The Power of Partnerships
As reported by The Buffalo News, UB’s chapter of Blackstone LaunchPad has relaunched and expanded under a new name: The UB Startup & Innovation Collaboratory Powered by Blackstone LaunchPad—The CoLab for short.
After seven years of mentoring thousands of students in entrepreneurial skills and helping launch dozens of new companies, the rebrand began in the spring of 2023 with a $300,000 investment from UB and additional funding from Blackstone. This allowed Hadar Borden, director of the CoLab, to go from one employee (with lots of volunteers) to hiring a team of four coordinators to run it as its own department under UB's Office of Student Life.
The expanded space has a ‘lemonade stand’ theme, as Borden tells new students that every kid who ever set up a lemonade stand has already been an entrepreneur. And, she hopes, the gesture of actually offering students lemonade will make them feel right at home in the program’s new space on the third floor of UB’s Student Union.