During the summer of 2025, David Allyn (MBA '26) interned as an NYU Stern MBA Summer Climate Venture Capital Fellow at Streetlife Ventures. Read on to learn more about his time there:

Name: David Allyn

Grad Year: 2026

This summer, I interned with Streetlife Ventures, a venture capital firm investing in urban sustainability and climate adaptation. As part of a small, mission-driven team, I worked on refining our investment evaluation workflows, deepening our sector research, and improving how we track and source early-stage startups. My deliverables included a custom-built AI assistant to analyze startup submissions, a standardized framework for thesis scoring, and a series of deep dives into areas like synthetic data and personal cooling. I also had the opportunity to see a company move through the full investment process and contributed to the diligence process and decision-making. The throughline across my work was how to rigorously and scalably assess whether a given startup contributes to climate resilience in urban environments.

Streetlife sits at the intersection of systems thinking and climate innovation, and my experience there has deeply influenced my professional path. It helped clarify my interest in entrepreneurship and venture-backed innovation as mechanisms to address sustainability challenges. I’m returning to Stern with a sharper thesis for where I want to go post-MBA, and a concrete set of skills, from diligence to opportunity assessment to automation.

One of the most surprising things I learned was how difficult it is to evaluate “climate impact” in companies that operate outside the core energy or mobility verticals. The lines are blurry, especially when a tool is horizontal but the use case might be climate-adjacent. It made our team’s thesis discipline even more critical, and taught me how to make tradeoffs between precision and practicality in venture decision-making.

This work is important not only for Streetlife’s portfolio, but for the broader future of climate capital. As billions more flow into the space, rigor, clarity, and humility in sourcing and selection will matter more than ever. Working at Streetlife gave me a front-row seat to that challenge, and a sense of how to meet it creatively and critically.