A relentless advocate for entrepreneurship

From advo­cating for bud­ding star­tups to his work in the North­eastern Entre­pre­neur­ship Club, Cory Bolotsky has hit his stride in and out of the university's entre­pre­neurial ecosystem. That inno­v­a­tive spirit, he said, is nearly a decade in the making. “Starting my first web design com­pany at 14 was what first got me into the idea of entre­pre­neur­ship,” recalled Bolotsky, a fourth-​​year busi­ness major and a recip­ient of the Samuel and Nancy Altschuler Scholarship. 

At North­eastern, Bolotsky got his break during freshman year when he met Scott Bailey, director of part­ner­ships at Mass­Chal­lenge, the world's largest startup accel­er­ator and com­pe­ti­tion. The pair had a chance encounter at NEXPO, a bian­nual entre­pre­neur­ship expo­si­tion hosted by Northeastern's student-​​run ven­ture accel­er­ator IDEA, and has since led to sev­eral opportunities. 

In the summer of 2011, Bolotsky started working full time at MassChallenge's Boston office, which led to an oppor­tu­nity to become the director of Startup Mass­a­chu­setts, the state's arm of the Startup America Part­ner­ship—an Obama admin­is­tra­tion ini­tia­tive to spark startup growth and sup­port inno­va­tion and entre­pre­neur­ship nationwide. 

This work got Bolotsky thinking about how to pro­vide sim­ilar resources and sup­port to col­lege stu­dents. What came next was Startup Summer. Launched in Jan­uary of 2012, the ini­tia­tive offers col­lege stu­dents intern­ships at early stage star­tups. Bolotsky took charge of both recruiting tech star­tups in Mass­a­chu­setts and pitching the oppor­tu­nity to stu­dents like him­self. After five months, the ini­tia­tive tran­si­tioned to the MassTech Intern Part­ner­ship. 

A relent­less advo­cate for entre­pre­neur­ship, Bolotsky soon began looking for his next oppor­tu­nity to make a dif­fer­ence in the entre­pre­neurial space. Teaming up again with Mass­Chal­lenge for his second co-​​op, he soon became the co-​​founder and director of the first pro­gram of its kind to open in Israel. Within weeks, he was on the ground there recruiting local star­tups and judges to par­tic­i­pate in Mass­Chal­lenge. Seven of these star­tups ended up relo­cating to Boston for the summer to par­tic­i­pate in the Mass­Chal­lenge Startup Accelerator. 

Bolotsky cred­ited his expe­ri­en­tial learning oppor­tu­ni­ties at North­eastern with helping him under­stand busi­ness on many new levels, par­tic­u­larly at the global level. 

“I was able to work with busi­nesses and entre­pre­neurs with com­pletely dif­ferent resources and needs, and under­stand the impor­tance of global col­lab­o­ra­tion and sup­port for early-​​stage and later-​​stage busi­nesses,” he said. 

One of these expe­ri­ences was a Dia­logue of Civ­i­liza­tions pro­gram in Cape Town, South Africa, where Bolotsky learned about dif­ferent par­a­digms through which to view entre­pre­neur­ship and eco­nomic development. 

Back on campus, Bolotsky is the North­eastern Entre­pre­neurs Club's director of strategy, a role in which he develops and iden­ti­fies new leaders and oppor­tu­ni­ties for col­lab­o­ra­tion and pro­motes the club's activ­i­ties campuswide. 

Bolotsky's efforts recently earned him a spot on Boston.com's “Hive 25 Under 25” list, which cel­e­brates Boston's best and brightest young con­trib­u­tors to the city's bustling inno­va­tion economy. 

“I'm happy that young people who are doing great things for the inno­va­tion economy are being rec­og­nized,” Bolotsky said. “It really shows, for all of Greater Boston, what the future of the startup com­mu­nity here is going to be.”