Cha’Gate Co-Founders Vivian Jiang ’26 (left) and Bill Luo ’26 (second from left) were the first to be approved under the new CVI certification process.
The clock is ticking down: 12 hours, 7 minutes until your environmental ethics final. Coffee is no longer cutting it. You even contemplate taping open your eyelids. Then the unmistakable smell of freshly-baked cookies wafts into your dorm room. Your nostrils flair, your stomach grumbles, and your feet trod a path out your door.
If you were at the University of Pennsylvania in 2003, those cookies were indubitably baked by then senior Seth Berkowitz. He began by spending $150 on ingredients, then baking and delivering cookies from his college housing to students across campus late at night. By the time he graduated in 2004, Berkowitz had signed a lease to open his new company’s first brick-and-mortar location in Syracuse: Insomnia Cookies.
Today, Insomnia Cookies boasts more than 260 locations, with a majority stake owned by Krispy Kreme, which purchased its shares in 2018 to the tune of roughly $139.5 million. During the 2023-2024 academic year, DZٱ’s Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation intersected with six food-based ventures – Campbell’s Nourish Bites, Cha’Gate, ’Gate Grubs, a hot sauce venture, Sunny Sky’s Foods, and Zja’gar – that with the right resources at their disposal could result in sweet dreams for their founders.
DZٱ’s Campus Venture Initiative (CVI) committee was established in 2014 to provide students with a variety of key resources to grow their venture, such as the availability of an exclusive, high-traffic location in The Coop and the use of a ’Gate card reader to transact those sales.
Starting in the fall 2023, the CVI committee overhauled its policies and procedures, with the resolve to answer the question: “How can the committee make it easier for students to do business on campus by promoting a business-friendly environment that helps them to learn important best practices and to be successful?”
With an eye toward reducing barriers to entry, the committee reviewed common requests that entrepreneurs have asked over the past few years and developed myriad benefits. Included among several others are:
- The ability to book spaces on campus to hold events and other activities, as well as access to makerspaces.
- The ability to have their goods and/or services mentioned in official university communications channels, including dozens of digital screens across campus, and to request inclusion in promotion materials for major weekends (e.g., Family Weekend).
- Offices, departments, and organizations across campus have permission to contract with CVI-certified ventures.
- A CVI-certified digital medallion that ventures can add to their online presence.
The updates to certification also provide clear guidance for nonprofit ventures, explicitly making CVI certification available to nonprofits, not just businesses.
“I noticed that our office was getting a lot of questions from students who were looking to conduct business on campus. At the same time, we were only receiving 2-3 applications a year for the Campus Venture Initiative,” said Carolyn Strobel-Larsen, director, entrepreneurship and innovation. “Given this, I asked assistant director Christian Vischi to lead an overhaul of the CVI to expand benefits and engage more campus offices. The goal outcome was two-fold: to have more ventures apply for certification, and to offer more value to those that do. I’m pleased that we now offer many of the things that students have been asking for over the past few years, and that as a result, we’ve already had four ventures apply for certification in less than one semester.”
New Certification Level for Non-Monetary Activities
The Campus Venture Initiative also launched a new certification level to support non-monetary activities as students move their venture from ideation through non-monetary pilot testing to formal business operations on campus. This certification level lets entrepreneurs devote more time to testing and validating their hypothesis before they commit to the cost – one that can exceed $1,000 for LLC incorporation – and significant paperwork involved in establishing formal business (or non-profit) operations. The venture is encouraged to pursue full certification after operating on-campus via the non-monetary certification level for one calendar year.
Corinne Campbell ’26, founder of Campbell’s Nourish Bites – a venture producing a variety of protein balls in flavors including chocolate, snickerdoodle, and chocolate chip cookie dough, was the first to apply for the non-monetary certification level to conduct product sampling without incorporation, sales tax collection, and other aspects of full venture start-up. The non-monetary certification process still requires entrepreneurs to consider things like insurance, permits, and logistics of operating on campus.
She said non-monetary certification would enable her to reach her target audience. Being able to sample her product at the Huntington gym and The Coop would provide her that initial test market, to see if “my product is something that students on campus would buy,” she said. Following a successful period of testing, future CVI full certification will benefit her customers because they will be able to use their ’Gate card for purchases “because students always have their ’Gate card, even when they may not always carry their wallet. This certification will allow me to pursue the next step I need to get my venture up and running,” Campbell said.
The CVI website has been updated to welcome all student-led ventures. Whether they are participating in the year-round TIA Incubator, the TIA Summer Accelerator, student-athletes seeking to sell goods or services under the university’s , turning their early-stage social impact ideas into scalable projects through the Clinton Global Initiative University, or are wholly separate from any resources under the Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, CVI acceptance criteria as well as its benefits have been expanded to permit more student businesses to operate and thrive on campus in the years to come.