Inside Brown’s Startup Engine: An Interview With the Nelson Center’s Danny Warshay

As the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship at Brown University begins its 10th year, its founding executive director, Danny Warshay, is reflecting on how far it’s come – and where it’s headed next. A Brown alum and veteran entrepreneur, Warshay has taught at the university for 20 years and helped build the Center around a clear mission: teach students how to solve big, consequential problems. That lens has shaped everything from the Center’s courses to its venture funding programs to the wide range of disciplines it draws from. 

Startup Boston caught up with Professor Warshay for a wide-ranging conversation about what makes Brown’s approach to entrepreneurship different, how AI is shaping the next generation of student ventures, and why he thinks entrepreneurship at Brown was always inevitable – even before the Nelson Center opened its doors.

Startup Boston: Can you tell me a little about how you joined the Nelson Center?

Danny Warshay: I have traditional business training – I went to Harvard Business School and worked at Procter & Gamble – but most of my career has been spent doing startups. In fact, when I was a student at Brown, I helped build a company [Clearview Software] that we eventually sold to Apple. That kind of work defined most of my career.

Then, about 20 years ago, [Engineering Professor] Barrett Hazeltine asked me to come teach at Brown. That got me thinking: What does it really mean to teach entrepreneurship? Over the past 20 years, I've been doing that at Brown and around the world, and I even wrote a book about the approach [See, Solve, Scale: How Anyone Can Turn an Unsolved Problem into a Breakthrough Success].

I define entrepreneurship as a structured process for solving problems. That definition resonates. It’s why we attract thousands of students, and it’s how we organize everything we do – around three pillars: curricular, co-curricular, and venture support.

SB: What’s the distinction you make between curricular and co-curricular programming?

DW: Curricular is what happens in the classroom. Our 25 courses focus on some element of entrepreneurship, taught across different departments. One of the things we’re proud of is launching Brown’s first undergraduate certificate program – students take specified entrepreneurship courses, and it appears on their transcript.

Co-curricular refers to out of the classroom programming that complements that. And then there’s venture support. We not only teach students what entrepreneurship is – we empower them to do it. That includes grant funding, our summer accelerator, paying students in teams to work on their startups, offering them space, mentorship, and more.

We also have a student-run VC fund called Van Wickle Ventures, a $50,000 pitch competition, and an embarrassment of riches in terms of alumni support; over 700 alumni and parents mentor, speak, and judge competitions. 

SB: I know you’re just wrapping up a school year. As you look to the coming year, are there any fresh priorities or initiatives you’re thinking about?

DW: We're starting our 10th year, and we're always doing new things. But our student body turns over roughly every four years, so we don't necessarily need to create new programs. We have a new market that we serve every few years. 

That said, there’s always something new. For example, there was a very substantial student-led conference on AI that we did this year. We brought in new speakers, workshop participants, courses, and certificate program cohorts. It wouldn’t be entrepreneurship if it were all just tried and true.

SB: Since you mentioned AI: Are there any particular patterns in the kinds of ventures students are most drawn to now?

DW: I wouldn’t say they’re drawn to one thing most. These are Brown students – they’re interested in solving every problem they can think of, in every discipline, domain, and industry. AI is less a standalone industry and more a tool that our students are embedding across startups. Whether it’s healthcare, climate tech, fintech, edtech – even food and beverage – students are leveraging AI in ways that teach me what’s possible. It’s interesting to see how they’re using it to accelerate their startup trajectories.

SB: Are most students coming out of computer science and economics, or is it more varied?

DW: They're in every discipline you can think of. Just to give you a sense: This past academic year, 1,664 Brown students took our entrepreneurship courses. Of those 1,664 students who took our courses, a subset went on to earn the certificate. Not everyone chooses to pursue it – some just aren’t focused on that. But when we launched that certificate program in 2022, we had 13 students complete it. This year, we had 53, and they came from 28 different concentrations. That kind of breadth is really exciting to see.

SB: Do you offer support for students after they graduate?

DW: Yes. There’s a group called the Brown Alumni Entrepreneurship Group. It’s a separate group, but we support it. We don’t want students to fall off a cliff after they leave campus. We want to stay engaged and support them over the long term.

SB: Are there any particular startups that have surprised you or that you think are worth highlighting?

DW: You can go to our website and under the “Impact” section, you’ll see a range of startups searchable by various tags. But I’ll mention a couple.

Perennial, which came in second in our very first Brown Venture Prize competition, has raised $35 million. It’s a climate tech startup that helps farmers optimize carbon sequestration. Another, IntusCare, is a health tech startup that’s raised around $27 million. It’s a healthcare analytics company. These aren’t just class projects – they’re companies with long-term scale and impact.

We’re not trying to simulate reality. We’re helping students create it.

SB: I work in public relations, and we often tell startups to really advocate for the problem they solve – that's what resonates. It sounds like you think similarly.

DW: Exactly. The tagline for the Nelson Center is “solutions with impact.” We teach students to find and validate consequential problems, solve them iteratively with small resources, and then scale the solution to achieve real-world impact. The world has a lot of problems. We need our students to figure out how to solve them.

SB: When I was at Brown, I don’t remember a lot of buzz about startups, though computer science was popular. Has excitement around entrepreneurship grown in the last decade?

DW: Very much so. We’re not inventing entrepreneurship at Brown – I know that personally because I was part of a startup as a student.. But there weren’t many of us. I graduated in ’87. Back then, there were maybe a couple of Barrett Hazeltine courses. Now, we have 25 courses, five new faculty hires just last year, and a robust certificate program.

Also, no one told me how to define entrepreneurship when we launched the Center. So we had the latitude to define it in a way that fits Brown: entrepreneurship as a structured process for solving problems. That makes us different from places like Stanford, MIT, Babson, or Harvard. All are great, but if I’d been asked to run a center there, the blueprint would’ve been clearer – and probably more narrowly focused on tech and business. We’re not allergic to those things, but we focus on problem-solving across disciplines.

SB: Do you see that openness reflected in who participates?

DW: Absolutely. A fundamental part of our mission is to encourage students from all backgrounds and disciplines to participate. We serve more graduate students than ever before, from every master’s program, the medical school, the School of Professional Studies. PhD students, too. Two of the last four Brown Venture Prize winners were PhD students. Even faculty get involved, sitting in on classes or participating in programs.

Entrepreneurship isn’t new to Brown, but we’re now centralizing and structuring it in a way that amplifies what’s already been happening here.

SB: Final question, and you touched on it earlier: How do you really differentiate yourselves from the Stanfords and MITs of the world?

DW: I sometimes joke that we could take the name off the building and call it the Nelson Center for Problem Solving. If you came here, you’d see the imagery, the students, the ventures – everything is about solving consequential problems. That’s our lens. If you're not solving a meaningful problem, you're not really doing entrepreneurship. You might be doing something else – maybe small business – but what we’re focused on is big problems, big solutions, big impact. That message resonates with students of all types at Brown.

Conclusion

As the Nelson Center steps into its second decade, one thing is clear: it’s not just building startups - it’s cultivating a generation of changemakers. By redefining entrepreneurship as a structured approach to solving consequential problems, Danny Warshay and his team have created a model that’s uniquely Brown: interdisciplinary, impact-driven, and inclusive. Whether students go on to launch climate tech ventures, healthcare analytics platforms, or something entirely unexpected, they leave the Center equipped not just with business plans, but with purpose.

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About the author: Randall Woods is a former editor at Bloomberg News and currently is a Senior Vice President at SBS Comms, a communications agency for technology companies and startups.