Writing & Photography by Justin Negard
What does an idea look like? It might be a crumpled piece of paper on a cluttered desk or a line of code on a computer screen. Or perhaps it’s a metal filing cabinet with wheels and wires screwed into the bottom or a team discussing and debating someone’s lightbulb moment.
Take a walk around Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island, and you just might encounter sights like these emanating from the many labs on campus. Alumni and startups alike can be seen walking the halls, working in the makers spaces and meeting with industry experts on an original idea.
“There are very few places that are building companies from zero like we are,” says Fernando Gómez-Baquero, the director of Runway Startup Postdoc and the Spinout Programs at Cornell Tech. “Even if you go to Silicon Valley or companies like YC (Y Combinator Management, a venture capital firm), many startups are already up and running when they begin with those sorts of places. We start from the ground up.”
Located against a backdrop of Manhattan skyscrapers and river views, this newly built campus and extension of Cornell University aims to be a center for technology in the New York region. It is for this reason that Cornell Tech was the perfect place to visit for our tech issue—to explore a new place outside our community while learning more about the tech services and innovation currently coming out of this school.
With this in mind, Cornell Tech is not a typical day trip, as is often written about in this publication. This place is less about family-friendly entertainment and more about education. It’s about witnessing new companies trying out new ideas and what those opportunities look like to our own community.
Roosevelt Island
You have likely driven past Roosevelt Island on more than one occasion during a trip to Manhattan’s east side. On your drive, you may have noticed the ivy-covered ruins of the 168-year-old Renwick Smallpox Hospital jutting out into the East River or driven under the red cable cars as they dangled high above the New York City traffic.
However, you’d be forgiven if you haven’t visited Roosevelt Island yourself. For much of its history, the island was home to hospitals and residential apartments, with very little draw for tourists. Recent years have changed that, with a new focus on bringing residents, tourists and students to the island.
In 2012, New York City built the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, which revamped the overgrown and dilapidated buildings and fields on the island’s southern tip. During that same year, after an extensive open submission process held by the city, Cornell University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology began building a new tech-centered campus alongside the park.
Today, Cornell Tech occupies a large footprint on the island with plans for future expansion in the coming years. Other new businesses have emerged as well, including restaurants, shops and even the trendy Graduate Hotel, which opened in 2021 to service both the campus events and many of the conferences that Roosevelt Island hopes to attract.
Finding unicorns
Take a walk through the modern buildings of Cornell Tech, and it doesn’t take long to understand its mission. This is a school focused on technology and business. There are no undergraduate courses, pep rallies or hacky-sack-cluttered quads. The school is open only to alumni, post graduates and tech startups looking to hit the marketplace in a real world environment.
“The role of this school is to teach people what entrepreneurship really looks like,” Gómez-Baquero explains. “It’s a life choice, not a theory, and the only way to do it is to actually do it. Cornell realized that part of that meant it had to become an incubator and an investor, helping people build something for real. The result might be that they succeed, and that’s great, or they don’t, and then they try again. Making, growing, failing. Making, growing, failing. That’s the process.”
In its relatively short history, Cornell Tech has helped make and grow 109 companies. Most of which don’t tell “the Mark Zuckerberg story,” as Gómez-Baquero calls it.
“The real story for these companies is one about sitting, building, crying, popping champagne and then maybe crying again,” he says. “Sometimes you find a unicorn that succeeds from the start, and sometimes you don’t. But it’s really about what you learn going through that process.”
Real world companies
One of the “unicorns” that came out of Cornell Tech is Biotia, which uses genetic sequencing and AI to map pathogens. Part of their startup story involved swabbing germ samples from as far as the New York Subway system all the way to the International Space Station. This work created what Gómez-Baquero calls a “mega-map of everything biological in viruses and bacteria,” so that any hospital can now instantly identify a bacterial sample.
“If it’s not part of Biotia’s pathogen map,” says Gómez-Baquero, “it’s likely something new.”
Another example is Otari, a company that devised a camera and yoga mat that can analyze a person’s movements in a three-dimensional space and provide accurate feedback on workout routines. The camera itself was such a hit that the exercise company Peloton bought the camera technology to use with its own workout bikes.
And, Abstractive Health uses AI to summarize a patient’s medical records so physicians can spend more time with their patients versus reading their files. Co-founder and CEO Vince Hartman traces much of his company’s success to Cornell Tech, where they still divide some of their time.
“Being one of the top tech campuses in New York was a big benefit for us,” says Hartman. “They provided a data partnership with Weill Cornell Medicine to fine-tune our language models. We did two years of research with them to build up the summarization structure of our system and build our product.”
In addition to financial investment, hardware and office space, Cornell Tech also emphasizes human resources.
“We get a lot of people who really want to help the companies,” says Gómez-Baquero. “Whether it’s providing experience in their field or investing in opportunities, these are people in the community that provide office hours and master classes and really want to talk to these entrepreneurs.”
Building new tech one day at a time
For a startup at Cornell Tech, dato-day schedules are typically split between meeting with the team, working on the idea and attending classes with faculty and industry experts.
The Tata Innovation Center is home to most of the creative work and where you’ll find the MakerLAB, the Digital Life Initiative (DLI), the robotics lab, car simulator lab and more. This is also where startups attend classes and meet with industry experts and investors.
For Hartman of Abstractive Health, a typical day is spent juggling all aspects of his business. It’s a nine-to-five schedule filled with team meetings, faculty classes and sales pitches to potential investors.
“We meet with maybe ten to twenty investors per week,” says Hartman. “It’s like a game of extreme Tinder dating but with much higher stakes. Over time, you end up meeting with one hundred to two hundred investors, and then you close with only three to five.”
After investor meetings, Hartman spends a third of his day coding, building out portions of the app, managing sales and working with his co-founder and team.
“The best part of my day is the daily scrum meeting,” he says. “We do a 15-minute company stand-up where we go through what everyone’]s doing for that day or the next. If there’s anything blocking them from moving forward on something, we discuss it.”
Choose your experience
For the general public, Cornell Tech offers an open campus for visitors to enjoy, making it a great addition to a day exploring the island and its renovated outdoor spaces throughout.
The school holds conferences throughout the year on topics like digital health and urban technologies, and they also hold an annual Tech Fest each spring, which is an open house for visitors to explore and learn about the innovations and services the school provides.
Whether it’s a shorter visit or something more ambitious, Cornell Tech provides new reasons to visit Roosevelt Island and explore a part of New York City you may not have seen before. For some, it may be an enjoyable day in the city. Yet for others, it might be a valuable resource to start building the next big idea.
Cornell Tech
2 West Loop Road
New York
(646) 971-3777
The Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park
1 FDR Four Freedoms Park Roosevelt Island
(212) 204-8831
Graduate New York
22 North Loop Road
New York, NY 10044
(929) 447-4700
This article was published in the September/October 2024 edition of Connect to Northern Westchester.
Justin is an award-winning designer and photographer. He was the owner and creative director at Future Boy Design, producing work for clients such as National Parks Service, Vintage Cinemas, The Tarrytown Music Hall, and others. His work has appeared in Bloomberg TV, South by Southwest (SXSW), Edible Magazine, Westchester Magazine, Refinery 29, the Art Directors Club, AIGA and more.
Justin is a two-time winner of the International Design Awards, American Photography and Latin America Fotografia. Vice News has called Justin Negard as “one of the best artists working today.”
He is the author of two books, On Design, which discusses principles and the business of design, and Bogotà which is a photographic journey through the Colombian capital.
Additionally, Justin has served as Creative Director at CityMouse Inc., an NYC-based design firm which provides accessible design for people with disabilities, and has been awarded by the City of New York, MIT Media Lab and South By Southwest.
He lives in Katonah with his wonderfully patient wife, son and daughter.
