What does an Entrepreneur in Residence do, anyway? (1/n)
A jaunt into the coolest job you've never heard of.
I’m back from whirlwind trips and can’t wait to write about my experiences in future articles. For now, here’s a sneak peek.
First, I was in New York City for the final showcase of Cornell’s Bioentrepreneurship Fellows. It’s my favorite activity since joining Cornell’s Entrepreneur in Residence team - in a nutshell, I’m airdropped into a room of STEM PhD and Master’s students who are building biotech startups, and I mentor them on the business while being sensitive to the science. No doubt because Bioentrepreneurship was a multi-school effort, the final showcase and presentation event in Midtown Manhattan was honored by the dean of our business school, Mark Nelson.
Second, I just got back from an exciting week in Boston, where I was attending the finale of Harvard Business School’s flagship New Venture Competition as a judge and mentor. It was incredible to be back on campus after the pandemic, and to attend NVC with my great friend Dr. Mahek Shah - I’m proud to say I brought him in, and he got to be head judge of our room! I’m also proud that both competition tracks this year were won by Black-focused, women-led startups. As a bonus, I got to meet some of my NVC mentees in person!
Again, there’s so much I could write about for each event that they’ll have their own articles later.
I’m blown away by the reaction to my career update and Cornell Entrepreneur in Residence role. My announcements on LinkedIn and Facebook were my most-ever reacted-with posts on both social media networks, as cheesy as that sounds. It’s very sad to announce the close of my startup, but I’m ready for a change and I’ve been looking for a way to pay forward the mentorship I received as a founder - the EIR role is perfect for that.
Every conversation I’ve been having with friends has been super exciting. After a while though, you start to recognize patterns* such as:
Friend: Congrats!
Me: Thanks!
Friend: What does an Entrepreneur in Residence do?
*It’s less so about me possessing investor-esque pattern recognition skills and more so that this happens in every conversation.
So I’ll explain here! (Note: This post is mostly tailored for a lay audience, but people with startup experience will probably find interesting new material too.)
Simply put, an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) is an experienced entrepreneur who acts as an advisor and mentor to younger entrepreneurs starting their own companies, typically at venture capital firms, startup accelerators, or universities. Mentorship can include guiding student founders through problem-solution fit, business model ideation, customer discovery, go-to-market strategy feedback, and investor pitch coaching. Differences definitely exist between EIRs and schools, but that’s the general idea. The EIR is almost always chosen by the school from its alumni, and the EIR is often a transitory role that adds value to the entrepreneur, school, and students alike.
However, the details are far more interesting. Let’s examine questions like:
Why are universities hiring EIRs?
Is an EIR like an in-house venture capitalist (VC)?
What exactly do you do as EIR?
So first, why are universities hiring EIRs?
It’s crucial to note that while entrepreneurial activity has played a dominant role in the US economy for decades, academic studies in entrepreneurship is a relatively new development in higher education. The world’s first university (the University of Bologna in Italy) was founded in 1088 AD, the world’s oldest English-speaking university (The University of Oxford) was active as early as 1096, and America’s first university (Harvard) was founded in 1636 - before America was even formally founded!
By contrast, the world’s first business school, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, was founded in 1881 by the entrepreneur and industrialist Joseph Wharton. (My dear friend and accomplished entrepreneur Brett Hurt wrote about his experience as Wharton’s EIR a decade ago) A few years later in 1900, Dartmouth College founded the first graduate school of business, the Amos Tuck School of Administration and Finance. (That’s right - Harvard Business School was not the first or even the second university into the arena!) It was a radical idea even back then to teach business, but you really have to tip your hat to Americans for inventing the MBA. It’s also worth noting that while MBAs seem ubiquitous, the MBA degree itself is barely out of its first century of existence and has ironically had its own challenges in gaining wider recognition as a truly academic discipline.
It’s unclear when the first EIR formally emerged, but it’s safe to ballpark it at two decades or three, tops. Universities didn’t even start teaching entrepreneurship until 1982, when Syracuse University student Doug Mellinger made his own luck and crafted a bachelor’s in entrepreneurship after meeting with the Dean of Student Affairs. Cornell hired its first Entrepreneur in Residence, Brad Treat (MBA ‘02) in 2006.
So to go back to the question, universities are hiring EIRs primarily because they offer a way for students to access real-world guidance from experienced entrepreneurs. It’s also worth noting that the emergence of EIRs partially reflects the gap that students face in learning entrepreneurship due to its historical exclusion from the academic curriculum.
The skills and challenges demanded for entrepreneurship often overlap, but are frequently separate from those in general business management education. Simply put, students frequently can’t tap this experience on campus when they’re starting a company. This is why it’s often said, “You can’t teach entrepreneurship in school - you have to go out and learn by doing it”. (I actually somewhat disagree, but that is a topic for another post)
Furthermore, teaching entrepreneurship helps the students and (to an extent) the university’s ranking, so there is a strategic element. The way that publications like US News or The Princeton Review rank schools for entrepreneurship varies, but the criteria are usually slightly unsophisticated. For example, TPR describes its methodology as such:
Does the school offer a major in entrepreneurship?
Is there an entrepreneurship center?
How many students take courses in entrepreneurship? What percentage?
How many companies were started by graduates over the last 5/10 years?
How much money was fundraised by alumni founders?
You can see that these are either Boolean (yes/no questions) or quantitative.
Finally, entrepreneurship offers a moonshot opportunity for universities to enhance their notoriety due to alumni ventures becoming wildly successful or reaching an IPO to become a public company. Everybody associates Harvard as the place where Bill Gates founded Microsoft and Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook. Dell Computer was one of the University of Texas’ great tech companies, and having Dell’s association with the university and its UT Dell Medical Hospital attracts top-caliber students. Stanford has Evan Spiegel and Peter Thiel (who I met thanks to a University of Texas event!), and almost singularly sways tech trends in the Bay Area. Cornell also has some accomplished tech alumni, like Y Combinator’s Paul Graham and Lyft’s John Zimmer.
Moving on to the topic of what an EIR does… and spoiler alert! It’s not acting as a venture capitalist.
Why not? Simply put, most student startups are not yet investible. It’s not stage-appropriate for most students, who are usually neophytes, to be seeking outside funding, especially from venture capital (a topic for another post, but think of venture capital as rocket fuel for rockets - if you’re not aiming for the moon, you probably don’t need it). Most student startups don’t have the inherent growth potential to need venture capital and its demands on ROI, especially not in this economic environment.
Instead, most students are in the earliest stages of venture creation, which is validating problem-solution fit (I have a solution to a problem, but I don’t know if it solves the same problem other people have) or customer discovery (Who are my customers? How many people out there have this problem? Will they pay for my solution?). It’s several stages before the company is investible, which typically looks like the founders having validated problem-solution fit, product-market fit, market sizing, go-to-market, growth strategy, and effective business operations, for starters.
Relatively little of this is taught even in traditional MBA classrooms, which tend to focus more on management practices applicable at big companies like the Fortune 500s. As we’ll see later, startups are far more than just miniature versions of large companies - an overly reductionist view I’ve had to talk friends out of.
That’s where the Entrepreneur in Residence comes in. Since the EIR has done all of this before for their own startups, they can advise and guide students as well. Indeed, some students may have done the legwork to be venture-ready, and vanishingly few students may have even scaled or sold their own ventures, but those are edge cases. Most VCs want you to be investment-ready when you start meeting, so EIRs can also help with bridging the gap for funding.
How exactly EIRs do that differs from university to university, and even within the same school. For example, whereas other universities may be more agnostic or industry-specific, Cornell prides itself on the Lean Canvas model of startup development. Some universities have Entrepreneurs in Residence with more experience in biotech, digital health, and deep tech, among other sectors. For example, MIT has some EIRs with experience in climate tech. Some universities have VC in Residence or Executives in Residence.
What I do on the EIR team is mostly mentoring the Bioentrepreneurship Fellows and MBA student entrepreneurs. We really shy away from engaging in a prescriptive way, and instead explore and validate the founders’ thinking through active questioning.
For example, say let’s work with an NDA-friendly, fictitious startup that’s doing AI for food waste (Cornell is #1 is agriculture - this was an easy pick), called wAIste. The founders want to target tech-friendly commercial farmers in the upstate New York region who are doing between $10-25 million in annual revenue. They decided this because wAIste’s tech, which uses Computer Vision along with AI to provide decision support for farming administrators, is really good at processing large-scale operations up to that level, and they have some personal connections in that space (my apologies to those who see my naïveté in commercial farming and agriculture).
There are several ways to approach this as an EIR. Although I’ve never even stepped foot into a large-scale commercial farm, the principles of early-stage startup growth are fairly universal and transferable regardless of industry. One principle I really like in Cornell's approach to entrepreneurship is that we espouse a common framework with the Lean Canvas model, so we have a shared understanding of where the puck is trying to go. That means we really focus on customer discovery and customer validation (this approach is also influenced by our status as a National Science Foundation Innovation-Corps regional hub - “I-Corps” leans heavily on customer discovery).
I’d want to ask some of the following questions:
What do you do? Who do you do it for? Why do they care?
Did their assumptions of customer problem line up with reality?
How important to wAIste’s target customers is the problem they are solving? How do they know? How many customers have they talked with to validate their results?
What’s the product hypothesis of wAIste’s value proposition? Are they connecting it with their customer’s willingness to pay in a compelling way? How do they know?
What are their next steps and why?
This usually begins a dialogue where misalignments between hypothesis and reality can be more easily identified and explored. (Notice that funding is not listed) Kudos to the student entrepreneurs for keeping their cool as they’re being dissected!
I usually pay attention to:
Where are the founders over-investing or under-investing effort? Any blind spots or gaps?
Does the team’s report suggest they are adjusting to market feedback, or are they confirming their own biases?
Is the concept simple, clear, and compelling? Would a target customer understand their value proposition?
Are they pitching their concept in a way that is led by value created for customers, or focused more on engineering / scratching their own itch?
How is the team responding to feedback? Are they actually hearing what we’re saying, or responding to a different question in their heads? Are they simply agreeing, or responding in a way that demonstrates they’re adjusting effectively to the insights from the discussion?
Is the go-to-market strategy and customer definition realistic?
As you can see, what is a business discussion can often feel like high-speed ballet. What’s really tricky is focusing on substance and not style, because one of my favorite things is pitch coaching and I often remind myself to refrain! It’s also really interesting to do these exercises with the Fellows, because scientific researchers are not used to the entrepreneurial mindset (that’s what I-Corps excels at) and certain patterns emerge consistently because of that trend. This is good - we want to push them to develop their own entrepreneurial judgment.
I can’t mention much more specifics, but I’ve noticed these trends across the different teams and industries they represent. I’ve mentored ambitious entrepreneurs working on AI for veterinarians, alternative proteins, women’s health, and healthy food accessibility.
Beyond that, I’m proactive in mentoring and judging at pitch events (like Cornell’s upcoming Impact Investing Competition) and talking with students about entrepreneurship. Half the fun is in connecting what the students are looking for with resources that will help them along. I must say that Cornell is really underrated in how much we support our students’ entrepreneurship efforts with real resources, and I predict popular awareness will catch up quickly in the coming years. (After all, Cornell is known for having the best engineering in the Ivy League!)
Finally, is all this worth it? You bet! For me, it’s like a puzzle I’m figuring out along with the student founders and that’s what makes it a fun challenge. I remember all the generous, patient, and non-judgmental help I received from mentors when I was building InCommon, and emulate their best practices. As a result, I’ve been told by multiple student founders that “This was the best feedback I’ve received!”. That is truly the best feeling ever in this space - second only to seeing your feedback implemented and hearing about new developments as a result. But I admit I might be the youngest person on the EIR team - so I’m always learning. That is the point, and as Brett Hurt wrote, it’s important to Always Be Learning.
“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.”
That’s all for this installment of the EIR series! I’d love to hear your feedback - what was an “A-ha!” for you? What new ideas did this spark? And… feel free to suggest topics for future articles!
–Jeddy