Rookie Road
“This relationship between Newhouse and Rookie Road, PowerSpike and Laylo will be a significant step in creating a new kind of experiential learning for our students,” says Sean Branagan, director of the Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship. “It is exciting to be able to give students the opportunity to get extensive experience working in the startup space.”
Each company will provide virtual internship and job opportunities for students during the summers and throughout the school year. Many of these opportunities will be in areas of significant relevance to students, including but not limited to research, writing, content creation, graphic design, animation/motion graphics, social media, video, photography, software development, data analysis and other areas depending on need. Students—based at home or on campus—will complete job or internship responsibilities remotely.
Power Spike
“During my college career, some of my most transformational experiences happened when I got to apply and translate the skills I learned in the classroom into industry experience,” says Michael Gursha ’10, CEO of Rookie Road and former entrepreneur-in-residence at the Newhouse School. “I am excited by the idea of providing those kinds of experiences to students eager and willing to learn. We are looking forward to hiring as many talented Newhouse students as possible.”
“We are excited to partner with Newhouse and the Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship to bring multiple internship and real-life career opportunities to the Syracuse University community,” says AJ Damiano ’18, CEO of PowerSpike. “Establishing this partnership is the first major step in our commitment to giving back to the university—the place that helped my team launch PowerSpike.”
Laylo
“As a proud Newhouse alumnus, I couldn’t be more excited to work with current students and faculty to build a stronger bridge to the startup ecosystem. This is exactly the opportunity I would have wanted as a student, and it’s awesome to be part of the program,” says Alec Ellin ’16, CEO of Laylo.
About the Partner Companies
Rookie Road Inc. is a leading digital media destination that provides the rules, lingo and gameplay for all sports globally. The company’s focus is creating high-quality, unique and engaging educational/informational content to audiences around the world. Rookie Road is based in Portland, Oregon.
PowerSpike provides programmatic influencer marketing technology that enables brands and advertisers to instantaneously launch scalable influencer marketing campaigns in the esports and gaming space. PowerSpike is based in New York City.
Laylo is a platform for artists and their teams to identify, connect with and monetize their superfans across the internet. Laylo covers over 1.3 million artists and can categorize taste preferences and interests for hundreds of millions of fans in real time, and deliver that directly to artists via their Laylo dashboard. Laylo is based in Los Angeles.
For more information, contact Sean Branagan at jpbranag@syr.edu.
