New York-based Next Jump is a data-driven rewards and offers company working at the juncture of three quintessentially New York City businesses: advertising, publishing and commerce. Between its annual Silicon Valley 500 event and other efforts, Founder and CEO Charlie Kim estimates that he and his company probably have invested more in recruiting software engineers out of college than any company on the east coast.

"If Boston has gone down [as a center for startups] and Silicon Valley has stayed flat, then New York is going up," Kim says.

Kim knows Boston's tech scene well, having started Next Jump in his dorm room at Tufts. After settling in New York, he resisted pressure to take Next Jump out of the city for easy venture capital money in California through two different tech booms in the '90s and '00s. He's an ambassador for the city, proof New York is a place where you can build a successful, lasting technology business.

So when New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg convened an advisory committee of university presidents, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and other experts to evaluate seven proposals to build an applied science and technology campus in the city to help attract and retain new tech talent and businesses, Kim was a natural choice.

A joint proposal by Cornell University and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology won the initial competition. Cornell, which already has a substantial footprint in Manhattan, will begin hiring and admitting students as early as next year while it works to build a new campus on city-donated land on Roosevelt Island.

Among other proposals, Cornell and Technion beat — or at least outlasted — Stanford University, the school whose marriage of high-tech smarts and entrepreneurial verve in Silicon Valley Bloomberg wanted to reinvent in New York. Stanford unexpectedly withdrew its bid shortly before the results were announced.

"Stanford was inherently conflicted from day one," Kim told Wired. After all, Mayor Bloomberg didn't propose that New York would match or follow Silicon Valley or Boston-Cambridge as high-tech hubs. He proposed to make New York City the best in the world.

"If you want to be number one, Silicon Valley has to be number two," Kim says.

It was harder for Stanford to commit itself and its resources to that vision than Cornell or many of the other bidders. Not without causing serious agita back home in Palo Alto.

The New York Times' Richard Pérez-Peña has a fine play-by-play of how Cornell and Technion partnered up, more or less under everyone's radar, to win the bid. Cornell and Technion each offered something the other didn't: Cornell's stateside prestige, endowment and experience in New York, and Technion's proven ability to spark high-tech business development.

But if Pérez-Peña's story helps to tell part of the universities' side of the story, Kim was able to show Wired something of how the mayor's office and advisers approached the proposals.

Continue reading 'How Cornell Beat Stanford (And Everybody Else) For NYC Tech Campus' ...

The advisory committee was convened for the first time in July, just after Bloomberg officially solicited bids, and again shortly after the proposal deadline at the end of October. Each member of the committee received and reviewed over 10,000 pages between the seven proposals. Over four hours, the committee analyzed and debated every application. Committee members also had one-on-one meetings with representatives from each university or university partnership. Finally, two weeks ago, just before the announcement — but just after Stanford surprisingly withdrew its bid — the committee met again to deliberate and deliver its final report and recommendation to the mayor's office.

The narrative floated that Stanford's sudden withdrawal and Cornell's last-minute alumni gift of $350 million turned the process on its head simply doesn't seem to be true. According to Kim, while all the proposals were strong, both he and a plurality of the committee recommended Cornell's application as the top proposal from the beginning of the process.

Cornell and Technion "kept putting on more and more attractive aspects to what was already quite a good proposal," deputy mayor Robert K. Steel told the Times.

Kim says that for his part, he evaluated the proposals in the same way he evaluates hiring a new engineer. Besides looking for natural talent and innovative ideas, he poses four questions:

Who has the most hunger?

Who has the most humility?

Who will fail quickly and iterate?

Who will stick with it?

Stanford's proposal, headed up by its President John L. Hennessy, was overwhelmingly strong, Kim says: rich in historic knowledge, past accomplishments and detailed plans for the future. Committee members with university backgrounds, who knew Stanford and Hennessy well, were particularly impressed. And the VCs and CEOs were struck by Stanford's die-hard loyalty to entrepreneurs and their needs. As deputy mayor Steel says of Stanford, "they're a bit like lining up against the Yankees."

But when Kim and the other committee members reached beyond the university Presidents to speak to the faculty and student body of the different universities, Cornell's hunger for the project, its humility in its approach, and its clear, unconflicted commitment to the project stood out.

And even though they didn't ultimately win this round, Kim also singled out Carnegie Mellon University, who'd proposed to build a new campus based in the Brooklyn Navy Yard as part of a partnership with video production company Steiner Studios. Like Cornell, the Pittsburgh-based technology university has something unique to offer New York, and vice versa.

The hope, voiced by Mayor Bloomberg at the press conference announcing the Cornell-Technion campus, is that additional proposals can be fulfilled in whole or part, from an expansion of Columbia in Harlem to Carnegie Mellon and NYU's proposals in Brooklyn.

Schools and faculty from different parts of the country each offer something unique, Kim says. There are well-known stereotypes that have a whiff of truth.

For instance, Boston/Cambridge engineers are often excellent on developing architecture for the backend; California engineers focus on the user interface and experience; and New York City produces business-minded pragmatists, the ones most likely to think in terms of the gestalt and ask "what's the real problem?"

Just as Silicon Valley isn't just Stanford and Boston-Cambridge isn't just MIT, the synergy of multiple technology, design and science programs working together, along with the CUNY and SUNY systems and other New York-area universities, creates something more than the sum of its parts.

After all, there's a nationwide shortage of engineers and other people with strong math and technology skills — and as it attracts more technology startups and satellites, there's perhaps a particular shortage of this talent in New York.

The running joke among the entrepreneurs on the committee, Kim says, laughing, was that "whichever university brings in the new engineers, we can just go ahead and hire all of them."