Entrepreneurship Education Builds on Strengths, Enters New Era

By: Alison Fromme
Headshot of a seated man wearing a suit jacket.

Gregory Ray, senior lecturer at the SC Johnson College of Business

Gregory Ray, PhD ’14, who will become the Don and Margi Berens Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business on Feb. 1, 2025, brings experiment-driven entrepreneurship into focus at the college. He builds on a legacy created by the late David J. BenDaniel and developed by dozens of faculty and staff across the university through Entrepreneurship at Cornell, including Steven Gal ’90, who will retire from Cornell this year.

“If we’re doing our job right as a business college, we’re not just making more entrepreneurs or better entrepreneurs; we’re making a better entrepreneurial ecosystem,” Ray said. “That means everyone who interfaces with entrepreneurs, from the investors to contractors to investment bankers. How do we prepare people to interface with businesses that are growing very rapidly?”

The answer, in part, is experiment-driven entrepreneurship, according to Ray. That means recognizing a startup’s most critical assumptions, breaking them down, and systematically testing them—well before money is wasted or a business fails. Are customers truly willing to pay for the product? Is the technology feasible? Are the founders fully committed?

“The idea is that we try to prove ourselves wrong,” Ray said. “It’s like deploying the scientific method in entrepreneurship. And we have to think about how we can be systematic across all facets of business.”

Ray himself trained as a scientist. After earning his doctorate in molecular biology at Cornell in 2014, he completed his MBA in strategy at the University of Toronto. Then, at the end of 2020, he joined the SC Johnson College faculty as a visiting lecturer.

Now, in addition to teaching students from undergraduate sophomores to graduate students, he serves as the faculty lead for the Life Sciences Technology Innovation Fellows Program and the Green Technology Innovation Fellows Program. Both programs bring doctoral candidates, postdoctoral fellows, and business students together in cross-disciplinary teams to learn and use entrepreneurial judgment to test assumptions within their potential business models.

Ray says his goal is to help all his students, including the Innovation Fellows, to develop an entrepreneurial mindset that they can take with them whether they start a new company or develop new businesses within existing companies.

With these efforts, Ray is continuing the legacy of BenDaniel, the first Don and Margi Berens Professor of Entrepreneurship.

Two men in suits stand smiling at the camera.
Steven Gal ’90 (left) with David BenDaniel, who won the Lifetime Achievement in Entrepreneurship Education Award

BenDaniel, who joined the faculty in 1985, was among the first teaching entrepreneurship at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management. Drawing on his education in physics and engineering, as well as his business experience, he mentored students; helped launch Entrepreneurship at Cornell; served as faculty advisor for Big Red Ventures, Cornell’s MBA-run venture fund; and was honored with Entrepreneurship at Cornell’s first Lifetime Achievement in Entrepreneurship Education Award.

Steven Gal ’90 was one of BenDaniel’s students.

“For me, that class was the awakening that I was an entrepreneur,” Gal said. “Before that, I felt like I did not fit. David inspired thousands of students. The problem was he needed to scale. Entrepreneurship was exploding in interest, and we had limited resources.”

In 2009, Gal had his first business failure and called BenDaniel for advice. BenDaniel invited him to return to Cornell and teach. Gal packed up his family in California and headed to Ithaca as a visiting professor. “I said, ‘David, we need to build an entrepreneurship program. We have no people, and we have no money. We have no organization, and we have no leadership. Perfect. That’s exactly where I thrive.”

By 2010, Gal had become a visiting professor and started getting to know Cornell’s faculty, staff, and students already working on entrepreneurship.

Together with SC Johnson faculty Tom Schryver ’93, MBA ’02, Ken Rother, Zachary J. Shulman ’87, JD ’90, Gal identified three things he believed Cornell needed: institutionalization of entrepreneurship at Cornell; more capital in Ithaca; and assurance of the program’s sustainability.

“For me, the key moment was when we decided to be partners,” said Gal, a senior lecturer since 2015. “We sat in Ken’s living room and said, ‘We’ve got to get all this stuff done.’”

The group promoting entrepreneurship education built on existing initiatives, continued to expand with faculty including Andrea Ippolito ’06, MEng ’07, Wesley Sine, Brad Treat, MBA ’02, and others, and developed collaborations across the university, starting more courses in entrepreneurship and cultivating broader support and funding from Cornell and beyond. Shulman became director of Entrepreneurship at Cornell. The Entrepreneurs in Residence program, Rev: Ithaca Startup Works, and eLab were launched, among many other initiatives.

In other words, the entrepreneurship ecosystem grew. Now Ray plans to continue to nurture the students entering it.

“There’s so much to be excited about here,” Ray said. “It’s an incredible privilege to get to work on this and work with the incredible intellectual capital of this university.”