Evan Korth - Sports Agent Turned Computer Science Professor #109
Evan has worn many hats as an active member of NYC’s academic and innovation communities since ‘99 – computer science professor, developer, investor, advisor, founder, expert witness, researcher, board member, coach and mentor.
Evan also advises Flybridge Capital and sits on the NYU Innovation Venture Fund’s investment committee.
Evan’s work in helping his students find opportunities at startups in early 2000’s led him to cofound his first non-profit, HackNY, to help federate the next generation of hackers for the New York City innovation community.
After helping the Bloomberg administration create NYC’s first two software engineering high schools, Fred Wilson and Evan co-founded CSNYC in order to ensure all 1.1 million NYC public school students have an opportunity to study computer science. In September 2015, Mayor Deblasio announced a $81mm public private partnership with CSNYC to meet its mission within ten years.
Today, Evan serves on the boards of hackNY, CSNYC and GirlsWhoCode.
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A note from Grant
Professor Evan Korth has worn a lot of hats in the tech space, including developer, investor, advisor, expert witness, board member and, of course, professor.
But Evan didn’t start in tech, at least not on paper. He earned a bachelor’s in Accounting from Syracuse University (one of my alma maters) and then working as an Internal Control and Systems Coordinator, Sports Agent, yes Sports Agent, and VP of Operations for Bruce Levy Associates, a sports agency.
After working at Bruce Levy Assosciates for 8 years, during which he went back to NYU to get his computer science degree, Evan landed his first job as a developer and started teaching computer science at New York University. Over the years, he’s worked for venture capital firms, started two non profits and sat on the boards of several for-profit and non-profit companies.
These days, Evan continues to teach at NYU and runs a tech consultancy firm named TechGrok.
-Grant Ingersoll
Quotes
“When I was offered an opportunity to teach a course in 1999 at NYU I thought, wow, what an opportunity to get over my fear of public speaking. I get to talk about something I know really well so I’d have the confidence to speak about it to undergraduates who wanted that knowledge.”
“We threw the first college hackathon as far as we know in April 2010. Then we started a summer fellowship program where we got the best hackers we could across the country, brought them to New York for the summer, and put them up in NYU dorms. They interned at different startups during the day and we had an educational program for them at night.”
—Evan Korth
Key Milestones
- Why did Evan choose to get a degree in Accounting?
- What was it like working as a sports agent?
- What inspired Evan to leave Bruce Levy after 8 years?
- How did Evan become a computer science professor?
- Evan founded two non-profits, HackNY and the NYC Foundation for Computer Science Education. What drew Evan to nonprofits?
Additional Resources
Previous episodes mentioned:
Adam Cheyer – Co-Founder of Siri, Viv Labs, and Change.org #67
Andrew Montalenti – From Morgan Stanley to Founding Parse.ly #92
Find out more about HackNY - https://hackny.org/
Learn more about Evan’s consulting firm - https://www.techgrok.com/
Learn more about how CSForAll is bringing computer science to public schools all across the country - https://www.csforall.org/about/csnyc/
Connect with Evan Korth
LinkedIn
https://cs.nyu.edu/~korth/
[email protected]
