Visit
Visit

A recent survey conducted by BT found that 85 percent of people who’ve called a business that doesn’t answer won’t call back, and 75 percent won’t leave a voicemail. When confronted with the possibility of having to wait in line behind several other callers, most people — around 80 percent — hang up. For small businesses around the world, this adds up to billions of dollars lost all because these companies don’t have the bandwidth to manage every call and voicemail.

Enter Bowtie, a company founded by Cornell Tech alumni Ron Fisher, Johnson Cornell Tech MBA ’16, Mike Wang and Vivek Sudarsan, Masters of Computer Science ’16. Bowtie is a streamlined portal for businesses to interact with their customers through chat, without the frustration and hassle of relying on the analog service a telephone provides. Focusing on the beauty, wellness and fitness spaces, Bowtie helps businesses turn missed calls into bookings using an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant.

“We have a chatbot that’s able to automate the booking experience and we’ve enabled customers to speak with their favorite businesses through SMS, web chat, and Facebook,” said Fisher.

The bot, named Bo, is an intermediary between a business, like Asanda Spa or The Curl Suite and their customers; it can help them book a service, buy a product and get answers to questions all through chat.

Bo also helps businesses collect feedback and reviews from customers, and should an experience be a negative one, offer to assist the customer in scheduling a follow-up appointment to fix the issue.

“A lot of larger companies are starting to take advantage of messaging platforms or call centers for their consumers, but smaller businesses might not have the resources or volume to be able to offer that kind of customer service,” said Wang. “We want to empower those small businesses with our tech and that’s why we’re starting in the beauty and wellness space. No one else is targeting this market.”

Initially, the team was focused on offering a better ordering system for delivering food, but realized that market was crowded, and Bowtie wasn’t really solving a need. The team began retooling their idea during their time at the Friends of eBay following Cornell Tech and deployed an MVP while in the Newark Venture Partners accelerator program.

“A number of experts from the beauty industry actually came to us and said that this was software that they needed,” said Fisher. “There are a number of issues with current booking solutions and they realized Bowtie was the perfect way to fix those issues.”

""

The Bowtie team from left to right: Vivek Sudarsan, Mike Wang, Ron Fisher

Once the team started to research the beauty and wellness space, they found that Bowtie piqued the interest of a number of business owners in NYC. “We interviewed 50 salon owners and 300 customers face-to-face,” said Fisher. “It was evident that this was a valuable tool for these businesses and that they would pay for it.” Fisher explained that these business owners missed between eight and 17 calls a day—and hundreds to thousands of dollars of missed appointments every year.

The AI improves with each chat experience so that it can better parse out what a customer is asking for.

“We use conversational data from our platform. All the data gets labeled and our algorithm looks for patterns in a customer’s preferences based on past experiences,” said Wang.

“We also allow businesses to shape the voice of the bot,” said Fisher. “Each business has their own brand voice. For example, some businesses want emojis and others are more formal.”

Bowtie, Fisher explained, would be the face of the business in this sense, so it would need to match up to a customer’s and a brand’s expectations of service.

The Bowtie team believes AI-driven customer service will only become more common as the technology matures.

“Ten years ago, businesses said they needed a social media strategy,” said Fisher. “Now, we believe, they’ll be saying they need a messaging strategy.”

< Back to News

Media Highlights

Bloomberg Law

Ripple Ruling Blurs Definition of Cryptocurrencies as Securities

Mental Daily

Study Takes A Closer Look At NYPD Patrol Patterns Using Dashcam Footage

Tech Policy Press

Content Moderation, Encryption, and the Law

Princeton University

Tech Expert Arvind Narayanan Takes the Helm at Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy

Marktechpost

A New AI Research from Stanford, Cornell, and Oxford Introduces a Generative Model that Discovers Object Intrinsics from Just a Few Instances in a Single Image

RELATED STORIES

Three Cornell Tech PhD candidates recently received National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Fellowship recognition awards or honorable mentions in the “Comp/IS/Eng” category.

Of the 13,000 applicants vying for fellowships offered by the NSF Graduate Fellowship Recognition Program (GFRP), 2,000 received awards last week. The program supports masters and doctoral researchers in STEM fields at institutions across the United States.

Congratulations to the three Cornell Tech PhDs for their success in the competition:

Paul Grubbs, a Computer Science PhD candidate working with Tom Ristenpart, won an award for research in theoretical and applied cryptography. Currently, his research focus is cryptography for cloud security applications.

Phillip Daian, a Computer Science PhD candidate working with the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3), won an award for research in cryptocurrencies and blockchain systems.

Matt Law is an Information Science PhD candidate working with Mor Naaman in the Social Technologies lab. He received an honorable mention for his work in human computer interaction and the technological mediation of local resource sharing within urban communities.

< Back to News

Media Highlights

Bloomberg Law

Ripple Ruling Blurs Definition of Cryptocurrencies as Securities

Mental Daily

Study Takes A Closer Look At NYPD Patrol Patterns Using Dashcam Footage

Tech Policy Press

Content Moderation, Encryption, and the Law

Princeton University

Tech Expert Arvind Narayanan Takes the Helm at Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy

Marktechpost

A New AI Research from Stanford, Cornell, and Oxford Introduces a Generative Model that Discovers Object Intrinsics from Just a Few Instances in a Single Image

RELATED STORIES

A startup incubated at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute has launched a global platform to address a challenging topic in scientific research — the crisis of reproducibility and transparency.

Code Ocean is a cloud-based platform that makes the computational code used in research both accessible and usable. Researchers and software engineers across the planet can now share and run code with a single click.

Code Ocean CEO, Simon Adar, was part of the 2014 cohort of the Runway Startup Postdoc Program at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute. Over a two-year period, Adar developed his idea with fellow postdocs, as well as business and academic experts. He assembled a dedicated team to build Code Ocean and the platform launched last month.

The goal of Code Ocean is to share code and algorithms more easily via an embedded link, just like a YouTube video, explains Adar. Researchers simply upload code to the platform, then link it to the associated article in an academic journal.

Code Ocean not only makes the code accessible, it also allows other researchers to run it at the press of a button.

“You can change parameters, modify the code, upload your own data, run it again, and see how the results change – without installing anything on your personal computer. Everything runs in the cloud,” says Adar.

This means that research can be reproduced, and even more importantly reused, by others with ease. This presents a unique opportunity to solve a long-standing problem facing the scientific community.

The crisis of reproducibility

In a 2016 paper published in the journal Science, Victoria Stodden et al. note that “Access to the computational steps taken to process data and generate findings is as important as access to data themselves.” Unfortunately, access to these steps has not been routinely available.

When code is not accessible, research cannot be easily replicated; it becomes less accountable and reliable. The effects can be staggering. According to a 2013 article in The Economist, “A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated.”

Traditionally, the code associated with research is in printed form. It is not dynamic and cannot be used in real-time, making it time-consuming and complicated to replicate.

When tackling a problem, researchers routinely look to the work of those that have gone before them. In doing so, they often encounter code that could help them.

“If I come across a piece of code that I think has application to solving what I’m working on currently, the only way I’m going to be absolutely sure is by running the code with my own data set or with my own input,” explains Director of Business Development, Pierre Montagano.

Code Ocean allows that work to take place at the press of a button, “We are speeding up the pace at which science can move,” Montagano said.

""

Code Ocean not only makes the code accessible, it also allows other researchers to run it at the press of a button

Credit Where Credit Is Due

Traditionally, previously published papers are credited in new research, but the code underlying the work is not. Code Ocean rectifies this by allocating digital object identifiers (DOIs) to code.

“By assigning a digital object identifier to that code, to the actual algorithm, the package, then researchers and authors can start getting credit for the actual algorithm itself. It can be cited in other work,” says Montagano.

Each piece of code also has an associated license, allowing researchers to define how it is used; the model is similar to Creative Commons.

When a user encounters interesting code on the platform, they can easily find out how it can be used. “I can go to the details page, and find out what are the associated software and data licenses,” explains Adar, “I can read what that license permits me to do — or not do — with a commercial product or new research. New improvements and discoveries can easily be shared and published back to the community by anyone, which is what science is all about.”

Code Ocean also functions as a collaborative workspace that supports different software and systems. Nowadays, research is often carried by people in different countries and institutions. The new platform allows teams to share and modify their code instantly.

Incubating Startups at the Jacobs Institute at Cornell Tech

The Jacobs Institute’s Runway Startup Postdoc Program gave Adar access to a vast network of talented people who could support the development of Code Ocean, including faculty, industry specialists, and investors.

“You get to hear a lot of ideas, and we had discussions with entrepreneurs on a weekly basis,” he explains. Sessions could be one-on-one or between small groups. Adar said access to expertise and the chance to get down to the “nitty-gritty” of an idea is what makes the experience unique.

""

CEO Simon Adar demos Code Ocean to visitors at a Spinout Open House in the Cornell Tech Co-working Space in the New York Times building.

Code Ocean envisions its customers as end-users who consume research and authors who want to disseminate their work. The IEEE, the world’s largest association of technical engineering professionals, has recently announced a partnership with Code Ocean. According to that announcement, IEEE authors will be able to link their published articles with their executable algorithms on the Code Ocean platform for free. The company is planning more integrations with other publishers in the near the future.

Going forward, their mission is to make science more open and accountable. As Adar points out, scientists often work for years before research is published. If people are not able to easily access and use that work, it is a waste of researchers time and billions in public funding.

For his part, Montagano stresses the sheer excitement of working with an “exceptional” team on such a pioneering project, “We really feel like we are adding to the better good of science and openness.”

< Back to News

Media Highlights

Bloomberg Law

Ripple Ruling Blurs Definition of Cryptocurrencies as Securities

Mental Daily

Study Takes A Closer Look At NYPD Patrol Patterns Using Dashcam Footage

Tech Policy Press

Content Moderation, Encryption, and the Law

Princeton University

Tech Expert Arvind Narayanan Takes the Helm at Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy

Marktechpost

A New AI Research from Stanford, Cornell, and Oxford Introduces a Generative Model that Discovers Object Intrinsics from Just a Few Instances in a Single Image

RELATED STORIES

Cornell University’s Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island is one of three higher education development projects that will transform New York City, the New York Times reports.

Opening this summer is Cornell’s 12-acre, $2 billion technology campus on Roosevelt Island, established in a partnership with Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

Cornell won Mr. Bloomberg’s initial Applied Sciences NYC competition, in which the city offered $100 million in funds and the Roosevelt Island acreage. Soon, a four-story academic building will open, powered by its own rooftop photovoltaic installations and equipped with geothermal heating and cooling. Next door, companies and start-ups will work alongside Cornell researchers, who are now temporarily working out of the Google building, in Chelsea. Flanking these facilities will be a 26-story residence for Cornell personnel.

The campus has attracted university officials and international visitors, who want to see how academics can work alongside start-ups and established companies. Universities want to “push the envelope to have that unique advantage,” said Diana Allegretti, assistant director for design and construction, who previously had worked on both the N.Y.U. and Columbia projects.

Cornell’s incoming president, Martha E. Pollack, the provost at the University of Michigan, joined the campus project’s steering committee in 2014. So “she will be uniquely qualified to oversee the opening of the Roosevelt Island campus and to capitalize on the opportunity to make Cornell Tech a major new player in the life of New York City,” Hunter R. Rawlings III, the interim president, recently said.

Read the full article on The New York Times.

< Back to News

Media Highlights

Bloomberg Law

Ripple Ruling Blurs Definition of Cryptocurrencies as Securities

Mental Daily

Study Takes A Closer Look At NYPD Patrol Patterns Using Dashcam Footage

Tech Policy Press

Content Moderation, Encryption, and the Law

Princeton University

Tech Expert Arvind Narayanan Takes the Helm at Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy

Marktechpost

A New AI Research from Stanford, Cornell, and Oxford Introduces a Generative Model that Discovers Object Intrinsics from Just a Few Instances in a Single Image

RELATED STORIES

Pioneers like Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci might find it odd that the arts and the sciences have become separated from one another. Aesthetic composition, mathematical equations, drawing and engineering were natural bedfellows during the Renaissance. Yet separate them we did.

A pioneering Cornell Tech faculty member has devoted the final third of his career to working across these disciplines. Professor C. Richard Johnson is the Jacobs Fellow in Computational Arts and Humanities in the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech. His crossover work between electrical engineering and art history has impacted museums across the world.

Johnson’s love of fine art began with his first visit to an art museum when he was an exchange student in Germany in the 1970s, where he encountered paintings by masters such as Rembrandt. Just two years later, as a grad student working on a PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford, he chose to minor in Art History. One of his professors, Madeline Kahr, was an expert in Dutch art and encouraged him to research Vermeer’s use of the camera obscura, a predecessor of the modern camera that uses pinhole projection.

This interdisciplinary scholarship was exciting to Johnson. However, it would be 30 years before the time was right to apply his technical skills to solving real-life problems in art museums.

The Right Timing and The Right Partners
At Cornell, Johnson found a supportive environment that allowed him to help establish a new field: computational art history. As technical processes like X-raying and digital scanning became more common within museums, Johnson asked himself how he could apply his electrical engineering skills to answer art history questions from digital processing of such images.

Johnson needed to find art history collaborators who were open to sharing ideas, and he needed access to museum data — which was not always easy. To engage external experts, he had to address questions that were meaningful to them.

“I’m looking for something they already want to do, rather than trying to get them excited about something they’d never thought about before,” he says.

At the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam he found the perfect team at the perfect time. Johnson proposed a workshop looking at how image processing could answer questions of dating and attribution in Van Gogh’s work. While organizing this workshop, Johnson was introduced to the use of thread counting as a valuable canvas forensic technique. In 2007, the Thread Count Automation Project ( TCAP) was established.

Computational Art History in Action
Traditionally, experts who studied the canvases hand counted threads from x-radiographs of paintings on canvas to determine density from a few samples at different spots across the canvas. Johnson and his technical collaborators devised computational techniques that characterized the local thread density at spots covering the entire canvas.

´Weave maps´ could then be produced for each canvas. Due to the weaving process, these spot density values recorded with color revealed stripes. These striped patterns could be compared in order to identify matches. When a match occurred, it meant that the canvases had been cut from the same roll of cloth. This invaluable information could then be combined with other knowledge, and used to date and authenticate paintings.

The result was an enormously successful project which was reported in art history journals such as The Burlington Magazine, and in the popular media.

Since then, Johnson has worked on interdisciplinary projects with many other institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Morgan Library and Museum, the Rijksmuseum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Establishing Excellence in Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Jim Coddington, former Agnes Gund Chief Conservator at MoMA, has worked closely with Johnson. The team used computational thread counting on Van Gogh paintings in MoMA’s collections, and in 2010 they established the Historic Photographic Paper Classification (HPPC) Project.

In the HPPC project, Johnson and his technical collaborators used algorithms to characterize photographic papers based on their texture. The team was then able to take unknown photographic papers and establish when and by what company they were likely to have been made, by comparing them to known papers. Again, these answers helped experts hone in on more accurate dates and attribution.

For Coddington, the key to successful interdisciplinary collaboration lies in clearly establishing which questions are being asked and in understanding why they are important. In order to do that, good dialogue is essential. Art historians, conservation experts and electrical engineers need to understand one another’s perspective and language.

“Explain it to me, as best as you can, in the terms that I’ll understand, and I’ll try to explain it to you in terms that you can best understand,” he said.

The surprises that technology can reveal in art history continue to excite Coddington. “That artist did that? What a crazy idea! Or what a brilliant idea. Or if we take an x-ray of something and we see a completely different composition underneath.”

Cornell Tech Students Working Across Disciplines
In 2015, Johnson started work on the Watermark Identification in Rembrandt’s Etchings (WIRE) project with Erik Hinterding, curator of prints at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and Andy Weislogel of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell.

To apply computing techniques to watermark identification, Johnson needed to understand how Hinterding was thinking. To date, Hinterding made identifications by eye using a book detailing over 500 known watermarks.

Johnson observed how Hinterding looked at features on the watermarks, such as the characteristics of motifs like crowns or eagles. Hinterding would narrow down the identification by asking increasingly detailed questions: Is the eagle double-headed? Is the crown positioned above or below the initials?

It was, to Johnson, similar to a computer-based decision tree model. Johnson is now working with Cornell Tech students to develop a decision tree. The students come from different departments, they work together, and discuss and share tasks.

“We’ve been going through this decision tree and trying to create it ourselves, and then asking Erik [Hinterding], well what do you think?”

Recently, the students presented their work to Hinterding, and experts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Morgan Library. In the development process, they had identified a watermark that was not catalogued in Hinterding’s book. Johnson delights in these breakthrough moments.

“It’s fun teaching, let me tell you, it’s fun teaching,” he says.

Full Circle
Johnson is now finishing a collaborative book on Vermeer’s canvases, and has produced weave maps for all 34 of the artist’s paintings. It is a vast and important project which has identified six canvas pairs. This, in turn, reveals new information about Vermeer’s studio practice. And poignantly, it connects Johnson back to Madeline Kahr, the professor who first encouraged him to look at Vermeer when he was a grad student in 1970s.

Johnson attributes his achievements since then to “luck, timing, perseverance and good advice.” He has helped establish a new interdisciplinary field and worked with some of the world’s greatest museums.

“That type of engagement outside academia is really what Cornell Tech is all about,” he says.

< Back to News

Media Highlights

Bloomberg Law

Ripple Ruling Blurs Definition of Cryptocurrencies as Securities

Mental Daily

Study Takes A Closer Look At NYPD Patrol Patterns Using Dashcam Footage

Tech Policy Press

Content Moderation, Encryption, and the Law

Princeton University

Tech Expert Arvind Narayanan Takes the Helm at Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy

Marktechpost

A New AI Research from Stanford, Cornell, and Oxford Introduces a Generative Model that Discovers Object Intrinsics from Just a Few Instances in a Single Image

RELATED STORIES

Against the turbulent backdrop of international immigration debate, Cornell Tech’s foreign students are leading the charge in founding U.S. startups.

The challenges they face, however, are many: how does one apply for a visa? What happens when they graduate? How do they go about incorporating, filing for IP, and finding funding?

“There’s a lot of misinformation out there,” says Aaron Holiday MBA ’12, Managing Entrepreneurial Officer at Cornell Tech and the co-founder and General Partner at 645 Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm that invests in budding entrepreneurs on making their dreams into reality. “That’s why we put together an international students’ guide to starting a company here,” he says. “It’s easier than it looks.”

This type of practical walk-through is core to the Cornell Tech approach.

Just ask Brunno Attorre, Master of Engineering in Computer Science ’16, who moved here from Brazil and is now a co-founder of the New York City digital video startup Uru.

“I got my computer science degree [in Brazil], worked as a software engineer, and realized how tough it is at big companies to be creative.” He looked to found a startup but, “after talking to friends who had tried to create companies, it’s really hard to get investment. Brazil is a developing country. I thought it’d be easier if I had a background in the U.S.”

This search led him to Cornell Tech.

“I was going to apply to Cornell University, but Cornell Tech caught my eye — its mission was both academic and cutting edge tech. That’s the reason I wanted to come to the U.S., for those product and startup-oriented courses.”

Once there, Attorre found that the curriculum laid bare the obstacles that most entrepreneurs face. Programs like Startup Studio, led by David Tisch, co-founder of the startup incubator TechStars, challenge students to select co-founders and wrangle their ideas into minimum-viable-products.

It ends with an impressive bang — students compete for multiple Startup Awards of $100,000. Attorre and his co-founder Bill Marino, Master of Engineering in Computer Science ’16, won, and it was the tipping point for them.

“One of the hardest decisions for me was that I had offers from other companies here in New York and they would sponsor my visa, and that’s a more stable way,” he recounted, but the opportunity now afforded him was irresistible. He applied for the student visa extension and incorporated his company.

Zafrir Schop, Master of Engineering in Computer Science ’15, originally from Israel and co-founder of the New York City based finance app Trigger Finance had a similar experience. He and his co-founders won a Startup Award in 2015 and, “The investment gave us time to figure out what we’re doing with our lives.”

That persistent question is the crux of the decision most international graduates wrestle with: do they take the relatively safe route of an H1-B visa which comes with employment at large firms like Google, Facebook, and Uber, or do they forge their own path?

According to Holiday, “Most think it’s far riskier than it is.”

Here is how the visa situation actually works: All students begin with an F-1 student visa. As founders, they can apply for Optional Practical Training (OPT), a one-year extension upon graduation. (Technical founders can snag a two-year extension on top of that.) Founders can then apply for an O1 visa which can be extended for up to five years and which asks them to demonstrate “exceptionalism.” For some, Startup Studio goes a long way toward meeting this criterion.

“You must demonstrate that you can raise capital. When the students win the award, it attracts outside capital. You must have notoriety, but most that spin out already get coverage from VentureBeat or TechCrunch. You must have references from entrepreneurs, but at Cornell Tech, many of our instructors are those outside practitioners,” explains Holiday.

His team is adamant that visa questions should not be the primary factor in employment decisions. “We encourage them that yes, you can do this,” he says, because for graduates of Cornell Tech, OPT is an attainable goal.

While not all international students at Cornell Tech seek to start companies, those who do find a high degree of institutional support. Extracurricular Spinout Clinics bring legal counsel and experts in to help students move forward with critical topics like incorporation, vesting schedules, pre-seed capital, and access to immigration lawyers. Students also have access to the well-connected faculty at Cornell Tech, all of whom have strong ties to the business world. As Schop puts it, “[It’s] a real bridge between academia and industry.”

“I think that [as an international student] there are challenges, but where there’s a will there’s a way,” says Schop. “It’s not the easiest thing, you have to deal with a lot of moving parts, but [going through] Cornell Tech is a great way to do it.”

< Back to News

Media Highlights

Bloomberg Law

Ripple Ruling Blurs Definition of Cryptocurrencies as Securities

Mental Daily

Study Takes A Closer Look At NYPD Patrol Patterns Using Dashcam Footage

Tech Policy Press

Content Moderation, Encryption, and the Law

Princeton University

Tech Expert Arvind Narayanan Takes the Helm at Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy

Marktechpost

A New AI Research from Stanford, Cornell, and Oxford Introduces a Generative Model that Discovers Object Intrinsics from Just a Few Instances in a Single Image

RELATED STORIES

When you hear fashion and law, you probably think of boring suits and monochromatic ties.

But there is a specific field of law that focuses on the fashion industry. Recently, one such lawyer, Lois Herzeca, partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and co-chair of their Fashion, Retail and Consumer Products Group, came to Cornell Tech and spoke about the practice.

Jaimie Wolman, Master of Laws ‘17, interviewed her about fashion, law and technology.

Wolman: What is the practice of fashion law?

Herzeca: Fashion law is global and complex – just like the fashion industry itself. It encompasses all the law that governs the relationships among participants in the global fashion industry (such as brands, suppliers, retailers and investors), the relationships between those industry participants and consumers, and the regulation of industry participants by domestic and foreign governments. Fashion law covers matters such as mergers and acquisitions, protection and enforcement of intellectual property, employment law, international trade and data security.

Wolman: How is technology disrupting the fashion industry and what do you believe will be the biggest technological disruption in the fashion world over the next few years?

Herzeca: The mass consumer adoption of smartphones and tablets, which enabled mobile commerce, and the proliferation of social media (which is rapidly becoming shopable), fundamentally changed fashion retailing. Brands and retailers can now gather voluminous data from their customers. Going forward, they will use artificial intelligence devices to personalize, customize and communicate more effectively with their customers, thereby enhancing the shopping experience.

Wolman: What are some common issues that many players in fashion and retail industries have had to deal with?

Herzeca: In 2016, and continuing into 2017, retailers have announced an unprecedented number of retail store closings, and a significant number of retailers have entered bankruptcy – some of them twice in recent years. These restructurings resulted from a combination of many factors, including changing consumer preferences (for experiences over apparel purchases), declining mall traffic, the rise of e-commerce, excessive discounting and reductions in tourism due to terrorism fears. Retailers that restructure, either inside or outside of bankruptcy, need legal advice from a range of specialists as they end or transfer retail leases, terminate employees, refinance their commercial loans, and otherwise reorganize their businesses.

Wolman: The legal industry has seen a trend towards industry specialization. Do you think it is beneficial to understand and specialize in one industry?

Herzeca: The legal marketplace is increasingly competitive. I believe that lawyers can add real value to their clients if they understand the key forces that are impacting an industry and can provide guidance as to how a range of industry participants are reacting to and addressing those forces.

Wolman: What is one piece of technology you use regularly that you believe is both fashionable and functional?

Herzeca: Since my smartphones (I use two of them) are my lifelines, I carry the Rebecca Minkoff Power Puff charger with me to keep my phones fully charged at all times. It’s both fashionable and incredibly useful.

Lois Herzeca is Co-Chair of Gibson Dunn’s global Fashion, Retail and Consumer Products practice group. A preeminent fashion and retail corporate lawyer, Ms. Herzeca is the co-author of Fashion Law and Business: Brands & Retailers, a comprehensive guide to fashion law (2013), a Lecturer in Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and a member of the Advisory Board of the FAME (Fashion, Art, Media and Entertainment) Center at Cardozo School of Law.

Jaimie Wolman is a Class of 2017 Masters’ of Law candidate. She recently graduated from Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, where she cofounded The Fashion Law Society and assisted in developing the FAME (Fashion, Arts, Media, and Entertainment) Law Center. Jaimie is passionate about the overlap between fashion technology and law and how we can create a seamless world of interactivity built around different sensory experiences.

< Back to News

Media Highlights

Bloomberg Law

Ripple Ruling Blurs Definition of Cryptocurrencies as Securities

Mental Daily

Study Takes A Closer Look At NYPD Patrol Patterns Using Dashcam Footage

Tech Policy Press

Content Moderation, Encryption, and the Law

Princeton University

Tech Expert Arvind Narayanan Takes the Helm at Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy

Marktechpost

A New AI Research from Stanford, Cornell, and Oxford Introduces a Generative Model that Discovers Object Intrinsics from Just a Few Instances in a Single Image

RELATED STORIES

The hotel on our Roosevelt Island campus will be a boutique Graduate brand hotel, the Associated Press reports.

The Graduate Roosevelt Island hotel is expected to open in 2019. The boutique Graduate brand has hotels in locations where there’s a strong identification with a university, and the Roosevelt Island site will be located at the gateway to the Cornell Tech complex, which is being built by Cornell University. The first phase of Cornell Tech is scheduled to open in September.

The Graduate Roosevelt Island hotel will be a new build with 196 rooms and will offer unobstructed views of the Manhattan skyline. There are no other hotels on the island.

 

< Back to News

Media Highlights

Bloomberg Law

Ripple Ruling Blurs Definition of Cryptocurrencies as Securities

Mental Daily

Study Takes A Closer Look At NYPD Patrol Patterns Using Dashcam Footage

Tech Policy Press

Content Moderation, Encryption, and the Law

Princeton University

Tech Expert Arvind Narayanan Takes the Helm at Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy

Marktechpost

A New AI Research from Stanford, Cornell, and Oxford Introduces a Generative Model that Discovers Object Intrinsics from Just a Few Instances in a Single Image

RELATED STORIES

The Tech Cafe at the Bloomberg Center will be serving American, Korean, Middle Eastern and Thai dishes, reports DNAinfo.

Tech Cafe will occupy the patio and first floor of the Bloomberg Center at the southern end of the island, opening in August with the rest of the four-building campus.

Customers will be able to choose from a variety of prepared dishes that rotate for breakfast, lunch and dinner from 7 a.m. to 9:30 p.m., seven days a week.

Read the full article on DNAinfo.

< Back to News

Media Highlights

Bloomberg Law

Ripple Ruling Blurs Definition of Cryptocurrencies as Securities

Mental Daily

Study Takes A Closer Look At NYPD Patrol Patterns Using Dashcam Footage

Tech Policy Press

Content Moderation, Encryption, and the Law

Princeton University

Tech Expert Arvind Narayanan Takes the Helm at Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy

Marktechpost

A New AI Research from Stanford, Cornell, and Oxford Introduces a Generative Model that Discovers Object Intrinsics from Just a Few Instances in a Single Image

RELATED STORIES

The media landscape is changing rapidly and social media is starting to compete with traditional cable networks. Perhaps no one knows this better than Ben Lerer, CEO of Group Nine Media which manages the brands Thrillist, NowThis, The Dodo, and Seeker.

“I still don’t really have any idea what is going on. And I think that is okay because I don’t think anyone else does either,” Ben Lerer said at CornellTech@Bloomberg’s Content and Capital talk led by Scarlett Fu, the anchor of “Bloomberg Markets.”

But Lerer’s career is evidence that he might know more than he thinks. Lerer has established himself as both an entrepreneur and an investor as co-founder and CEO of Thrillist, an online men’s lifestyle publication, and managing director of Lerer Hippeau Ventures. He has a proven investment track record with high-profile startups including Warby Parker, Giphy, Oscar, Casper, and BuzzFeed. Lerer’s shared his advice and predictions with Cornell Tech students, Bloomberg employees, and the New York City tech industry.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the conversation:

Create great content

Television isn’t dead or dying, but it is changing. “The rules of media and the ecosystem have been flipped upside down multiple times over the last decade. I think the biggest flip is in progress right now with the disruption that is happening with television,” said Lerer pointing to the role that Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, and to a lesser extent, Instagram and Twitter play as a media source that can compete with traditional cable networks.

Brands are producing content that gets billions of views, but the compensation structure hasn’t been refined yet. Lerer hopes that Facebook, Google, Snapchat, Netflix, Amazon, and other platforms will provide a structure for scalable monetization for publishers. “There is more competition for great content, and I believe these platforms will create opportunities for brands to create real money to allow the best video media businesses to create great content on those platforms,” he says.

No one knows what’s happening next

Lerer’s business partner at Lerer Hippeau Ventures also happens to be his father, Kenneth Lerer. Kenneth Lerer is a fellow managing partner at Lerer Hippeau Ventures focusing primarily on consumer technologies. He was previously the chairman and cofounder of The Huffington Post and is currently chairman of Buzzfeed, Betaworks, and a co-founder of NowThis Media.

Of the many lessons Lerer has gleaned from his father, one that has stuck in his mind is “everyone is a fraud.” “By that I mean that whenever I feel insecure or I’m concerned about loosing control he says ‘It’s fine, so is everybody else,'” Lerer said. He interprets the advice as meaning that nobody know what’s going on, not because they aren’t smart, but because the industry is changing drastically.

“If you work in media and you think you have a handle on it you’re screwed.” Learn, adapt, and grow instead of getting complacent and remaining in the status quo. “What he’s done is he’s infused me with confidence to try shit,” said Lerer.

Balance conviction and flexibility

As early state investors, Lerer Hippeau Ventures makes their decisions based upon the teams more than the concepts. “We are looking for an incredibly concise, clear conviction in what you want to build and why it’s right and also a willingness to be open-minded and take feedback and be flexible,” he said when asked what he looks for in a pitch.

“It’s a balance between conviction and flexibility,” he said. When it’s time to make the call, Lerer makes most of his investment decisions based on gut instinct and being decisive. “For me it’s totally gut. It’s not particularly hard for me to make decisions about the things I am going to invest in. I’m pretty decisive and let my gut drive and that often works. More often than not we are sort of right,” he says.

Do your research and be confident in your vision, but be willing to change course. “I have an incredible conviction that I have a game plan and that what I am doing is right, but I’m not afraid to pivot,” Lerer says, “It’s a survival tactic and to thrive you need to survive.”

Watch the full conversation.

Read more at Tech at Bloomberg.

< Back to News

Media Highlights

Bloomberg Law

Ripple Ruling Blurs Definition of Cryptocurrencies as Securities

Mental Daily

Study Takes A Closer Look At NYPD Patrol Patterns Using Dashcam Footage

Tech Policy Press

Content Moderation, Encryption, and the Law

Princeton University

Tech Expert Arvind Narayanan Takes the Helm at Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy

Marktechpost

A New AI Research from Stanford, Cornell, and Oxford Introduces a Generative Model that Discovers Object Intrinsics from Just a Few Instances in a Single Image

RELATED STORIES