By: Michael Raspuzzi
Life Changing Labs (“LCL”) is an organization that supports Cornell’s top entrepreneurially minded students. Founded to provide students with early hands-on experience working on or with early stage ventures, LCL has grown to provide structured support, resources, and a formal environment for students year round with its team of highly dedicated students including engineers, designers, MBAs, JDs, and PhDs. Its network of students represent the numerous Cornell schools and the interests of Cornell’s diverse, creative and influential entrepreneurial offerings. LCL alumni have gone on to pursue their own startups and have been hired by top companies including Google, Amazon, Palantir, Microsoft, and VC-backed ventures. LCL runs an incubator program for Cornell founders in the summer and has several initiatives during the school year to help grow the entrepreneurship community.
In the past, there has not been a structured program or high level of support during the summer for Cornell student founders. Students in the summer had to figure out their own plan and pull together resources to leverage by themselves. LCL will be meeting this need while also bringing together the entrepreneurship community at Cornell centered around the incubator program. The program will entail weekly dinners (modeled after Y Combinator) where we bring together all startup founders and team members to interact and provide updates of their progress. Top entrepreneurs and VC guest speakers will be giving “Life Changing” talks to our teams. Mentorship will be provided through our ever-growing network of experienced entrepreneurs based on the different needs of each company. This summer we will be providing space at the Popshop, which is a co-working space for students in Collegetown at Cornell.
We are lucky to have fantastic partners who are providing well over $200,000 in free resources to each LCL startup. This includes Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Bizspark, Github, Braintree, Proto.io, Envision, plus legal and accounting support.
Summer is the best time to be pushing forward startups for student founders. It is a time when they can focus solely on growing their ventures without having to worry about all of the other obligations of being a full-time student during the semester. This upcoming summer we are looking to serve 6-8 startup companies. In future summers, our program is structured in a way where we can easily scale and serve up to double that amount of businesses. And for interested students without a team, we have an internship program for individuals which has evolved to focus on matching individuals with startups within the LCL network.
Students and alumni who are interested in applying with their startup or as an individual can visit http://lifechanginglabs.com to submit their applications by April 10th!
