Letter from the Executive Director
At Tsai CITY, we encourage students to explore their passions, collaborate across disciplines, and engage in innovative problem-solving to advance new ideas.
The 2023-2024 academic year was another vibrant and busy time for Tsai CITY. In the seventh year since the center launched, we began to move out of startup mode and into a more steady-state existence. We continued with a breadth of initiatives across programming, mentoring, funding and community and consistent with our five innovation pathways. In addition to our existing initiatives and ongoing collaborations with Yale partner centers, organizations, and clubs, we focused on implementing a rebrand of Startup Yale and hosted it at a new venue in April. This allowed us to increase the size of the event and broaden the event content: adding a keynote, an innovation showcase, on-site mentoring, and a variety of workshops. We hope you will join us on April 3-4, 2025, for the special 10th anniversary celebration!
New student leadership opportunities were also a priority this year. The Tsai CITY Student Fellows began their outreach and advisory roles in the fall. This group of 10 students, evenly divided between Yale College and Yale’s graduate and professional schools, provides the student perspective on Tsai CITY’s initiatives. We also partnered with the Yale Entrepreneurial Society (YES), the university’s oldest and largest student entrepreneurship club, to deliver Yale LAUNCH, a pre-orientation program for incoming first-year students to Yale College eager to learn about innovation and entrepreneurship.
Now that Tsai CITY has completed its 7th year, we are delighted to follow news from our recent graduates on their accomplishments since they graduated from Yale. They have won awards, been recognized for innovation in their fields, signed book contracts, raised startup funding, joined influential consortia and advisory boards, been recognized in Poets & Quants, and have taught innovation concepts to under-resourced students internationally (just to name a few). While we know very well that these accomplishments are driven by many factors, we feel an immense sense of accomplishment and pride that Tsai CITY was part of their journey.
