This past summer, NYU Law’s Venture Fund provided funding to Carolina Yu ’23 and Eli Silverman ’23 as they pursued internships with NYU Law alumni in the startup space. Founded in 2018, the Venture Fund offers internships, grants, equity investments, and other opportunities to NYU Law students and alumni interested in entrepreneurship.
Yu says that her interest in California as a geographic market and her background in science—she holds a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience from the University of Chicago—led her to apply to work with the California-based synthetic biology startup Octant, co-founded by Ramsey Homsany ’00. The company uses a combination of synthetic biology, chemistry, and computer science to understand and predict how cell receptors will respond to different drugs.
“It was definitely all-hands-on-deck as far as what you got to work on,” says Yu, who notes that she worked on recruitment efforts and US Drug Enforcement Administration registration for precursor chemicals. “What I really enjoyed about my experience and being part of a startup is that it lets you interact really closely with people, learning so much more than you would working in-depth on a single aspect of one case, as is sometimes the case with some other summer work,” she says. Yu is still working with Octant as a part-time consultant.
Silverman spent his summer at TechGC, a community platform for general counsel at technology companies and venture capital firms that was co-founded by Gregory Raiten ’08. Among other projects, Silverman wrote blog posts about legal trends for TechGC’s website and helped organize and run events in New York and Los Angeles. Attending the gatherings was a highlight of the summer, Silverman says: “I was able to talk to general counsels and senior partners and really get a good sense of what a number of firms and companies are about.”
Silverman also named Raiten as an important mentor. “Because Greg is an alum, there’s this added benefit, not only in helping with what professors and classes that he enjoyed and coffee spots around NYU to take advantage of,” says Silverman. “But also in talking about firms, because a lot of the opportunities I was looking at, Greg had also been considering when he was in Law School. And he and a number of other employees had worked at [other] firms previously.”
“My internship at TechGC definitely helped me define what I was looking for in my career and discover what area of the law truly interested me,” he says.
Posted October 14, 2021.