By: Lewis Dvorkin, Entrepreneur in Residence

I started a new gig this month, the same day I began year two of Life in California. My mother always told me… “If you want to stay young, be around young people.” As I tell my wife all the time, “I embrace getting older” — the ups, downs, aches, pains, graying, wrinkles… all of it. But my mother’s words keep ringing loud. I jumped into digital media 20 years ago and quite naturally found myself working with people much younger than me. This time around, I headed back to campus — California State University Northridge. 

I’m the Entrepreneur in Residence at the David Nazarian College of Business and Economics. It’s a new type of gig for me — and for Nazarian, too. There’s a Bull Ring (think Shark Tank, but carrying CSUN’s Matadors mascot theme). And, there’s a FastPitch competition, an accelerator, an incubator and a National Science Foundation I-Corps program. It’s all part of Nazarian’s emerging “entrepreneurial ecosystem.” There are no university silos in this ecosystem. Students from the other colleges get to participate, too. That means I get to work with — and learn from — enterprising students and experienced faculty from across the campus.

Last week, I attended a Nazarian-hosted event at the Oviatt Library, which doubled as Starfleet Academy in the 2009 reboot of Star Trek (a go-to TV series for me in the 60s). In a two-hour presentation, students and faculty got to hear about a CSUN-Amazon project revolving around Amazon Echo, Spot and Dot and voice-activated technology. Afterward, two graduate students from engineering corralled me with an Echo/Alexa idea. I listened, excited by their enthusiasm and my belief in such devices (I use both Echo and Google Home Assistant on a daily basis). They asked if they could come talk about it. Absolutely, I said.

That’s the genesis of the quote at the top of this post. It was part of a follow-up email from one of the students. Wow, did it take me back in time! Forty plus years ago I ventured off-campus (I went to the University of Iowa) to take a test to figure out where my skills should take me. The conclusion: young man, it’s accounting for you (that’s what my father had in mind for me, too). Not long after that definitive assessment I stumbled into the student paper newsroom. The rest is history — a path through traditional, digital and social media, then the entrepreneurial world as I started a news platform company and later joined the board of The Mighty, a startup here in Los Angeles launched by a colleague of mine and focused on people with rare and chronic diseases.

I look forward to meeting up with this energetic CSUN student and mentoring him in any way I can. In return, he’ll no doubt educate me (as my mother knew youthful minds do) as I explore new worlds. As for the student’s future, I can tell from our first encounter that he will find his own newsroom, so to speak, the minute he walks into it. And he will never look back.