Please join us in welcoming Rachel Jaffe to the Leslie Entrepreneurial Institute team!

Rachel joins us to help systematize what's working at the Institute and build AI tools to scale our impact. She started out studying science fiction writing at Stony Brook University, and now brings that same instinct for storytelling to how she coaches founders: as builders of new worlds who need narrative clarity to bring their ideas to life.

She's also a founder herself, as the founder of Adjacent, a platform connecting student entrepreneurs with mentors and collaborators, and was previously a Business and Investment Consultant at Cambridge SupTech Lab. She's currently building another startup, Lodex, to help people track and grow their networks.

In her first year, Rachel is focused on streamlining how we find speakers and mentors, using AI to give student founders more personalized support, and developing content to help technical and nontechnical founders move faster.

Welcome, Rachel!

What drew you to the Leslie Entrepreneurial Institute, and what will you be focused on in your new role?

I really love the Leslie Entrepreneurial Institute’s ambition to be recognized as one of the top entrepreneurship destinations in the world, alongside Stanford, MIT, and Harvard. I’ve been brought on to help make that happen: first by systematizing what’s working, and then building the AI tools to 10x our efforts. Finally, then sharing more of our thinking and methodology with the world through our blog so the world can learn about the great work we’re doing.

Also, these are some of the warmest, most collaborative humans I’ve come across in my work. I really want to work at the kind of place where ambition comes together with empathy and kindness.

What's a piece of advice you'd give to a student or founder just starting to explore entrepreneurship?

I created something I call the Tool Horizon Theory (I’ll be writing more about this!). It’s the idea that the tools you know how to use shape the size of the company you can imagine building. If you’re a potential founder, I’d start by asking yourself how big you want your company to grow. Then question why you settled on that scale. What might you build if you had a few more tools at your disposal? Spend a few hours exploring AI tools or processes that could help you push the scale of your idea further. That small investment of time could help you find ways to scale your company exponentially.

What's something about your background (industry experience, past startups, research, etc.) that you think will shape how you approach this work?

I started out as a writer and studied science fiction writing as an undergraduate at Stony Brook University. I see startups as fundamentally about world-building: you have an idea for how the world could be different, and you’re using a company to bring that idea to life. The biggest difference between a science fiction story and a startup is bringing your ideas into real life.

To do that, you need to share your story and bring people along with you. I really stress to founders how narrative clarity is absolutely essential, whether you’re trying to organize the people in your company, reach customers through your website, or make your case to investors in a pitch deck. 

What are you most excited to work on or see happen at the Institute in your first year?

I have three big goals for my first year. I’m already working on a way to streamline how we find and track speakers and mentors, which I think will make the work we do every day much easier. Next, I’m looking for ways to 10x our support for founders. NYU has the good problem of having more student founders than we can support throughout their entire startup journeys. I’m looking at ways to use AI to give more students personalized support for longer periods of time.

I’ve also found in my conversations with technical and nontechnical founders that they need different kinds of support to scale effectively. When I was a nontechnical founder a few years ago, the advice I got was often just “find a technical cofounder,” and not much else. But the tools have changed. Today, it’s a lot easier to become technical, but I think the methodology and the advice to them is lagging behind. I’d love to create a blog series, and maybe some workshops, that help our non-technical as well as technical founders move further, faster. 

Outside of work, what's something people might be surprised to learn about you?

I write science fiction and fantasy. Over the last year and a half, I’ve written my first full-length novel, Love in Soft Winds. It’s a romantasy that tackles issues of control and climate change. In the very small amount of free time I have, I’m editing it and sending it to agents.

I also naturally build partnerships, but I’ve always had trouble tracking my network and spotting potential connections. That’s part of why I’m also still working on a startup called Lodex, which helps me keep track of the people in my network and find opportunities to connect them.