By McKenna Dalton ’25 and Fiona Dosanjh
What began as a typical student venture journey in TIA quickly evolved into a multi-year talent pipeline between Colgate University and Ozeki Technologies, a legal tech startup founded by Ken Carter ’92.
Through TIA, students Omar Fargally ’25, Mark Attar ’25, Noah Saint Surin ’25, and Raghav Sah ’26 were introduced to Carter, who was serving as a TIA mentor.
Recognizing their curiosity and technical potential, Carter invited them to contribute to his own venture. This opportunity offered not just guidance, but internships with real responsibilities, product ownership, and exposure to a fast-paced founder environment.
“For the students, Ozeki represents the opportunity to work with me and our CTO, exposure they would not be able to get in a larger company. Moreover, if Ozeki succeeds as a business, it will raise the students’ professional profile for having been involved as an early employee,” Carter explained.
Internship
Each student was given responsibility within the company. From frontend and backend coding to product design, testing, and client meetings, they played key roles in the day-to-day development and iteration of the product.
“We literally built a whole lot of things,” said Fargally, who entered TIA unsure how to move an idea forward. “Working with Ken helped me learn how to build and think like a founder. Startups now feel accessible.” Fargally, who also received summer funding from Colgate Career Services to support online learning while working at Ozeki, is now a software engineer at ClaimsHero.
Attar, founder of the student venture Sloop, credited Ozeki with giving him experience in building for real users — and presenting to real investors. “I was already interested in startups, but Ken gave me the chance to be in it — learning, building, and pitching. It was fast-paced, and there was a lot to pick up on the fly.” Attar is now a software engineering intern at Tesla.
Weekly recap meetings became a highlight. “It felt like we were part of something accelerating,” Attar added. Carter described the meetings in more detail, commenting, “Our weekly all-hands meeting is called Last Appointment for Friday or LAFF meeting. The meeting is intended to promote accountability and cohesiveness. Carter starts each LAFF meeting by telling a really corny joke, then each team member reports on their expectations, accomplishments, and ‘football spike’ for the week.”
Surin, who worked on improving and stabilizing the product’s codebase, described the pace of the work as “like pedaling too hard on a bike and needing to fix it mid-ride.
“It was hard, but it was worth it. I enjoyed being challenged and having a lot to do.”
Surin, like the others, now feels more confident navigating future tech environments — whether in startups or larger companies. The best part of the internship? Getting to say, “Yeah, I worked for Ken Carter.”
Carter added: “It is important to me to afford current students small, but important experiences that will heighten the arc of their careers. I hope that their work at Ozeki is a small impact that leads to significant positive impacts later in their career.”
Sah joined the team this summer after being referred by Fargally and Attar, demonstrating the ripple effect of TIA’s mentorship and the strength of Colgate’s network.
“This summer at Ozeki Technologies was an incredible experience,” Sah said. He was a lead developer for a first-of-its-kind AI-powered NDA Negotiator, starting completely from scratch and driving the project to deployment.
“[It was] designed to replace slow, email-based NDA processes,” Sah said. “The product leverages GPT-4-powered negotiation algorithms to help businesses save part of the $5B lost annually to inefficiencies in contract negotiations. It was my first time owning a product end to end, from backend architecture and AI integration to ensuring security for sensitive legal data, and seeing it go from idea to real-world use was both exciting and deeply rewarding.”
Moving beyond, because of Sah’s experience at Ozeki he was selected as a Neo Scholar, a highly competitive startup accelerator founded by Ali Partovi, early investor in Meta and backer of companies, including Cursor AI, Cognition AI, and Kalshi. According to Forbes: “This Tech Incubator Is Harder To Get Into Than Harvard.”
“[That] made the recognition even more special,” Sah said. “This summer not only gave me invaluable technical and leadership experience, but also opened doors to opportunities I never imagined.”
Mentorship
While many undergraduate internships prioritize observation, Ozeki offered immersion. Students weren’t sitting on the sidelines — they were building for production, contributing to investor decks, and learning to evaluate product-market fit.
By creating this type of work environment, Carter hopes that his interns will “learn to be both strong individual contributors as well as integral team members,” he says. Carter’s dual role as founder and mentor helped shape a professional environment that prioritized growth, trust, and autonomy.
“Ken is always willing to share what he knows — and he’s a hoot to work with,” said Surin.
This collaboration between TIA and alumni like Carter demonstrates how Colgate’s entrepreneurship ecosystem extends beyond campus and into real industries. Thanks to the Colgate Alumni Network, students left their internships not only with sharper skills but with a renewed sense of confidence.
“These experiences didn’t just give us internships,” Fargally said, “they gave us perspective.”