hackNY

Strategy is set by a board of directors composed of the original faculty co-founders and alumni. Evan Korth and Chris Wiggins represent NYU and Columbia. Operator-directors from the alumNY community — including Randall Hunt, Sandile Keswa, Shy Ruparel, and Shelly Bensal — shape program direction. Eric Wu, the former Executive Director, previously ran Yahoo's Hack program before moving to New York.

No. hackNY is a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit; it does not invest. The fellowship places student engineers inside startup companies for the summer, operating as a structured talent pipeline rather than a fund. The organization’s output is a time-distributed operator network.

The Summer Fellows Program is an annual co-living community in New York City that places student technologists at host startups. Fellows attend a curated speaker series, mixers, and alumni celebrations during the summer. The program was listed by ProFellow as a Top 10 Summer Fellowship.

Per the firm’s website, alumni hold engineering, product, and data science roles at Google, AWS, SpaceX, Facebook, MongoDB, DeepMind, The New York Times, Writer, and Caylent. The board’s composition suggests concentration in large West Coast consumer and cloud companies alongside New York-based generative-AI startups.

The organization is co-organized by faculty from both universities. Chris Wiggins teaches at Columbia and serves as Chief Data Scientist at The New York Times. Evan Korth teaches computer science at NYU and sits on the investment committee for the NYU Innovation Venture Fund. The fellowship draws students from a broader set of universities, including Carnegie Mellon and Temple.