Vengo and the NYU Entrepreneurial Lab
Frank Rimalovski is the Executive Director of the NYU Entrepreneurial Instititue He has made quite an impact at NYU connecting them to the entrepreneurial community and helping NYU put some money back into some of their entrepreneurial graduates. One of the companies that came out of NYU and that Frank and I both work with is Vengo. Vengo is more than a vending machine it is a billboard that delivers products. We had a board meeting this past week which took place at the new Mark and Debra Leslie eLab. What a fantastic place. There also happen to be two Vengo machines in there (see above).
I bought my Vengo products. Plenty of candies too which I held back on.
What I love about the lab is it feels like a start-up. The architecture, the offices, the communal spaces have that shared work space vibe. This is one of the shared spaces. I happen to love the clever names that they used for each spot. This is the option pool.
The conference rooms each have names too such as VC, Bootstrap and Pre-money.
Even the elevator has a name.
And so does the bathroom.
This gives you an idea of the open feeling of the space.
I particularly love the stairs. When you go up you can see the quotes from different brilliant minds who really understood or understand the start-up space.
Hats off to Frank for creating this at NYU. It is really fantastic and I am pretty confident that the impact it will make will have a very long tail.
Comments (Archived):
Cool. Where is it?
Washington Place and Greene.
Do you think they’ll hold public events there? Like meetups?
no idea but it is a university.
Bathroom exit strategy and elevator pitch room. Hilariously brilliant.
University of Chicago has had the Polsky Center for years. Last year, companies had a few billion in exits that were incubated there. This week, they opened the Chicago Innovation Exchange. I love that colleges all around the US are providing places for students to be exposed to startups.
me too
I was recently in Stanford’s Design School and the feeling is similar – totally perfect for the work that goes on there. It’s not as focused on funding as this is (appropriately so), but it was such a great place to be. It’s fantastic that Universities are designing their spaces to suit the learning and work they are enabling.
We work there everyday, we are actually featured in the pictures above. And it is one of the best designed, inspiring places to work in. Thank you for building it
great place to work!
I love the idea of those stairs — i would love to do something like that in my house (my chief creative officer hubbie would never let me do it in a million years however 😉