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By: Lewis Dvorkin, Entrepreneur in Residence<\/h6>\nBy: Lewis Dvorkin, Entrepreneur in Residence<\/h6>\nI started a new gig this month, the same day I began year two of Life in California. My mother always told me… \u201cIf you want to stay young, be around young people.\u201d As I tell my wife all the time, \u201cI embrace getting older\u201d \u2014 the ups, downs, aches, pains, graying, wrinkles… all of it. But my mother\u2019s 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,\u00a0I headed back to campus \u2014 California State University Northridge.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I\u2019m the Entrepreneur in Residence at the David Nazarian College of Business and Economics<\/a>. It\u2019s a new type of gig for me \u2014 and for Nazarian, too. There’s a Bull Ring (think Shark Tank, but carrying CSUN\u2019s Matadors mascot theme). And, there\u2019s a FastPitch competition, an accelerator, an incubator and a National Science Foundation I-Corps<\/a> program. It\u2019s all part of Nazarian\u2019s emerging \u201centrepreneurial ecosystem.\u201d There are no university silos in this ecosystem. Students from the other colleges get to participate, too. That means I get to work with \u2014 and learn from \u2014 enterprising students and experienced faculty from across the campus.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0faculty 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\u00a0asked if they could come talk about it. Absolutely,\u00a0I said.<\/p>\n That\u2019s 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\u2019s accounting for you (that\u2019s 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 \u2014 a path through traditional, digital and social media,\u00a0then the entrepreneurial world as I started a news platform company and later joined the board of The Mighty<\/a>, a startup here in Los Angeles launched by a colleague of mine and focused on people with rare and chronic diseases.<\/p>\n I look forward to meeting up with this energetic CSUN student and mentoring him in any way I can. In return, he\u2019ll no doubt educate me (as my mother knew youthful minds do) as I explore new worlds. As for the student\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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… \u201cIf you want to stay young, be around young people.\u201d As I tell my wife all the time, \u201cI embrace getting older\u201d \u2014 the ups, downs, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":146,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9,7,13,8],"class_list":["post-4","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entrepreneurship","tag-csun","tag-ecosystem","tag-startup","tag-students"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.csun.edu\/startupzone\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.csun.edu\/startupzone\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.csun.edu\/startupzone\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.csun.edu\/startupzone\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/146"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.csun.edu\/startupzone\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.csun.edu\/startupzone\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.csun.edu\/startupzone\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.csun.edu\/startupzone\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.csun.edu\/startupzone\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}