Andrew, you have tons of experience in consulting, venture investing, and negotiations.   Can you tell us a bit about your trajectory and how you landed at Cornell and now NYU?

Andrew started off working as a Venture For America Fellow for Andrew Yang in New Orleans.  Using a “sugar water -> rock candy” analogy, he described how the ingredients for rock candy are insufficient for it to emerge.  You need a critical binding agent like a stick to make the sugar crystallize.  And that’s what entrepreneurship is like.   Social capital, which is defined as individual- and community-level binding, is critical to make the whole come together.   This is what has motivated Andrew in his research program.

We then turned in our conversation to some of the problems that arise with social capital, i.e., what Andrew calls “the dark side” of social capital.  

Andrew studied this dark side in the context of venture investing in social ventures.  He looked at how venture investors can drive the successes of companies in which they invest by conveying information between them.   This can happen through customers and employees as well.

That got Anita and Andrew into reflecting on Andrew’s core interests in fairness and the structural embeddedness of preferential access to critical resources.    The advice that we give in our classrooms to prospective entrepreneurs may not take enough account of the dark side of building endorsements and engaging high-status partners.    There are real tradeoffs in doing that:  Investors and other outsiders can expose to you to threats in ways that you didn’t count on.

Andrew then reflected on some of the accomplishments of Lina Khan, the former chair of the Federal Trade Commission who sought to limit or even eliminate non-compete agreements.

For Andrew, he was inspired by the ways in which non-competes can impinge on innovation.   He urges us to think carefully about how any intermediary – including venture capitalists – can disrupt the innovation agenda by conveying information and other resources in ways that are not fair or well-understood.

What makes Andrew optimistic?

He fundamentally sees entrepreneurship as a social process.  When you’re shaping a new idea, it’s the relationships that you have that influence you more than anything.    Great entrepreneurs learn how to help people help you early on.