Tell Me More: A Conversation with Your I-Corps Team: Keith Mauppa

 Senior Programs Manager, New York University (NYU) Entrepreneurial Institute

How did you come to join NYU, and what’s your role there?

I joined the NYU Leslie Entrepreneurial Institute as senior programs manager about four and a half years ago. Most recently, I had been COO of Flat World Partners, an impact investment advisory & asset management firm, where I led our clients' investments into more than nine dozen startups including Lyft, Sweetgreen, CueHealth, and Andela.com.

I knew Frank Rimalovski, executive director of the Entrepreneurship Institute, from the work I did at Flat World. I always admired the work he was doing at the EI and wanted to get involved; my former boss at Flat World encouraged me to serve as a volunteer mentor for startups at NYU. I came to enjoy it so much that I joined the team!

At NYU we have two main conduits for creating startups—the Startup Accelerator program, which is primarily geared towards undergraduate students—although it also welcomes professors and researchers, and the Tech Venture program, which is specifically for faculty and researchers. My work is with the latter.

Where did you grow up, and what sparked your interest in entrepreneurship?

I was born in Harare, in Zimbabwe, and grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa. I got interested in entrepreneurship in my teens. I was a computer nerd—I was really into gaming, and I got into hacking as well. I realized that I didn’t want to get into trouble, and I started to focus on finance rather than computer science. I enjoy finance—I still think of myself as an investor more than anything else. But I was also still a computer nerd, doing a lot of coding and data analysis. I studied economics, politics, and philosophy at the University of Capetown, and after graduating, I started working in management consulting at Frost & Sullivan. I spent two years doing research across different markets, focusing on engineering and industrial automation.

I enjoyed the work but decided to leave to do asset management at Cadiz SA. I started in fixed income and then moved into private equity with a focus on socially responsible investments; my clients were largely pension funds, trust, unions, and endowments. Our team won best socially responsible investments (SRI) asset manager covering Africa. I could have spent the rest of my career there, but I felt like I wasn’t going to be pushed to learn and grow. I wanted to get a better understanding of how businesses operate, day to day, rather than being on the outside looking in. I didn’t want to stay in the ivory tower.

I made a change and worked in corporate mergers and acquisitions (M&A) at a subsidiary of First Rand Group, the second-largest banking group in South Africa. I spent about four years there; it was a great opportunity to learn. I got exposure to all the so-called “boring” things that are critical to operating a company, like preparing for board meetings, joint venture pitches, really everything that happens on the inside.

At that point I got a great offer from the Hult School of Business—they offered a full ride. I just wanted to get the MBA done at that point, and Hull’s program allowed me to study from both their New York and San Francisco campuses. I already had so much exposure to the business world prior to business school, the MBA felt more valuable for networking. My old boss wanted me to stay, but I didn’t feel like it would be enough of a growth and learning opportunity.  

Upon graduating, I was living in New York City, and I joined Flat World—I was there from the first day of the firm and was promoted to COO after three years. I did quite a bit of investing; I was kind of reluctant to become COO and be more of an operations guy than directly making investments, but it was also an opportunity to learn about running the company, so I jumped at the chance to try that out. And that’s where I was until I joined the team at NYU.

Tell me about I-Corps and entrepreneurship at NYU. What motivated you to become an I-Corps instructor?

NYU’s Tech Venture is where our Regional NYU I-Corps program lives—the regional short course qualifier along with other Tech Venture programs serving faculty and researchers. The other track is for undergraduate students. It’s a three-to-four-day program spread out over three weeks.

I’m an instructor across all the programs; I do all the program management, scheduling presentations, and then I also cover startup business models. We do Tech Venture three times per year—fall, spring, and summer.

What question do you wish entrepreneurs asked, and what surprises you about entrepreneurs who come through the NYU program?

One thing that surprises me is the consistent misconception that entrepreneurs should be asking for money from investors early in their process. They don’t think about how that means they are giving up a piece of their company.

I talk with founders who have done their first pre-seed or seed round and have given up thirty percent of their company, and they are going to have to sell even more of it as they go. I tell a lot of folks to avoid the venture capital (VC) route if they can. Try to leverage pilot programs and the lean, scrappy tactics that are non-dilutive. If you can get away with not having to sell a piece of your company too early, down the line, you will be far better off.

I think this misconception comes from the media—from shows like Silicon Valley and Shark Tank. It’s glamorized—everyone wants to follow in the path of role models like Facebook. They know that Peter Theil was the first investor. What they might not realize is that when Zuckerberg went to him, Thiel said he didn’t see any potential for generating revenue and that it would take another 10 years to monetize his idea. That’s a long time, and most of the people we see with startups today don’t want to do anything for ten years. 

I wish I could dispel this misconception that someone is just going to give you money to get you started. Grants are competitive—you must do the legwork—so that’s what we drill with our teams.

What trends are you seeing? And after learning about so many different customer markets, can you share a market or customer challenge that still requires a solution you’re hoping to see? 

AI is trending right now—I’d say sixty to seventy percent of the startups we see involve AI in some capacity. That’s been the case for a while. There’s a fair amount of startup accelerator program participants who are trying to do an application layer of AI using off the shelf software to solve a problem, or something they think is a problem!

Prior to AI we were seeing a lot of crypto-related efforts, but that’s less so now. We are also starting to see more quantum computing. I would love to see more innovation with materials. We have some of that at NYU; one of our professors, Andre Taylor, who has worked with I-Corps, is working on advanced new materials that offer electromagnetic conductivity and reduce interference with electronics. There’s a lot of interest in this area from investors outside of our pipeline.

With Tech Venture, we only work with faculty and researchers that are published—that is our strict criteria. We are looking for research IP based at NYU. We have 24 teams lined up for our next cohort—that’s our largest Tech Venture workshop yet. Sixty percent are incorporating AI. I think those participation numbers reflect the climate of funding cuts; people want to learn how to diversify their funding sources.

What advice would you give to I-Corps participants?

Along with not going for VC money first, I would emphasize that it’s a “superpower” to be a great collaborator and to work with people from different universities, different parts of the world. It strengthens your startup and your appeal. I’ve noticed that across all our teams that participate in the Tech Venture program, the teams that progress the fastest and furthest draw upon diverse resources. For example, if you are studying chemical molecular biology, you wouldn’t necessarily know about finance. When folks partner with an MBA at Stern to get that perspective, they are going to be more successful. So how do you find the people that can help you along the way? We spend a lot of time teaming up people and making those connections.  Working with teams that are in a very early stage, we spend significant time connecting researchers with faculty.

When is a good time for companies and startups to consider venture capital funding?

The best time to seek VC funding is when you’ve established these three critical factors: a clear product-market fit with paying customers, a scalable and repeatable business model, and growth metrics that support raising capital to scale, rather than to discover or validate. Most participants in I-Corps and Tech Venture Workshops are still focused on customer discovery and problem validation. At this stage, grants, competitions, pilot revenue, and bootstrapping are often more suitable for reaching that proof point. VC funding is designed for scaling validated models, not for determining what/how to build.

A frequent mistake I encounter is founders believing they need VC funding to validate their ideas. The truth is, it’s the customers who should validate those ideas first. When customers are actively pulling your product from you—rather than you having to push it to them—that’s when pursuing institutional capital starts to make sense.

Can you share a recent accomplishment?

NYU was recently recognized in Fast Company’s Ignition Schools ranking at number eight. That’s our highest ranking to date. It’s a team win for all of NYU and something that I’m also personally proud of. I lead data collection and management for the Entrepreneurial Institute. I like to say my heart calms down with data. I like data, collecting and analyzing and then sharing findings with Crunchbase, Pitchbook, resources like that. That might include data about teams that have raised capital, done I-Corps, secured nondilutive funding. Over the past 18 months we’ve done a lot of data collection and sharing, and that may have helped us with those rankings.

What are you reading (or hoping to read soon)?

I want to read Enshitification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, by Corey Doctorow; I preordered it. I read his online post about this concept a year ago and shared it with my colleagues. I’m hoping to read it when I have time to focus. Doctorow coined this term to describe the time we are in, where things we loved as a society are not the same anymore, and have gotten shittier over time. This happens time and time again over different examples and scenarios, but the internet is a leading one that he talks about. Thinking about this can be demoralizing but it’s also exciting because there’s still so much to learn about the world right now.

I think the book will hold good lessons for founders. Often, people go into startups with noble intentions of creating a product people will love, but then they realize that investors are expecting to see a profit, a return on investment of 10 or 20 times. How do you make a profit without falling into the “enshittifying” trap? When I can come up with that answer, I’ll be a better instructor! Until then, I’ll keep learning about it.

What do you do to relax?

My wife loves to travel, and I love her—so we travel often! We just got back from Belgium and Luxembourg. We do a big trip every year. It was so beautiful there. Our next trip is to South Africa and Zimbabwe. When I’m not traveling, I spend a lot of time at my desk. I really enjoy getting up early and working on complicated stuff without interruption.