Higher Education as an Engine for Entrepreneurship: The College and Community Benefits

Episode Transcript

Vincent Boudreau00:00:12

So welcome to From City to the World. I'm your host, Vince Boudreau, the President of The City College of New York. I got to tell you, this is my favorite time of the year. We've wrapped up the academic year. Graduation has happened. We've seen a whole generation of students go out into the world to make their way. So, it's a great time for us to look back at our accomplishments and also look ahead at what's to come. Now typically, our program features an innovator from City College of New York alongside a community leader doing impactful work that's somehow thematically linked together. And we like to put those two voices together. But today I'm joined by two special guests who are both making great contributions here at CCNY and beyond.

City College, for those of you that don't know, is a living mosaic of discovery and expression. It's where science and engineering meet the humanities and the arts, where education, social sciences, architecture and medicine all converge to imagine what's next. So, in each episode, we shine a light on those vibrant areas of research and connectivity that connect our college to the world around us. Through conversation with students, faculty, and staff who are reshaping their fields and with community partners who carry this work beyond our campus limits, we explore how ideas born here at City College ripple out across our neighborhood, our nation and the world. So together we're going to explore ways to tackle urgent challenges such as climate change and public health, social justice, economic opportunity, and how through collective action with local and global partners, we can turn our ideas into real solutions. So, this is From City to the World, where knowledge meets purpose, where research meets upward mobility and the impact of our work reaches far beyond the City College walls.

So, as we near June 27th, which is MSME Day, the United Nations recognized day that highlights the vital role of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises play in strengthening communities around the globe, it makes it a great time to discuss another important milestone here at The City College of New York.

So, if you remember, last month we spoke of the newness that comes with the season in a conversation with two of our newest deans at City College. This month, we turn our attention to two more new avenues that City College is exploring. It's a time when senior colleges are seeing a transition in educational styles and employers are seeking employees with diverse educational backgrounds not centered on traditional four-year education. It's imperative for college like a CCNY to consider the various ways to educate and support innovative learning on campus.

So, I'm going to start with our most recent initiative, which is the Small Business Development Center, which we are building here at CCNY. We're partnering with the New York State Small Business Development Center and CCNY is excited to announce for the first time on air, you're hearing this for the first time folks, the launch of the Upper Manhattan Small Business Development Center here at City College. The center is unique in that it will be the first small business development center in Upper Manhattan in Harlem. This center, while first in Upper Manhattan, will be the fifth regional center hosted on a CUNY campus. So, our partner campuses, Baruch College, York College, College of Staten Island and LaGuardia Community College all host similar small business centers. Ours will be located in Shepard Hall. That's the biggest of our old historic buildings on the north campus, the one that looks like a castle and is all alone on the east side of Convent Avenue. It'll be managed by our Office of Institutional Advancement Communications and External Relations. And over the course of the conversation, you may hear me refer to that office as OIACR.

So, the sole mission of this office is to encourage and equip entrepreneurs with the tools they need to start their own small businesses by providing no cost one-on-one business advisement training and research for aspiring entrepreneurs and business owners. Leading the charge from the OIACR is my first guest, Dee Dee Mozeleski. She is the Senior Vice President at the Office of Institutional Advancement Communications and External Relations, the aforementioned OIACER. She's also the executive director of the Foundation for City College. And in 2016, she was asked to serve in the additional capacity as my senior advisor in the President's Office. She has spent more than 30 years working in service to public higher education institutions, cultural programs and international agencies and government organizations. At City, she's a member of the college's senior leadership team, the President's Cabinet, and she serves on a variety of special committees, including the task force for the future of City College.

Her responsibilities include philanthropic management of the foundation for City College, stewarding and expanding the college's public profile. She manages her workforce development activities and city, state and federal government affairs. Community engagement projects also fall to her as does the management of our campus emergency needs with programs like the Benny's Food Pantry, the Urban Gardens at CCNY, and as I said, a broad portfolio of emergency support programs to expand opportunities for students. During her years at City College, she led the consolidation of the colleges to fundraising organizations and oversaw the fundraising campaign, which launched the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leaders in 2013.

More recently, she oversaw the launch of the college's new Doing Remarkable Things Together campaign to raise the foundation's endowment to $1 billion. And I got to say this, we just announced that we are, as of today, halfway there. We crossed the $500 million mark. Having worked with some of the largest nonprofit organizations in New York City and around the world with a focus on North America, the Middle East and Africa, Ms. Mozeleski has focused her career working as a public servant in support of causes that impact communities on a global scale. She's a graduate San Diego State University, a San Diego Padres fan, and she served as the advisor to the college's outdoor initiative, is a member of the CASE District II Cabinet and a board member of AFP NYC, where she also serves as co-chair of the membership committee.

She's also a member of the AFP Global Ethics Committee, the Public Relations Society of America, and a board member for the National Scholarship Providers Association and Family Kind. She's previously served as a board member of Women in Development, New York City and Seeds of Africa Foundation, where she worked to build a K-12 school in Adama, Ethiopia. She was recognized as the CASE Professional of the Year in 2021 for CASE District II. She was named a Crain's New York Notable and nonprofits in 2021 and 2025, a New York City and state trailblazer in economic development, that's 2025, and a trailblazer and a higher education in 2026, as well as Crain's New York notable in marketing and communications for 2023. One of her proudest accomplishments is having raised a City College graduate classes of 2016 and 2022. And she's now looking for a bigger apartment to hold all of her trophies. If anyone has a tip, please call the hotline here at the radio station. Dee Dee, welcome to From City to the World.

Dee Dee Mozeleski00:07:27

Thank you, President. Thank you for having me again.

Vincent Boudreau00:07:29

So, let's jump right into it. Many people know you through your leadership role at City College, but we'd love for our listeners to learn a little bit more about you and your background. So, can you tell us a bit about your professional journey? What first inspired your interest in economic development and community engagement and all the other things you do at CCNY?

Dee Dee Mozeleski00:07:48

So, I am a non-native New Yorker. I'm here about 33 years now. Got my start working on a naval station in San Diego. Knew nothing about economic development, just want to be really clear. Moved to New York. I got very lucky, got some really great mentors who took me through the nonprofit experience. I will tell you, my workforce development, my economic development experience comes, I hate to admit this, it comes from you. You tasked me 10 years ago with thinking about revenue models for the college and you said it was okay to think beyond traditional fundraising and it was definitely okay to think beyond federal and city and state dollars to think about other ways we could impact the local Harlem community. So, everything I've learned about workforce development, I absolutely believe I've learned in the past decade through some great mentors who have stretched the way we think about revenue generation for the college, for the community, for Harlem specifically, but New York State as a whole.

Vincent Boudreau00:08:39

Could you talk just a little bit about, it's not every college administrator that when we're talking about a program on campus, leads with impact in our surrounding community. Can you talk a little bit about where this commitment to Harlem and other local communities comes from and where it takes you?

Dee Dee Mozeleski00:08:58

So, I have to say, I think I'm super lucky. I came to New York as a 19-year-old. I was pregnant. I was newly married. I had no friends. I didn't know anybody beyond my husband and the soon to be baby who then went on to graduate from City College. But New York took me in. New York gave me a home, gave me careers, career pathways. It gave me friends. It gave me family. And I remember coming to City College for my first interview with you way back in 2012. And you said something that I tell people all the time. You said you wanted to be the kind of place where when the communities around us had a challenge they wanted to solve, they could trust that they could work with us and make those solutions happen. And so, everything I've done at City College, with City College, through your leadership, through your pushing and sort of stretching my sort of thinking about this has been in response to someone in our community saying they had a need.

So, we opened the food pantry because we identified that 45% of our students were food insecure. We started doing emergency support grants because we found that we had a tremendous amount of students who were experiencing homelessness or domestic violence or health issues and they were afraid to come and tell someone. And when we started thinking about small business development, it's because of a program that we ran with the New York City District Attorney's Office and a group called Living Redemption. It's a program designed for people who've been just as impacted, who are coming out of the prison system, who are beginning to rebuild their lives starting with their career development. And we had a real opportunity to partner with them to help make their programs grow. And hearing the things that the Harlem community needed. Yes, housing, yes, food security, but really jobs. Jobs start. That starts everything for us.

So, I think that kind of shaped the early thinking. And then Congressmens Rangel and Espaillat coming and talking to us about what would it look like if infrastructure rebuilding happened not just for New York City, but with our imprint on it. And I think about this, we had a post-it note in my office for a full year that said, "Infrastructure related jobs." And I had no idea what that meant. And now I could rattle off all the acronyms top of my head, but I didn't know what that would look like four years ago or five years ago. And now we're placing, we're doing a thousand students per academic year who are doing specific training and infrastructure. We have a micro loan project starting. We have across the Harlem community, people have come out and said, how can we support this new initiative? But if you'd asked me five years ago, I had no idea what it meant.

Vincent Boudreau00:11:33

I want to drill down on that because I kind of kid about all the awards you've won. But what's really stunning about that, and I say this all the time when I introduce you, Dee Dee holds a portfolio of five separate vice presidents in the previous administration. So, you have moved from really being somebody who is focusing on fundraising to kind of pulling together all the different aspects of the college's external profile, whether it is the way we tell the story or who we interact with or how we work with government leaders, the whole portfolio. And every time, I'll say this to y'all listening, every time I come to you with another job, one of the first things you say is, "I don't know anything about this."

So just tell us a little bit about this process of yours of going from, for instance, not knowing about workforce development to being recognized last year by city and state as a trailblazer in workforce development. So, you didn't just learn it. You're learning it in a way where you're forging a path that others will follow. How do you do that? How do you think about that?

Dee Dee Mozeleski00:12:37

So, the truth is fundraising is very hard and fundraising... Anyone in fundraising who tells you that they don't get nos on a weekly basis would be lying to you. But I didn't think that our role was to do traditional fundraising. I thought that when you and I in particular, or for those of you who don't know, President Boudreau and I worked together in the Colin Powell School for a number of years before moving into our administrative positions for the college, I remember coming into the job and my board saying, "It will be hard for you to do this work. This kind of work is very hard. We are not sure that this is the right direction for the college." And I remember thinking, I just don't think that's true, but I didn't know what the answer was going to be.

And so, we worked on our first ever strategic plan for what became a unified shop. And the very first section of that is about rebuilding confidence, not by asking for money, but by asking for partnerships. And so, if I think about my first two years in what was interim and then permanent, I didn't make a lot of traditional fundraising asks. I asked elected officials to meet with us. I asked partner organizations to help me think about the college and where we were going wrong. I was trying to solve for a public perception that City College was a closed institution. And the way to do that was not to ask for traditional gifts, it was to ask for friendship, ambassadorships, partnerships. When it came time to think about workforce development, we'd already built the relationships around the community. We'd already heard that our community...

Half a million people call Upper Manhattan home. 98% of businesses in New York State are considered small businesses. That means that the average person you meet is an owner operator. They're hiring people from their community and we weren't necessarily the place that they thought to go to for support and we wanted to fix that. So, if I think about all the ways in which the college's community facing impact has changed, a lot of it was because we were trying to build relationships that extended beyond alumni giving or traditional donor giving. It was who could I call in the middle of a crisis?

I often say this and it was hard to recognize this while we were doing it. For us, COVID changed everything about us, I think for the better. For two years, we had to spend time thinking about how we were going to be engaged outward, not inward. So, we turned our pantry open to the external community because there weren't students here. We turned every faculty member who said they were doing any kind of forward-facing work, PPE development, research grants for community impact, all that was turned outward because that's where our faces had to be. Coming back from COVID, I think we were in such a better position than we were before COVID and we were in a better position than most of our peer institutions, regardless of if they're higher education or not, because the community no longer had to hear us say we wanted to be of them. They saw us on the ground with them. So, workforce development springs from that kind of work.

Vincent Boudreau00:15:36

So now let's actually talk about the New York State Business Development Centers. They provide resources to small business owners and to entrepreneurs. So, can you tell us about the role that these centers play in a community and how they can be a resource for economic growth?

Dee Dee Mozeleski00:15:50

So, New York State Small Business Development Group as a whole represent 99.8% of businesses in New York State and that's a number that was mind-boggling to me. The average New York citizen works for a small business, not a large corporation and not government agencies and I think that's interesting. They represent more than, I have the numbers here, 2.4 million New Yorkers who employ more than four and a half million New Yorkers. In our area, half a million New Yorkers are in our residential area. The average family household income is $40,000 in the Harlem community. In just the CUNY system and we're the fifth, as you said, of these centers, CUNY has advised 3,400 small business clients over the past year generating 28 and a half million dollar in client investment across our campuses. That's huge. York College, I was looking at their numbers. Their economic impact on just their small business development center programming is over $200 million between hiring capital investments, everything that those businesses do that generate money back to the New York State economy.

So broadly speaking, even if you're not thinking about small businesses, you're probably working with one, you're employed by one, your children are employed by one or you're shopping at one. So, I think we have to just remember that.

When we got the call, I should say this, we weren't seeking out a small business development center. We got a phone call asking if we would consider hosting a site. And we spent a few weeks really thinking about were we the right place? Did it make sense? And I know we'll talk about this later, but it felt like it was the right time for us. It felt like between our Rangel Institute, our continuing education program, our President's Innovation Fund, we were exactly where we needed to be to host this.

Vincent Boudreau00:17:39

So, I want to actually stop you there. And let's not talk about that later. Let's talk about it now because we are going to talk about the role of a small business development center in the community. But you have a way of thinking about this initiative on campus that positions it within these initiatives. You mentioned the Rangel Center. We've talked about it on this show a number of times. This is our workforce development initiative that Congressman Rangel and Congressman Espaillat really pushed to get established here in infrastructure construction. You mentioned the President's Fund for Innovation, and Andoni, I know we'll talk about this a little bit later, this is a pool of resources we have so that faculty members who have technology that can move into the market are supported in that work. Could you talk about within the college, within your vision of how the college does some of these, let's call them out of the classroom initiatives, how this functions to kind of sit alongside or maybe coordinate or synergize some of these other initiatives?

Dee Dee Mozeleski00:18:46

So, and I think this is actually really exciting, the reason why this center sits within our office of institutional advancement, broadly speaking, is because it's also where the President's Innovation Fund sits. It's where the Rangel Initiative sits. It's where our Zahn Innovation Center sits. It's also the place where we're the only place on campus that's doing both traditional philanthropy, federal grants, city grants, state grants, working with private industry. And so, it made sense-

Vincent Boudreau00:19:11

Labor unions.

Dee Dee Mozeleski00:19:12

Labor unions, exactly right. So, it made sense to put the center in the center of that work because what we were hoping for, what I'm really hoping for, I'm hoping that a young woman who walks through the City College doors to study in our continuing education program, for example, and maybe she's thinking about working in the childcare space. I hope that when she's finished with that program, she can walk right across the hallway to the small business center and think about applying for a loan to open her own childcare center.

I'm hoping that someone who comes to us through the Rangel Initiative and takes our AutoCAD training, for example, comes back and thinks about starting their own business. We have all these ways in which we sort of disaggregate the work, the Small Business Center puts it back together. I'm hoping that a faculty member who is selected for the President's Innovation Fund takes something that is just about ready to go to market, walks into our office and thinks about a federal SBIR loan and starts to think about their startup operations.

Vincent Boudreau00:20:10

Could you explain an SBIR loan?

Dee Dee Mozeleski00:20:12

These are loans that are explicitly designed for academic researchers who have something that is ready to go to market. They can tap into additional funding for their startup operations. In some ways it supports someone who is both thinking about their operations being on campus. We do have faculty members who have startups who are co-located here on campus or someone who's thinking about acquiring a space with our partners at Janus, for example, or moving downtown to the Flatiron district. The idea is putting seed money in for something that you believe is ready for our patent process. But I always thought when we're mapping out the small business center, the idea was to put it together with the places that have to either do the lobbying efforts of government affairs teams, communications team, think about venture capital a different way, put our faculty together with new types of funding sources and put people who might otherwise be shut out of the small business loan process into that process.

Vincent Boudreau00:21:13

Mm-hmm. You talked about people who might be shut out of the small business loan process, but another kind of issue that we deal with our neighbors, with our students, with our community is it's sometimes hard to get good salaried employment. And can you talk a little bit about small business support as an alternative to that for folks either in our community or on our campus?

Dee Dee Mozeleski00:21:42

So, one of the things I was asked, so we're making two hires and I'll serve as interim director until those hires are made. One of the first hires we're making will be the research analyst followed by the loan specialist. And the reason for that is we want people who come in thinking about is a small business the right step? What tools are out there to have somebody who can answer all those questions, so that's the research analyst. The loan specialist becomes the person who says, "Come with your business plan. Who are you hiring? What types of supports do you need? What's it going to cost?" And that person helps you tap into loan options.

And what makes us a little bit different, yes, you can absolutely go to a local bank for this, but we're finding that many people in our communities don't feel comfortable going to banks. They'll feel much more comfortable going into the chamber, for example, the Harlem Chamber, making a connection there and having the chamber refer them back to us. Or we had a conversation with Harlem One Stop and the ways in which that group got excited about the Small Business Center reminded me that I think there's, I believe they said there were 400 small businesses in the local kind of eight block range that we could be tapping into. They don't always know that they have an option to go someplace and learn about loan options, and that's what our services are for.

So, I showed this to you the other day, I sort of mapped out the kind of hierarchy of the Small Business Center as a center of all these ways in which people who are thinking about traditional for us startup operations for a faculty member or a mother who wants to start a small business or a couple who want to start a business together. And every way that I came up with this sort of mapping reminded me that we've already built the infrastructure even though we weren't thinking about something like a small business development center. What's really interesting is there are some really great models in the state of New York. I think our colleagues at Binghamton, Stony Brook have really nailed the model. If I think about the SUNY system and the CUNY system, like I said, Baruch, York, all of our CUNY sister schools have really fantastic operations that have sort of bridged the fear of tapping into finances, the educational needs for their community and their campus presence back out into the local economy, so very important for us.

Vincent Boudreau00:24:05

You've described the development of this small business center as a kind of watershed moment for the college. That's interesting language. Could you tell us what you mean by that and what it means to be a watershed and why this is one?

Dee Dee Mozeleski00:24:22

So, I'm going to go back for a second to when we were first brainstorming the President's Innovation Fund. The first question we asked was, would faculty be interested in this? And I think the question we took a longer time to get to was would the neighborhood care, would New York City care, would New York State care? And because we do this light cast work, so this is this high-end data analytics we do about our impact on the New York State economy, I'm also forced to produce documents around our entrepreneurship and startup operations. We've always kind of had this in the back of our heads that students who come out of the Zahn Center who might have a product that one day might go to market, might need support.

Vincent Boudreau00:24:59

I'm going to stop you just for a second. You all may not know listening, the Zahn Center is now, it's over a decade old. It is a place on our campus where students primarily, but we've also had some people from outside come in and learn the whole how to do a pitch, how to do an elevator speech, how to develop a business plan, all of that. So, it's working in the same space. I didn't mean to interrupt you, but I want people to know that we've actually been developing this portfolio of entrepreneurial activities on campus for quite a while. But go ahead. I apologize.

Dee Dee Mozeleski00:25:31

But just to that, so we had Zahn in one corner. We had the President's Innovation in another. We have an office of research through our provost unit in another. None of those ever came together. We have a government affairs team, but none of that collaborated. We talked a little bit around each other about the work we were doing. About five years ago we started to unify that work. In no way do we sit in a meeting with a city, state or federal elected where we're not all saying the same thing now, we're not putting these things forward.

The reason I said watershed was about a year and a half ago, I attended a conference. It's a science and technology group called SSTI. And SSTI brings together city, state, federal agencies, plus counties, plus university systems. And I was the only person in the room not representing a system, I was representing a college, but I was also the only person in the room when they said, how are you diversifying your portfolio of revenue? Who could speak to diversification. We were the only place across counties and across the country, university systems across the country that had already started that pathway between traditional philanthropy, traditional government relations, thinking about bringing things to market.

And what they said to us was to bring yourselves ahead of what we believe will come from the federal government in the next year, two, three, four, five years as things change. If you don't diversify now, it will be too late to diversify two or three years from now. And I remember rushing back to you and saying, "I think we're onto something. I think we finally figured out the ways in which others will get left behind because they kept these things separate. If we could just put them all together, we could solve some real issues." And then we got the SBDC call and it just felt like it was exactly at the right moment where I had just been told by a federal agency and a nonprofit agency who run this kind of stuff, "If you're not diversified, there's no way you're going to get ahead of the curve."

Vincent Boudreau00:27:32

Mm-hmm. I do want to ask you one question, which is you have this gift, I think, for seeing the lives of individuals in big global processes and being able to identify big global processes in the lives of individuals. So, you move back and forth, I think, with a lot of adeptness between talking about the world and the economy and then sitting down with an individual. How do you see those threads of big national trends, global pressure, the lives of individuals coming together in this work that you're doing? And maybe you want to answer in relationship to the small business, but you do a lot of work and maybe you want to just talk about your work broad brush, but how do you do it?

Dee Dee Mozeleski00:28:17

So, Andoni is here and he'll, I'm not going to look at him when I say this, I think I frustrate my team a lot because I don't think that things sit apart from each other. And you know this because I may have heard this and Andoni will hear this now, I grew up in the foster care system and so a lot of the childhood stuff was navigating big institutions against this person. And so, I think we run our operation in our office at least. You shouldn't walk in the office and be lost. You should walk in the office and figure out a pathway. I think that's what people were asking for us as a college.

And I say this because when we cross the street from our North Academic Center to the Willie Building and the Shepard Building, what I kept hearing from the community was City College is not here for us. Where is City College? And I would hear that from people who were directly across the street on Amsterdam Avenue. And it stuck with me that even though we talked about ourselves as an open institution that worked with the community and that was hearing community needs or hearing our own needs, people in our own community, both on campus and off campus had no idea who we were, what we were doing. And so, I think the last decade has sort of given us a real moment to fix that. So, if you ask me how I'm thinking about it, I think all the time about the person who's left out as opposed to the person who's inside.

Vincent Boudreau00:29:31

Mm-hmm. I'm going to give you a chance before we wrap the show up to formulate a shout-out and a call to action for folks that may be listening. But before I introduce our next guest, I would like to say Mourdoukoutas, Mourdoukoutas, Mourdoukoutas. That is Andoni's last name and I'm going to get it right for the rest of the show.

So, while the Small Business Development Center is an external initiative, I'd like to shift the conversation a bit to an internal initiative set to fuel academia in a new way. I'd like to bring in CCNY alum and the associate director of the co-innovation programs at City College Innovations Collaborative, which is you'll hear that abbreviated as CInC, City Innovations Collaborative. In August 2020, we announced the establishment of the President's Innovation Fund. Dee Dee talked about that briefly in the earlier section, which at the time was a holistic coordinated innovation acceleration strategy.

The fund seeks to address a gap in resources for the development of early-stage innovations into products and ventures. Simply put, we have all of this research on campus and we would like to encourage and support researchers developing products and businesses coming out of that research. So, the President's Innovation Fund is part of a broader strategy that creates a consortium of partnerships for early-stage projects in which partners provide synergistic resources. The program will provide multiple benefits to the institution and its stakeholders demonstrating that innovation is a priority and it's an integral part of CCNY's culture. So, to talk more about the work of the Innovation Fund, we have Andoni Mourdoukoutas, who is the associate director of co-innovation programs at City Innovations Collaborative. Did I screw that up again?

Dee Dee Mozeleski00:31:14

Well, the public-

Vincent Boudreau00:31:15

Dee Dee is still here. And in her role as senior advisor to the president, she's going to advise me on what I may have just miss said.

Dee Dee Mozeleski00:31:25

The public may want to celebrate this with us. Andoni's just had a title change and promotion, yes?

Vincent Boudreau00:31:30

So, when we first wrote the script, he was the assistant director and now he is the director of co-innovation programs at the City Innovations Collaborative. And Dee Dee, just stay around in case I screw something else up. Andoni Mourdoukoutas is the director of the City Innovations Collaborative in the OIACR at City College of New York, where he leads the development of campus-wide research commercialization programs. Through CInC, Andoni helped launch CCNY's President's Innovation Fund, which is the college's first structured translational funding program supporting faculty and student technologies that are on a pathway towards licensing startup formation or external fundraising. So, building on this foundation, he is now expanding a broader suite of commercialization programs designed to help CCNY researchers translate their work into real world impact from early ideation through venture readiness.

In the broader New York City innovations ecosystem, he's mentored founders across NYC accelerators, including CUNY Firefly Innovations and CUNY NSF I-Corps New York, which is another National Science Foundation funded effort to bring innovation to market. He also advises startups on customer discovery, market analysis and technology market fit. Prior to CCNY, Andoni was a consulting associate at Charles River Associates where he advised global pharma and biotech clients on asset strategy, commercial planning and portfolio prioritization. He also gained early stage investing experience as a venture associate at Petri Bio, which is a pillar venture capitalist firm where he sourced and evaluated precede biotech startups. Andoni holds a PhD in bioengineering from UC Berkeley, University of California, San Francisco. It's a joint degree. It was supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Has a BE in biomedical engineering from CCNY where he graduated as valedictorian and Barry Goldwater scholar.

Andoni, welcome to From City to the World. We got to start cutting down these introductory accolades, folks. There's not enough time to talk to you about the work that you're doing. In the first segment, Andoni, first of all, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here.

Andoni Mourdoukoutas00:33:44

It's great to be here. Thanks.

Vincent Boudreau00:33:45

And great to have you on campus doing this really important work. So, in the first section we talked about entrepreneurs and small business owners. Your work focuses on helping researchers and inventors carry their ideas and solutions from the lab into the broader world. And so, we're going to talk a little bit about the President's Innovation Fund, which we've already described a little bit.

Let's actually start there and maybe just begin with a little bit about you. You're in a unique space in you're leading this new initiative, but you're also a city college graduate. So, looking back at that journey, what do you think helped you most prepare to lead this project?

Andoni Mourdoukoutas00:34:21

Yeah. Well, first off, thanks for having me today. It's really great to be here. And I didn't realize we had this room on campus. It feels very professional.

Vincent Boudreau00:34:29

Oh yeah, this-

Andoni Mourdoukoutas00:34:30

We don't cut corners around here.

Vincent Boudreau00:34:31

No, no, we don't. We've got headphones and everything, ladies and gentlemen.

Andoni Mourdoukoutas00:34:33

Yeah, exactly. So, this role is really interesting. I mean, my background academically and even in early career has really been technical in nature. I mean, it's an undergrad degree in engineering, a PhD in engineering. This is a lot of math and science, pen and paper and sort of alone in a lab figuring things out. This role now though is a lot of not that. It's actually a lot of working with people and a lot of trying to form community or trying to help influence the thinking of people who are kind of sitting in different offices all over the place, very often not on campus, spread throughout the city and trying to get everyone rowing in the same direction. So, in that end, what's kind of helped me the most here, I mean, yes, the technical background and the engineering parts has been really useful, but it's more the, I think, understanding how to work with people and the interpersonal relationship development parts that have been I think most useful in my day-to-day job right now.

So probably first, I mean, my mom is a very, very social person and I think I learned a lot of these just how to work and be friendly with your neighbors skills from her growing up. But then City College as an undergrad, that's one of the biggest things that you'll learn when you kind of walk around on campus is that it's a lot of people coming from all corners of the earth to be plopped together in the same classroom and very quickly you get a crash course on how to work with people who are kind of thinking in different ways. And in my day-to-day right now, when I'm trying to connect, for example, a for-profit real estate company to a nonprofit workforce development group and also a city agency focused on economic development to a City College campus all in one program, it's that kind of just how do you work with different people at a very general level that has really kind of come to the top of how I wake up every morning and start my day.

So, the science is useful in the background, but really that is just the thing that helped open the door for me. And now in the day to day, it's just working together with other people.

Vincent Boudreau00:36:30

Mm-hmm. In a lot of academic institutions, the researchers and scientists, the goal is publication of a paper, discovery as an academic enterprise. And I imagine there are lots of engineers and scientists who never think about taking their work in a kind of commercial direction. And so, I was wondering, and we're going to get a little bit to your experience in the first round of the President's Innovation Fund, but in your conversations with researchers, do you find is it difficult to kind of get somebody to think about this other possibility? How does that conversation work when you're kind of talking to maybe a chemist who's only thinking about publishing in the leading journals in their field and say, "You've got something here that could actually be brought to market." How does that go?

Andoni Mourdoukoutas00:37:23

Yeah. This a good question because I don't think it's... I think it's about creating a pathway if someone wants it. It's not saying that this is the right way to do science or the right way to frame your work. Not every project needs to be commercialization ready. And some projects may be commercialization ready, but not for another 20 years.

I think in the research world where you're publishing for publication's sake or just to advance fundamental knowledge, that's really useful for society and academia, academic research is a special place that allows us to look on these multiple decade, even century long horizons to say, when will this come back to benefit society? It might not be in an investment cycle. It might not be something that I in my career can commercialize because it just takes that much longer to actually get us there.

So, one, if someone is just interested in that long horizon or just expanding what we know about the world and us and where we come from, that's okay and empower them to do that, but they might have a student in their lab or they might accidentally stumble onto something that has immediate commercial potential and immediate potential to benefit society right now or in a five to 10 year horizon.

And so, if that happens and there are people who are interested in it, we just need to make sure that there's a pathway for them to actually follow this. So, it's I think an awareness of that this exists and if this is ever something that aligns with you or someone in your lab, you can follow this pathway and here the stepping stones will guide you along the way. But beyond that awareness, it's just waiting for the right people to come together and have that interest themselves inherently because the startup route is very difficult and 9 out of 10 will fail at some point, and so it's not for the faint of heart and you've really got to be in it because that's what in your gut you know you want to be doing. And if that's not for you, that's totally fine too, but you shouldn't be excluded from that journey just because we haven't created the pathway for you to follow that interest.

Vincent Boudreau00:39:28

Mm-hmm. Is there, I mean quite apart from financial return or even the success of a startup, are there benefits in the quality or the character of the research that happens when somebody is of a mind approaches research with asking the question about end use and benefits to society? I mean, does it create a different atmosphere in research?

Andoni Mourdoukoutas00:39:52

Yeah. So just before this actually, I was catching up... When I was an undergrad here, I worked in the lab of Marom Bikson, who's a professor in biomedical engineering and thinks very translationally, but he is to his core a professor and an academic researcher and that's really where he lives. And we were talking about where our interests align and where they divide. And what we came up with is that there is a discipline I think when you pursue science towards a commercialization route that needs to be there, that doesn't need to be there in the academic research sets. So, he was describing his interests as when something... A grad student has a new idea and we've got no idea if it's going to work, but it seems kind of cool. And it's iteration number 12 on a device they've been workshopping for a while. His first thing is like, "Great, let's do it. Let's jump and go and explore this new frontier here."

In the commercialization sense, there's such a clear path and timeline tied to the money you've brought in, which is usually pretty scarce that once you reach that milestone or whatever's next for you, that allows you to keep going. And if you don't reach that milestone on that timeline with that limited amount of dollars you've got in pocket, the whole thing disappears. And so, in terms of how does it frame your way about research, I think in just an academic sense, there's so much more freedom and exploration at the heart of the person pursuing that, that comes through in the types of projects they pursue. In the commercialization sense, there's just such a discipline and focus and frugality that allows you to go very far very quickly, but in one narrow lane.

Vincent Boudreau00:41:27

Mm-hmm. A couple of us have used the phrase translational, the word translational. And that's a kind of term of art that we use to talk about the work of taking research and bringing it to a commercial use, translating it from the laboratory into real world. It took me a couple of years to figure out as I kept hearing it what that meant exactly. I'm going to talk just a little bit. One of our real brands at City College is social mobility. And I think we talk about that a lot in terms of what happens when you come into this place without a degree and you leave with a degree and get a job. Can you connect this work, this kind of translational work to the kind of social mobility that have been so important to the college historically and also in this moment?

Andoni Mourdoukoutas00:42:16

Yeah. Yeah. This a great question and usually not I think the first thing that comes to mind when people think about this work, but it is really at the heart of it still. I think generally now, and this is me speaking as me on behalf of the college or whatever, but it feels like the world, there's a lot of money in the world that is being aggregated in fewer, fewer hands.

~This happens on an individual level, just the wealthiest 1% in the world and how much money has kind of been aggregated into those folks compared to the 99% of the rest of us. This happens on an organizational level for, look at the S&P 500, it's whatever the top seven or so tech companies that make up most of it. Then there's all the rest of the world's companies. This happened to a greater extent than ever before. And it even happens at an educational or institutional level. Look at the wealth of some of the wealthiest universities in the world and compare that to the number of small liberal arts colleges that are closing doors or having to merge right now because of financial instability.

So, when this happens at so many different areas, it also happens in the academic sense with us. If you're a professor here looking to start something and want to spin this out into a company, we us at City College need to make sure that we're giving our own folks here a chance to do that. And when you look at the demographic of who studies at City College, and when we say giving our home researchers a chance at success and making it into these startup spaces, the diversity and the demographics of who's on campus and then who is being mobilized up these social ladders just by City College being there, we're adding another way in which they can be mobilized by ensuring that there's money that can go towards these startup development pathways here already.

So, it comes in just the fact that there is a lot of money at play I think in the world. There is a lot of money being funneled into this type of work. We don't want to be a place that is overlooked, and to the extent that we can empower ourselves to enter into these kind of commercialization pathways, we have responsibility to do that. And so, a big part of PIF here is making sure that our researchers aren't overlooked and even if that means that we are the ones there providing the first sort of help here.

Vincent Boudreau00:44:29

Mm-hmm. Now PIF, the President's Innovation Fund, we just went through our first cycle of that. And I think one of the things that surprised all of us around this table is how many people on campus applied with really good projects. Can you just talk a little bit about what that experience was like for you, what you saw when you looked at this research and how that kind of orients you going forward?

Andoni Mourdoukoutas00:44:54

Yeah, I think we didn't realize I guess, I didn't realize, and this is someone, I did my undergrad here. I spent five years here studying. I've now been working here for three years and that's over the span of kind of a decade in between. I didn't realize how many labs on campus were really hungry to pursue this type of commercialization work. I think when we were setting up the President's Innovation Fund to begin with, we as a group, me and the other committee members, all of us were thinking that we might have three to five really strong applicants here just from how I understood our academic environment and the types of grants and projects people had traditionally pursued.

What we found out is that we had nearly 20 really strong applicants actually as we rolled out the President's Innovation Fund. And so, I think this speaks to what I had been saying earlier about it's not about changing someone's mind, it's just if we create this pathway for you, will there inherent interest encourage them to follow down this pathway? And so, we just made the first stepping stone out of many long stepping stones that are required, we just made the first one and we found kind of a waiting list of people to get on that and quality applicants.

And so for us where we set up this first President's Innovation Fund cycle to fund one of these awards, I think what I had realized here is that there's far greater demand and a need for this type of financial empowerment of researchers on campus in this particular direction and just an inherent desire of them to follow this commercialization route, a greater amount of all of that than what I had initially anticipated in setting up shop here. Yeah.

Vincent Boudreau00:46:31

Okay. Could you give us a little bit of insight into, there's probably no one process, but when somebody is working in the lab and they have an innovation and they're starting to think about commercializing it and all of that work, what does that process even look like? I assume it's not a eureka and a light bulb goes on and then you've got a company. What are the major steps and what are the big traps in that process?

Andoni Mourdoukoutas00:47:01

I think in terms of the big... One of the most powerful things you can do for yourself is also one of the biggest traps, I think. One of the best things that you can do is just start talking to people. And so really if you're developing something that eventually will go into a market, you need to go make sure that that market is there and size that market and talk to the people that are there as the buyers. And in a therapeutic sense that might be going to talk to the physicians that might prescribe the drug you're developing and see is this actually something that you would want or not? Or what type of benchmarks do I need to meet in this drug's performance for you to adopt it? Or you might talk to the patients and figure out what pain points that you have. If the drugs they take normally are through an injection and you have something that's orally delivered and much easier. It might be the same efficacy, but that would be a huge benefit for patients who don't want needles or something.

So going to talk to the people that are the end buyers is probably one of the best things that you can do. And for an academic researcher who might not be thinking about size, the markets and what is the dollar amount and how much do I produce this for and how much can I sell it for? That might be new learnings for all of them. It's just very helpful to, if you're going to pursue that route, start thinking that framework.

This is also a trap in that before you start communicating and presenting your work outwardly, what we do as I think scientists is try and democratize the information and our publications and make it so that it's open access. And you see this even in journals that are, some are traditionally paywall and there's moving towards more open access ones so everyone can read this and everyone can have access to this. If you get ahead of yourself and start communicating this outward before you've set up the correct patent protective layers, you might accidentally kind of-

Vincent Boudreau00:48:37

Get scooped, right?

Andoni Mourdoukoutas00:48:38

Yeah. Yeah. Or just be making a great product that also somebody else could just make because you haven't protected it. So those kind of two things. One, figure out if what you're making is actually something that the end market you're imagining actually needs and they want this. And two, just make sure before you go and put up a whatever for sale sign that you actually do own the thing that you're going to be selling.

Vincent Boudreau00:49:01

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. So, it's time for the obligatory artificial intelligence question that has to happen in every conversation of research. And we worry a lot about how quickly the job market is changing. Coding jobs disappearing in a matter of months because Claude can-do entry-level coding and all the rest of it. There's something in, it seems to me, the entrepreneurial mindset, independent of any specific research project, but a way of thinking about what people need and what I have that may actually transcend any kind of specific research domain or research project that people are working on. Can you talk a little bit about this on-campus work? I mean, I know you work mainly with faculty, but you've also worked a lot with students. You've been a student. How does this help us meet the challenge of the rapid evolution in the labor market and the skills that people are looking for?

Andoni Mourdoukoutas00:49:58

Yeah. One thing I hear commonly from even peers or students is how difficult it can be to find an entry level job and kind of looking to AI and many other things as a potential reason for this. Big companies to the extent that they can trying to replace work with AI tools that empower their current employees to stretch further than they were able to before. So that in the sense of you looking to work for some big institution can be a challenge, but it also can be a tremendous benefit in that you as an individual are also empowered by AI tools in the same way that these big corporations are.

So, in the small business development world, if you wanted to start a company and you're thinking, gosh, to get off the ground, I'd also need to figure out some of the legal stuff to do that and get an accounting team together, then figure out what my marketing is. And all these things might be three or four additional hires you might have to make before you even get off the ground at all, you now as an individual can empower yourself through these AI tools to become a really quick expert and productive worker in seven different completely distinct disciplines.

So, while big corporations might be a little bit slower to hire new people thinking that they can probably get this done with their same staff in a little stretch by AI, you have an exit door that actually might have greener grasses on the other side here where you as an individual are just so much more empowered by these tools. So, I think about it from that lens of yes, this might close one door, but it potentially opens up another one and that one really conveniently for us is kind of where Dee Dee and I sit right now in this small business development work and entrepreneurial type of work. You just are empowered to go further than you ever were before.

Vincent Boudreau00:51:50

Let me wrap up with one last short question. Five years out, what does success look like for this initiative?

Andoni Mourdoukoutas00:51:59

I think it's hard to bet and it is the job of all the venture capitalists and stuff that are there trying to bet on their winning horses, whatever. I think if we had one, a culture shift where there is... When you say City College, this happened to me the other day at my pharmacist in Astoria. It's a Greek guy. My last name is very clearly Greek and tricky to pronounce and stuff and he saw it immediately and was like, "Where are you from? I know you, whatever. Somehow you're from my country." And I mentioned that I worked at City College, now before I could even get the name out of my mouth, immediately he was like, "Great institution." Just immediately to what it had done for migrants to the US, in this case for Greek migrants to the US, but then also just the quality of education you can get there, it's synonymous with a great deal. You'll come out the other side better there. If we could have that type of branding but around entrepreneurial empowerment, that would be huge.

The other thing is not just around the branding, but if there were one or two clear wins, if someone wasn't funded by the President's Innovation Fund and that turned into a startup which raised their first series A and is out in the world growing, that'd be fantastic also. So, I think those two things are really what I'm looking for. Can we have a clear early win and can we create a culture around entrepreneurship?

Vincent Boudreau00:53:13

I would sign up for that as a group of winning accomplishments. Dee, I promised you a short moment to pitch the world on the Small Business Development Fund. What do you got to say?

Dee Dee Mozeleski00:53:26

We should know that 62 million Americans are employed by small businesses. 43.5% of the US GDP comes from small businesses. Our Small Business Development Center will have its ribbon cutting on August 28th. The community will be invited. We hope that anybody who has a question, you don't have to know what you're trying to accomplish. You just have to know that you're trying to accomplish something, finds a way through those doorways. The average small business needs about $2,500 to $3,000 to get started, Andoni 100% nailed it, AI is going to be a great tool for people who can't afford to hire auditors and CASE statement designers and branding experts because some of that stuff can be done through AI. But we hope that they'll choose City College if they're in the Upper Manhattan area because we're here for them.

Vincent Boudreau00:54:11

Folks, consider that an invitation. And this is, I am reminded, this is the last episode of our '25, '26 season. And one of the themes that's linked all the shows that we've done this academic year together is opportunity. We've highlighted work from students, from faculty, staff, community stakeholders that are working to shape greater Harlem, New York City and the world. From expanding workforce development projects, opening doors for new entrepreneurs, the Small Business Development Center here today, to supporting innovation research through initiatives like the President's Innovation Fund, workforce development, the Rangel Program, all the things we've been talking about over the course of the year. It's been a good season. I want to thank you all for sticking with us during the year.

And for this episode as well, thank you for listening to From City to the World. Special thanks to our guest, Dee Dee Mozeleski, who is the Senior Vice President of the Office of Institutional Advancement Communications and External Relations and the executive director of the foundation and senior advisor to me and Andoni Mourdoukoutas, associate director... Andoni, just give it to us one more time.

Andoni Mourdoukoutas00:55:22

Andoni Mourdoukoutas.

Vincent Boudreau00:55:23

I almost got it. Who is now the director of Co-Innovation Programs at City College Innovations Collaborative. Thank you for joining us throughout the year. We look forward to continuing these conversations and sharing more stories from City College and the communities we serve next semester and in the next academic year. Be well everybody, be safe and we'll be back with you before you know it. Bye-bye.