The Brown Institute’s 4th annual Summer Entrepreneurship Program just wrapped up. Five teams, 10 weeks, over 300 user interviews and one final prize of $75,000!
Our summer program started in 2022
That year, the Brown Institute was invited to join StartUp Columbia’s Venture Challenge, introducing a new Media track devoted to ventures that mixed tech and content creation. We quickly accepted, but realized we were facing a skill gap — the skills required to build and scale a successful venture differed from the skills learned in Journalism School. Our students had never pitched to investors, written a unique value proposition, identified a market gap, mapped out a business model, or estimated a TAM/SAM/SOM.
To mitigate this gap, we decided to launch a summer program introducing our Venture Challenge winners and institute grantees to the world of business — pitching, identifying a moat, interviewing customers, identifying their riskiest assumptions, meeting VCs, and learning about some brutal entrepreneurship truths. Justin Hendrix, previously the director of the NYC Media Lab and now CEO of Tech Policy Press, was a top choice for instructor, and has taught the program every summer since.
This year’s program
This is the fifth year of the program. Every week, our group of ventures would meet at the Brown Institute to get a crash course in entrepreneurship. Our cohort this year consisted of five teams — our three Venture Challenge winners and two Magic Grant teams. We had Arbiter, where Swapneel Mehta & Ethan Sheinker are building a social listening tool for newsrooms and OSINT investigators; Hey Kahani, where Hemish Dave is building a screen-free audio storytelling platform for Indian diaspora children; Palumba, where Anna Micelli, Solene Aubert, Pol Villaverde & Miriam Egger are building the “Tinder of Politics” to engage the next generation of voters; PRISM, where Jaclyn Sawyer & Sonia Huq are building policy simulation tools for journalists, policymakers, and civil society; and SiSe News, where Davi Merchan & Marina Garcia-Vasquez are building an AI-first news platform that debunks misinformation for Latin communities.
The cohort varied by type of product, team size, progress-to-date, and vision. This group made for extremely colorful discussions in all of our sessions. Each team challenged, built upon the ideas of, and shared resources with the other. Hey Kahani’s Hemish Dave interviewed PRISM’s Sonia Huq’s sister for his product and acquired a customer. SiSe News’ Davi Merchan and Marina Garcia-Vasquez teamed up with Arbiter’s Swapneel Mehta to incorporate AI listening in their news service. The cohort posted resources and thoughts on our Slack channel throughout the summer.
We also went on two field trips during the summer. Our first one was to Betaworks in Chelsea, a New York-based startup platform that builds, accelerates, and invests in early-stage consumer technology companies. Founder and CEO John Borthwick spoke to the cohort about pushing the possibility space in the AI era. With testing, trialing, and building now cheap, he sees the real next cost as distribution. Our second field trip was to AlleyCorp in Soho to meet Amy Chen, Head of Community and Content at Tola Capital, where she supports early-stage enterprise and AI software startups. Over her career, she led VC partnerships at AWS, ran incubator and accelerator programs across NYC and built civic technology in NYC government. She pressed our teams for their riskiest assumptions and what their products really represented.
Justin pushed the cohort to center the customer. Over the summer, they were to interview as many customers as they could, attend conferences, find people on the street, and welcome skepticism, criticism, and pushback. Put together, the cohort interviewed more than 300 customers over the summer and revised their business models accordingly.
The winning final pitch
The program wrapped up with a final pitch competition, where two teams — Hey Kahani and SiSe News — were competing for $75,000 Magic Grant. We were joined by 3 industry leaders as judges: Carolina V. Valencia (Epicenter-NYC), Robin Kwong (Yahoo), and Clay Eltzroth (Bloomberg). Each team had 6 minutes to present, followed by a 10-minute Q&A with the judges.
At the end of the day, Hemish Dave from Hey Kahani took home the $75,000 prize. This is not his first experience as an entrepreneur. He attended Columbia Business School, has built and scaled companies in the past, and drove operational transformation at Danone and HelloFresh.
When Dave became a father, he and his wife were looking for a story, song, or show that reflected their culture. Yet they found a flattened narrative of South Asian culture. Hence Dave built Hey Kahani, where his operational skills met something personal: building the stories he wants his children to grow up with.
His vision for Hey Kahani is to become the default platform every South Asian diaspora family turns to when they want their child to learn about where they come from. The team will use their funds to produce more content and extend their community from Brooklyn into the broader NYC metropolitan area, New Jersey and Connecticut, all places with dense South Asian communities. We can’t wait to watch Hey Kahani grow alongside the rest of our 2026-2027 Magic Grants.
Looking forward
This program is one of the Institute’s highlights every year. The unique passion and expertise the cohorts bring every year make the summer a very exciting time for us. Thank you to Justin Hendrix for being a force of an instructor — every week he pushed the cohort to think bigger, talk to more people, and check their assumptions. Thank you to John Borthwick and Amy Chen for advising the cohort and letting us visit their spaces. Thank you to Carolina V. Valencia, Robin, Clay Eltzroth and Robyn Frank (HGB Foundation) for asking the teams insightful questions during the final pitch competition. And a major thanks to this year’s cohort — Arbiter, Hey Kahani, Palumba, PRISM, and SiSe News — for walking into each session with an open mind, curiosity, and a willingness to learn from and help one another.
We look forward to next year’s program!
If you’re interested in participating in next year’s venture competition, look out for announcements in January 2027. Apply at entrepreneurship.columbia.edu/startupcolumbia (select Media Track). Questions? Reach out to browninstitute@columbia.edu