Carnegie Mellon and Pittsburgh Love!
"My heart is in the work", Andrew Carnegie, Founder, Carnegie Mellon (November 15th, 1900)
Carnegie Mellon in the Family
I have a joint master’s degree in Information Networking from Carnegie Mellon. It is a joint degree program from three of Carnegie Mellon's top-rated schools. Tepper School of Business. School of Computer Science. And Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Carnegie Mellon won a competitive bid among dozen top universities for this program. Started in 1989 by Bell Communications Research (Bellcore), an R&D company after the AT&T breakup. Bellcore morphed into Telcordia Technologies which is now part of Ericsson. The initial focus of this program was mid-career individuals. Experienced practitioners in either programming, engineering or business. The program goal was to help understand all three.
My younger brother, Nitin Kapur, also graduated from Carnegie Mellon in Master of Information Systems Management from Heinz College. Now, he's VP of Engineering at Discovery in New York.
Carnegie Mellon Giving
Before I went into investing, my last employer wrote the biggest ever corporate gift check of $35 million to Carnegie Mellon.
Carnegie Mellon and Pittsburgh Region Investing
I have invested in multiple startups with either a Carnegie Mellon founder(s) and/or Pittsburgh HQ. And happy to co-invest with fellow Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon founders, VC's and angel investors:
- Chris Smoak, Co-Founder of Atrium, Y Combinator alum and now a VC.
- Ned Renzi, General Partner of Birchmere Ventures, a $50 million seed fund.
- Rich Lunak, Founder and Managing Director of Riverfront Ventures, and President & CEO of Innovation Works.
- Robb Myer, Director of CMU VentureBridge Accelerator, and founder of Nowait that was acquired by Yelp for $40 million.
- Severin Hacker, Co-founder and CTO of Duolingo, first Pittsburgh startup to be valued over a billion.
- Tom Beckley, SVP & GM, Custom IC & PCB Group, Cadence Design Systems, and former President & CEO of Neolinear, a Carnegie Mellon spin-off that was acquired by Cadence Design Systems for over $100 million.
- Chris Smoak, Co-Founder of Atrium, Y Combinator alum and now a VC.
- Ned Renzi, General Partner of Birchmere Ventures, a $50 million seed fund.
- Rich Lunak, Founder and Managing Director of Riverfront Ventures, and President & CEO of Innovation Works.
- Robb Myer, Director of CMU VentureBridge Accelerator, and founder of Nowait that was acquired by Yelp for $40 million.
- Severin Hacker, Co-founder and CTO of Duolingo, first Pittsburgh startup to be valued over a billion.
- Tom Beckley, SVP & GM, Custom IC & PCB Group, Cadence Design Systems, and former President & CEO of Neolinear, a Carnegie Mellon spin-off that was acquired by Cadence Design Systems for over $100 million.
Strengthening Carnegie Mellon Community
Earlier, I served on my graduate program's alumni leadership council.
To strengthen the Carnegie Mellon community and help myself learn about new domains, I created and organized a speaker series, CMU Alumni Industry Insights, which featured highly accomplished Carnegie Mellon alums as speakers in a simple Q&A session.
To strengthen the Carnegie Mellon community and help myself learn about new domains, I created and organized a speaker series, CMU Alumni Industry Insights, which featured highly accomplished Carnegie Mellon alums as speakers in a simple Q&A session.
