Photo by Hannah Taylor/TheGazelle

Rafael Scharan and Stephen Underwood were part of NYU Abu Dhabi’s inaugural class. Though they only graduated last May, they’ve already begun shaping a legacy that will affect future generations of NYUAD students: that of entrepreneurship.

Blacksmith Coffee, what was once a popular Student Interest Group, has evolved into a small business. Underwood led the SIG during his time at NYUAD. The idea for Blacksmith, Underwood explained, was inspired by his experiences in high-end coffee shops while studying abroad in Prague and New York. Underwood wanted to offer this experience to the NYUAD student body, and decided to take matters into his own hands.

“What can we do to get good coffee here?” said Underwood. “I didn’t see an easy path, and so I thought, why don’t we make it ourselves? I threw together a governing document, found a group of people who loved coffee just as much as I did and approached Student Government and said ‘Let’s make a SIG.’"

"It was that simple," he concluded. "It was just a desire for excellent coffee.”

A quick scroll through old Student Life posts on Facebook, with the keywords Blacksmith Coffee, reveals examples of students’ enthusiastic engagement with the SIG.

“We really acted more like a service,” said Underwood. “We held a few events of our own in the early days to kind of get things off the ground, but the SIG was envisioned and even pitched to Student Government as, ‘We want to provide coffee to the student body. Really excellent coffee.’”

He added that SIGs would contract Blacksmith to provide coffee for their events.

“Our presence would bring additional people to an event,” Underwood shared, emphasizing the long-standing relationship that the NYUAD student body has always shared with Blacksmith.

Highlights of Blacksmith’s service to the student body include the wide range of Latin coffees that Blacksmith ordered and served on Latino night in 2014.

“That night, on my little brewers ... I brewed like 18 liters of coffee over two and a half hours. It was incredible,” Underwood said.

Scharan, who has since become Stephen’s business partner, was originally not involved in the Blacksmith SIG other than by virtue of proximity.

“I was never involved in the SIG, even though, interestingly enough, Stephen and I were roommates when he was running the SIG," he said. "So I had all of the coffee roasting and a lot of the coffee serving done in my apartment."

It was, however, Scharan’s idea to take Blacksmith to the next level as a business.

“I think I had my first conversation with Stephen about it at the very beginning of the spring semester of our senior year,” said Scharan. “The idea to develop Blacksmith into a business kind of grew on me over time. So late in my junior year I made a personal and professional decision that I wanted to pursue entrepreneurship.”

Scharan was an economics major during his time at NYUAD. Scharan had just returned to Abu Dhabi after a six-month long internship in Seattle, famous for its coffee culture.

“I did a little research when I was there, and I came back and was like, ‘Hey Stephen, I have this idea and I’m serious about it. I want to start a specialty coffee brand here in the UAE,’” said Scharan, who was particularly excited about the idea because of the long-standing history of coffee in the Arab world.

The idea had first nudged at Scharan even before going to Seattle. Scharan shared a story of going out to lunch with a class during the spring of 2013. During the lunch, students were discussing what the Saadiyat island campus would be like, and the need for a proper coffee shop arose in the conversation.

“Coffee shop on Saadiyat. Talk to Stephen,” reads an Evernote entry on Scharan's phone, time-stamped 12 June, 2013.

“I wrote that down in my Evernote because I thought, you know, this is the final evidence I needed to convince myself that this is promising, this is what we should do,” said Scharan.

Beyond having a unique and in-demand idea, Scharan and Underwood needed a lot of support to get Blacksmith started. Without a previously established platform for entrepreneurship, they were, in many ways, pioneers.

“Stephen and I, we’re kind of like the pilot project,” said Scharan on the school’s involvement in entrepreneurship thus far. “It’s been pretty ad hoc, because we were a little bit ahead of the curve.”

Underwood and Scharan are living and working on campus as they incubate Blacksmith, as the first Blacksmith location will be here on campus. Beyond space, however, the pair received extensive mentorship provided by NYUAD’s network.

“We were able to meet some really fantastic individuals, who gave us a lot of guidance and support, and eventually that’s how we met our investors as well, just through networking,” said Scharan.

Blacksmith has secured investment from two Emirati nationals who are very motivated by Blacksmith’s vision.

“The support had been partly guidance and mentorship, so throughout six months there was something called the Entrepreneurship Advisory Board, which was a number of experienced professionals who would meet with us once a month, and we would present to them our business plan and various components as we developed and they would give feedback, guidance, criticism, everything,” said Scharan. “And then we’d go back and start working.”

The design of Blacksmith’s support from NYUAD was deliberately crafted to lead the idea through to fruition. Behind NYUAD’s programs for entrepreneurship and innovation is Ramesh Jagannathan, who holds three titles: Research Professor, Associate Dean of Engineering and a new title created especially for him, Vice Provost for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

Before coming to NYUAD, Jagannathan spent the majority of his professional life working for Eastman Kodak, an American technology company focused on imaging solutions. He shared that he was enticed by the thought of coming to NYUAD and working in the region.

“One of the key needs for this region is entrepreneurship, capacity building,” said Jagannathan. “For the past 40 years it’s an oil-based economy and, as you know, that’s not really sustainable ... The leadership and the government is very committed to changing to a knowledge-based economy. The ecosystem should be able to create new jobs, sustain new jobs. So I sensed that as a huge opportunity.”

According to Jagannathan, the goal is to eventually create a department at NYUAD for innovation and entrepreneurship. But before shaping the larger entrepreneurial ecosystem of Abu Dhabi or the region, Jagannathan set out to cultivate the correct mindset among the NYUAD community.

“Normally what people do is set up an organization and hope that the mindset follows,” said Jagannathan. “I am of the opposite viewpoint. You have to create the mindset, and the organization follows.”

Among the steps for laying this groundwork, he cites establishing the Design and Innovation January Term course for engineers, setting up the Superlab or Idea Lab in formal terms and engaging the community with regional and worldwide competitions focused on innovation. Successes arising from these efforts have included the securing of a US patent for a technology developed in the Idea Lab, students winning the Wadi Drone award and the Hult challenge.

Engineers for Social Impact, the program that many engineers take part in during Spring Break, is one example of NYUAD’s larger narrative of innovation. Jagannathan explained that it is an example of a bootcamp, an intense training on how to develop ideas all the way from conception to implementation. In the future, NYUAD will have these accelerative programs — bootcamps — available on campus and open to students of all disciplines.

“Rapid is a key part of entrepreneurship,” shared Jagannathan.

Beyond following ideas from conception to prototyping, a new desire arose among the student body.

“Students were asking, What do we do now? We have ideas, we have won grand challenges, we want to do some start-up companies,” said Jagannathan.

Jagannathan approached Provost Fabio Piano to speak about setting up an office centered around entrepreneurship and innovation, affirming that Blacksmith was the pilot for this process.

“It’s great that we did Blacksmith because it actually gave us an idea to work with as we set up the organization,” said Jagannathan.

Future plans for NYUAD’s entrepreneurship platform include localized bootcamps as well as the continuation of events NYUAD hosts or engages in, such as the recent Angel Rising conference on investment. The school will provide financial support during the first stages of idea development, which are called incubation and acceleration. The goal of acceleration is to exhibit funding.

“After they exhibit funding, we won’t get involved. Because we are a university, we want to stop here, but we are available to these students or teams if they want to use our services," said Jagannathan. He added that even when financial support ceases, there are always opportunities for mentorship.

Blacksmith, which plans for a soft launch sometime over the summer and is eager to take hold on campus, sets the stage in many ways for the future of entrepreneurship at NYUAD. But there is always more work to be done. As advice to future entrepreneurs, Scharan urges eager innovators to remember: “Entrepreneurship is not a sprint, it’s a marathon."