Hacker in Residence at Columbia Startup Lab

Happy Spring! It’s been shamefully long since my last post, but I’ve been really busy. Among other things, I’m now serving as the Hacker in Residence at the Columbia Startup Lab!

The Columbia Startup Lab, or CSL, fosters innovative new businesses founded by recent Columbia graduates by providing inexpensive co-working space and access to numerous shared resources. Although many founders have graduated from the Business and Engineering schools, others have taken less traditional routes to the startup life, via Law, International and Public Policy, and many more.  This results in a diversity of backgrounds and experience that makes CSL unique among incubators.

As Hacker in Residence, my role is that of an internal technical advisory resource; although some of the teams are quite adept at programming and managing their technical development efforts, others came to CSL with a great idea, but little experience in developing a website. My goal is to provide those teams with some perspective and advice (when they ask for it) that might make their work go more smoothly. I’ll also be leading some workshops in June for non-technical founders to give them a grounding in web technologies and technical management.

There are currently about 40 teams at CSL, and a new batch of founders will be arriving in June. Over the next few weeks, I’ll write about the teams with which I’ve been working.