Meet the Inaugural CVC Impact Cohort

Columbia Venture Community's Impact Program, the newest of our Global Program Accelerators, wrapped up early this year and we are excited to highlight the amazing founders that were selected for our inaugural cohort.

The Impact Program was born to foster and support entrepreneurs that focus on addressing social and environmental challenges with their core business and innovation approaches.

CVC provides startups from the Columbia University community with impact measurement tools, market trends, and connections to mentors/investors/partners over 12 sessions in six weeks.

The Impact Program was created by Esther Kim (SPS 17’), and is supported and led by a group of committed volunteers, including Stacie Hur (CBS 12’) , Azhar Yerzhanova (SPS 20’), Anindita Sharma (CBS 05’) and Heer Baxi (BC 21’).

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GetMotivatedBuddies
Michael Goldstrom (CC 96’)

Michael Goldstrom.
Source: IMDB

GetMotivatedBuddies, the brainchild of Juilliard-trained actor turned founder Michael Goldstrom, is a platform that leverages technology and behavioral psychology to connect users with accountability partners to help them achieve their goals. GetMotivatedBuddies has already help nearly 15,000 users reach goals and has been recognized on BloombergTV, Forbes and Fast Company for its ability to support strong mental health and help people reach their highest productivity through the power of community and technology.

Brava
Ifi Akpandak (CC 12’)

Ifi Akpandak standing a prominent black-owned business in NYC. Source: CNN Business

As the son of a black business owner, Ifi Akpandak has always held a special passion for creating opportunities for underrepresented companies to grow. So the mission that he had in creating Brava is a personal one. Brava is a digital gift card subscription for corporations, connecting some of $250 billion in annual corporate gifting and reward budgets away from mega-retailers like Walmart and Amazon and toward well-deserving minority-owned small businesses across the country.

Commune
Tara Heuzé-Sarmini (SIPA ‘17)

Tara Heuzé-Sarmini.
Source: Commune

Tara (SIPA '17) & Ruben are building Commune, the first-ever co-living dedicated to single-parent families. Commune makes these households' lives easier by creating a community in which all parents and their children are able to thrive. Indeed, Commune brings a pragmatic and much-needed turnkey housing solution to best accommodate parenting duties and address kids’ needs. By doing so, Commune prevents the vicious circle of social, professional and financial hardship traditionally experienced by solo parents after a family breakup. With a background in hospitality and revenue management, a successful track record in social entrepreneurship and speaking 8 languages counted together, the Commune team is convinced of a rapid international expansion.

Voltpost
Jeff Prosserman (CCS 21’), Aditi Desai (CCS 22’) & Luke Mairo (CCS 20’)

(From left to right) Aditi Desai, Luke Mairo and Jeff Prosserman.
Source: CCS, State of the Planet

Luke Mairo and Jeff Prosserman met when they served as president and vice president to the Environmental Entrepreneurs group as students in Columbia Climate School’s Sustainable Management Graduate program. Aditi Desai, a colleague of Luke’s from his days at Barclays would also go on to attend this graduate program. Together they run Voltpost: a sustainable hardware company that retrofits lamp posts into electric vehicle charging stations whose location, booking and charging status can be managed and displayed in a mobile application. Having studied with some of the foremost thinkers in sustainability at CCS, they hope to leverage that education and their combined passion for sustainability to accelerate electric vehicle (EV) adoption by providing cities with a first-in-kind, scalable curbside charging solution.

Inaugural CVC Impact Accelerator Application Trends Signals Broad Diversity among Columbia Entrepreneurs

In Q3 2021, CVC launched the inaugural cohort of the Columbia Venture Community Impact Program under the leadership of it’s creator and Founder/CEO of Consider Beyond, Esther Kim (SPS 17’).

The CVC Impact accelerator provides early stage Columbia-affiliated companies with support in the first phases of building, launching, operating and  scaling their businesses. The program provides access to world class mentorship, expert-led panel discussions, workshops, pitch feedback and so much more and was designed to help founders through these critical initial phases of a start-up’s lifecycle.

We are excited to share some aggregated data about this cohort's application and see what we can learn from the data.

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Cohort Summary

• Most represented school : Columbia School of Business (27.9%)

• Most represented location : New York City (65.1%)

• Most Common UN Sustainable Development Goal: Decent Work and Economic Growth (23.3%)

• Most Common Industry :Beauty and Apparel (14.0%)

• Most Common Sector : Consumer (41.9%)

• Over a quarter (25.6%) of companies are operated by solo founders, and nearly a third (30.2%) by a co-founding pair.

• Nearly a third are bootstrapped: 35.8% of startups have received no prior funding. 

• Of companies that have accepted investment, the average total invested amount was approximately $900k.

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School Representation

Over a quarter of this cohort applicants were alumni of the Columbia Business School (CBS), following in hit the footsteps of several notable start-up founders and executives. Although the majority of applicants are CBS alums, Columbia College (CC), The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) and Columbia School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) are also well represented, each with over a tenth of the total applicants. 

Despite that, even alums from schools that are not usually associated with entrepreneurship like Columbia Law, the School of Social Work and the Columbia Journalism School have applied, which is a testament to the diversity of the spirit of entrepreneurship amongst our university’s alumni community.

Companies by Location

More than half of our applicants are primarily based in New York City, which besides being Columbia’s home base the New York City tech ecosystem is also showing resilience despite a year of lockdown that some suspected would besmirch the city’s status as a main financial hub. According to NYC Media Labs, New York City start-up funding for the first half of 2021 tripled year over year, soaring from ~$7B in 2020 to over ~$21 in 2021. 

Company Development Stage

Nearly half of our applicants are in the earliest stage of the venture journey: mocks. The mocks and design phase is critical as it also includes prudent business planning processes as well as the articulation of consumer needs and sentiments along with the strategy to leverage those insights. The next largest majority are already earning revenue and are likely seeking support to scale their efforts now that the flywheel is turning, while another 16.3% and 18.6% percent, are on the cusps of revenue in the beta and prototype phases, respectively, gaining valuable user feedback.

Industry Trends

The largest industry segment amongst our applicants is in the Beauty and Apparel space at 14% of the cohort. This is in line with what we know about the biggest areas for impact against the social and environmental challenges of the day. The fashion industry produces 10% of all humanity's carbon emissions and is the second-largest consumer of the world's water supply, comprising nearly a fifth of the wastewater produced across the entire globe. CVC Impact is proud to be contributing to bringing better solutions to these very important issues in impact.

This is in line with the proportional breakdown of companies by each of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, with over 20% focusing on ‘Responsible Consumption.’ However, the largest subset concerning these goals was ‘Decent Work and Economic Growth’ with another sizable subset being attributed to ‘Reduced Inequalities’, demonstrating that income inequality and the future of work is a problem area that continues to attract founders looking to democratize economic growth and opportunity across genders, races, and creeds. This is especially important in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, in which some of the nation’s most impoverished go through even deeper financial hardships while the wealthiest Americans have seen their fortunes grow considerably.  

Sector Trends

Consumer and enterprise plays comprise the largest proportions of our applicants by business sector this time around. This focus underscores one of the more exciting trends in the venture industry: the rise of the COVID entrepreneurs who have transitioned side hustles, hobbies, and annealed expertise into companies and startups, as well as the rise of e-commerce and the acceleration of its adoption. 

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, almost 4.4M new businesses have been created since March 2020, and over 600k new business applications in March 2021, the highest number of unadjusted new business applications ever recorded, with the majority of these new businesses being in retail trade. Meanwhile, according to research published by McKinsey and Company, online retail sales have tripled or even quadrupled in 2020, in some localities, namely, the United States and the United Kingdom, showing that digital commerce is here to stay. Consumers' discretionary spending has arguably never been more accessible to entrepreneurs who are bringing meaningful solutions to their issues while driving meaningful innovation in the key areas of social and environmental impact.

We hope you enjoyed learning about the startups who applied to our first cohort as we did. We would like to thank every founder that applied and we look forward to sharing more results from the program cohort in the coming weeks.

If you would like to learn more about CVC Impact, or be notified when the next cohort application is available, check out the accelerator webpage here and please subscribe to our newsletter.

Thank you for reading!

Author:

Mourtallah Faye 

Global VP of Content

Founded in 2006, Columbia Venture Community (CVC) is a private network of more than 5,100 Columbia alumni, students, and employees interested in all aspects of entrepreneurship. CVC supports entrepreneurs at any stage of their business with monthly in-person programming, an actively engaged community, and founder resources.