Grants from the NYU Law Venture Fund helped Danny Fein ’21 and Andrew Mather ’22 gain start-up experience and develop their entrepreneurial skills this past summer. Launched in 2018, the NYU Law Venture Fund offers funding, internships, and other resources to students and alumni interested in law and entrepreneurship.
Fein, a Jacobson Scholar at the Law School, received support through the Venture Fund’s Summer Grant Program, which provides funding for 1L and 2L students interested in pursuing a start-up business concept. Fein began to develop his business idea, an end-of-life-planning digital platform, with a Venture Fund summer grant in 2019. “My concept has evolved since last summer,” says Fein, who said that in summer 2020 he focused on the business side of estate planning. Fein worked closely with Harry Margolis ’84, founder of the firm Margolis & Bloom, whom he met through an estate planning simulation course he took last spring at the Law School.
“Harry has been practicing elder law and estate planning for more than 30 years…and has also been trying to modernize the estate planning process, and he helped me to think through what the role of lawyers should be in estate planning,” says Fein.
“It’s hard to overstate how valuable it was to work with the Venture Fund both summers,” Fein adds. “It gave me time to really work through different problems, to take classes in the year between these two summers to give me more perspective and context on what estate planning entails from a legal perspective, and to be able to come back for the second summer and take this more abstract idea that I worked on in 2019 and make it a little more concrete.” He plans to continue to develop his business after graduation.
Mather received a grant through the Venture Fund’s Summer Internship Program, which provides funding that allows students to work at a start-up during their 1L summer. Mather interned at TechGC, a network- and knowledge-sharing platform for general counsel of venture capital funds and tech companies. TechGC was cofounded by Greg Raiten ’08.
“I wouldn’t have thought to look for a company like TechGC on my own,” says Mather, “so the fact that the Venture Fund had already sourced this opportunity and already had that relationship was really valuable to me.” Mather, who studied computer science as an undergraduate, says that his experience was an interesting mixture of legal and business tasks, including conducting legal research and memo drafting surrounding new product launches, and drawing on his undergraduate degree to develop technical strategies.
“It was a true start-up experience. I felt like I was truly helping them to solve their most pressing problems at any given time,” says Mather.
Mather also notes that the internship helped affirm his interest in entrepreneurship by giving him a fuller understanding of the scope of the law and tech space. “In terms of the actual breadth of opportunity out there, my internship really opened my eyes in a lot of respects and allowed me to think more deeply about what career I want to have and what I want my practice to look like.”
Posted November 20, 2020