support mission-aligned programs led by student groups and alumni communities. We’ve put together a page here with more information for organizers.
It’s a time-honored Columbia tradition to lament that we’re not as close-knit as other alumni networks. That may be true, but it will only be true so long as we don’t take the initiative to break the negative cycle, and initiate a virtuous one. None of us volunteers would be where we are without people who took a chance on us along the way, and that’s given us immense motivation to give back. We will help the next generation wherever we can, so that they in turn feel more committed once they have the resources to give back themselves—and we hope to work with all of you along the way.
