Cornell Insider

Another day, another potential breakthrough for the CornellNYC Tech.

The team that will lead Cornell’s development in New York City continues to grow, adding a familiar personality with ties to a technological powerhouse.

The University announced on Wednesday that Greg Pass, ’97, former Chief Technology Officer for Twitter, will serve as CornellNYC Tech’s founding entrepreneurial officer. The position will primarily be responsible for assuring constant communication between the school and local industries, while also promoting entrepreneurial skills in the classroom.

Pass graduated from Cornell in 1997 with a degree in Computer Science. He stepped down as CTO of VP of Engineering at Twitter almost exactly a year ago on May 20, 2011.

“The idea is for the new program, is that we really ought to have someone specifically focused [on] making sure that the academic program and industry partnerships will successfully result in entrepreneurial value for students and faculty and the New York tech community,” Pass said in an interview with Business Insider. “We want to bring students that are specifically interested in making a difference and having an impact on technological innovation and are entrepreneurial.”

With the move, Cornell has proven determined to demonstrate that they have the networks and influence necessary to make the CornellNYC Tech campus a reality and to turn New York into a technological powerhouse that can rival Silicon Valley.

In the last week, New York has been outshining its West Coust prototype. Two days after tech icon Google (who had previously backed Stanford in Mayor Bloomberg’s contest) announced that they will rent space to Cornell for the school’s first five years of operation, Pass has followed suit and cut his ties with his Silicon Valley comrades in favor of a move back East.

“I see this as a unique opportunity to give back to my profession and figure out how to better cultivate the types of students interested in making an impact,” Pass continued. “How can we actually educate those types of students better and give them a better education to increase the size and quality of the talent pool?”

Answering this question now falls on the shoulders of Pass and his growing team of technological gurus.

111 8th Avenue, New York – the temporary home of Cornell NYCTech

Cornell University’s new Applied Science campus in New York City will be temporarily housed in property owned by Google, according to a New York Times story this morning.The move will help the University live up to its promise of holding classes in the city this fall. President Skorton said in an interview with the newspaper that students and teachers would travel down from Ithaca for seminars and workshops this fall. Classes will begin in the Google building, located at 111 8th Avenue, in the fall of 2013.

Google bought the property in 2010 for $1.9 billion. Cornell will have access to the top floor, which Google executives have valued at $12 million.

The deal with Google says that we must be out of the building in five and a half years.  This ties in exactly with the fact that Cornell has promised to begin holding classes on Roosevelt Island in 2017. It leaves little room for error, however, throughout the construction process.

Perhaps the most significant implication of this partnership is that it indicates that large technological corporations are behind Cornell (and its Israeli partner Technon) in its quest to establish a stronghold in the New York City High-Tech labor market. Previously, Google had publically announced its support of Stanford University in Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s contest for $100 million and the plot of land on Roosevelt Island.

This is not the first time that Cornell and Google have gotten together on a technological endeavor. In January 2011, the Insider reported that Google had given Cornell faculty members $800,000 to research the usefulness of social media networks like Facebook.