🔒Yale School of Management’s entrepreneurship czar Jensen sees more growth in startups

At a place with a lot of great jobs, Kyle Jensen thinks his is the best.

“I have the best job on Yale’s campus,” Jensen said. “I get to work with student entrepreneurs who are creating all manner of new products and services. I’d have to be mad to not want to do such a thing.”

As an associate dean and director of entrepreneurial programs at the Yale School of Management, Jensen plays a key role in raising the Ivy League university’s profile in the rough-and-tumble world of startups, innovation and tech.

It’s a universe he knows well as an entrepreneur, developer and scientist. Before joining Yale, he co-founded three companies, including Agrivida, a venture-backed biotechnology company; PriorSmart, a patent analytics provider; and Rho AI, a software development company focused on data science.

“Like all good entrepreneurs, he is dissatisfied with the status quo and is unafraid to push and be part of Yale’s increasingly active role in starting companies,” said Matthew McCooe, CEO of New Haven-based Connecticut Innovations, the state’s quasi-public venture capital arm. “Kyle has become a champion for entrepreneurship inside Yale School of Management, and more broadly, across all of the university.”

“CI’s relationships with Yale have never been better, which is critically important as we foster an environment turning New Haven into a global life sciences hub,” McCooe added.

Building momentum

What does it mean to be entrepreneurial at Yale, long known more for training politicians and media workers than coders and startup founders? With graduates of West Coast universities and regional stars like MIT dominating the executive rosters of this century’s tech giants, Yale is pursuing a broader definition of entrepreneurship, Jensen said.

“Our goal is to support student entrepreneurs and students studying entrepreneurship who don’t want to be entrepreneurs per se, but who might wish to be entrepreneurial in a preexisting organization or who wish to become entrepreneurs later in life,” Jensen said.

Yale’s School of Management, founded in 1976 as the School of Organization and Management, wasn’t traditionally known for boosting the university’s startup profile. The school only started awarding traditional MBAs in 1999 and long had an emphasis on training executives for the nonprofit sector.

Reflecting the traditional disdain of business studies as part of a liberal arts education, Yale and most other Ivies lagged far behind in student-generated startup companies, even as Harvard dropouts Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg made history in Silicon Valley.

For decades, Yale’s modest entrepreneurial activities were centered in the Office of Cooperative Research, under the longtime leadership of Jon Soderstrom.

Tasked with translating Yale’s research into products, services and new companies, the Office of Cooperative Research (OCR) started small, with a stretch goal of launching three to four venture-backed startups a year.

But under Soderstrom’s leadership, OCR emerged as a major player in the last decade, helping to generate $3.7 billion in venture capital, 1,600 patents and 60 venture-backed startups in the last six years alone.

Under Soderstrom’s watch, more than 75 Yale spinouts with over $2 billion in venture capital and another $7 billion in public equity financing took root in New Haven. New Haven’s growing bioscience industry stands as the most lasting testament to OCR’s increasing activity, with major companies like Alexion, Arvinas and Rallybio tracing their roots to Yale laboratories.

On the campus itself, the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute was founded in 2007 as a 10-week summer program and has since grown into a full-fledged department with year-round programs and events for students at all levels.

Yale grad Joseph C. Tsai, co-founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba, took campus entrepreneurship to a new level in 2017 with the founding of the Yale Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking (CITY), which has grown into a new building dedicated to startup activity adjacent to the engineering school.

That corridor includes Yale’s Center for Engineering Innovation & Design, its school of Engineering & Applied Science and a new engineering teaching concourse.

Yale’s enthusiasm for commercially oriented innovation has only intensified: The university announced in February it had created a new senior associate provost position for entrepreneurship and innovation, vaulting entrepreneurship programs into the highest ranks of leadership.

The inaugural pick for the post was Josh Geballe, a star in the administration of Gov. Ned Lamont known for his managerial skills.

Key to Geballe’s new role is linking leadership at the Office of Cooperative Research and Tsai CITY.

“Entrepreneurship begets entrepreneurship,” Jensen said. “If you look to your left and your right, seeing there other students who are starting companies, you will yourself feel great about starting a company [or nonprofit, or similar effort] in lieu of consulting, finance or other more well-worn paths. I believe this phenomenon explains our gradual increase in student entrepreneurship.”

Broad entrepreneurship

The new emphasis on entrepreneurship doesn’t mean that Yale is selling out or overly commercializing its offerings, Jensen added. The university is taking a broader view and extending innovation across fields.

“Our engineers are entrepreneurs, our scientists, our doctors — but, so too are our English, politics and law majors,” Jensen said. “These students are often social entrepreneurs, creating new organizations not necessarily for profit, but for impact.”

Looking ahead, Jensen would like to see more startup activity centered around computer science in New Haven.

“I’d like to see more software companies — I like to code,” he said.

The university’s administration seems to concur: Yale announced in February it would add 45 new faculty positions in engineering and the sciences and bolster programs in artificial intelligence, biological systems, materials science, mathematical modeling and robotics. The engineering school’s department of computer science — the field with the school’s most undergraduate majors — will be expanded under the initiative and computer science courses would be incorporated into other departments.

McCooe, of Connecticut Innovations, also sees potential in Jensen’s advocacy of software startups.

“I’m hoping Yale’s push to expand its [computer science] department will lead to us working on a highly successful software company together,” he said.