“iHaven” Entrepreneurship Program Launched

City officials and economic development boosters celebrated the kick-off of a new 10-week training and mentorship program designed to keep local college student entrepreneurs rooted in New Haven even after they graduate.

That new program, dubbed iHaven, was at the center of a grand opening and celebratory press conference Tuesday morning on the ninth floor of 195 Church St. downtown.

The presser took place in the offices of Health Haven Hub, a new health-tech business incubator that will be host to the biweekly iHaven courses and that has partnered with the city to line up some of the academics, lawyers, bankers, and business leaders who will be teaching participating students.

The program will hold its first classes every Tuesday and Thursday evening starting next week, Health Haven Hub CFO Donna Lecky said, with a cohort of roughly 20 student entrepreneurs from partner institutions Gateway Community College, University of New Haven, Southern Connecticut State University, Quinnipiac University, and Albertus Magnus College. The courses will focus on everything from perfecting a business pitch to financial modeling to raising capital to creating provisional patents.

“The goal is to work with these students to help create their minimum viable product,” Lecky said, ​“or, if they already have a product, teach them to scale and develop their business in a more meaningful way.”

City economic development deputy and Small Business Resource Center Director Cathy Graves, who spearheaded the development iHaven project along with city Small Business Counselor Gerry Garcia, said the primary motivation for establishing this course was to make it ​“too expensive” for young New Haven entrepreneurs to leave for New York, Boston, or San Francisco.

“We believe that if there were resources available,” she said Tuesday, ​“we could root them here. We could grow them here. And they would hire here.”

Lecky said that iHaven is designed to support two different groups of student entrepreneurs: those still in the ​“ideation phase” who are in the midst of coming up with an idea for a business, and those past that phase, who already have a product and are looking to scale and develop a consumer base.

Students in the latter group will each receive a dedicated mentor from the local business world and will participate in a series of 16 training workshops over the course of the 10-week program. That will culminate in a pitch competition before investors with the opportunity to win seed capital. The former will be able to participate in a weekend-long ​“bootcamp series” consisting of a variety of intensive workshops that mirror the 10-week curriculum.

“iHaven is emblematic of how New Haven has quickly become the region’s epicenter for entrepreneurship and tech training,” Mayor Toni Harp said.

This program, along with the variety of entrepreneurship incubators and co-working spaces that have sprouted up over the course of her administration, like Health Haven Hub, DISTRICT, and Collab, will only expand upon the city’s already burgeoning small business economy.

“It wasn’t luck that got us here,” she said. ​“It was hard work over years by many people” dedicated to promoting New Haven and encouraging businesses to grow in New Haven.

The program itself is cost-free for students to participate in, and is funded primarily by a $200,000 grant from the state Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD) and a $50,000 grant from CTNext.

State Senior Development Specialist Lindy Lee Gold said that DECD was interested in supporting such a venture in large part because of its focus on Albertus, Quinnipiac, UNH, Southern, and Gateway. Many students at those schools ​“have not been privileged to have the mentorship and [business] accelerators that their peers at Yale have,” she said.

“I think it’s in our enlightened self-interest,” she said, for the state to fund a program designed to keep young entrepreneurs innovating and growing their businesses in New Haven.

In addition to the five local colleges, DECD, and CTNext, iHaven’s partners include the law firm Bankwell, Carmody, Torrance, Sandak & Hennessey, the accounting firm Marcum, LLP, and Peoples United Bank and Webster Bank.

Click on the Facebook Live videos below to watch the iHaven press conference.