Zicklin MBA Grad Is the Boss of Moss
June 23, 2023Mere weeks before celebrating his graduation from the Zicklin School of Business, Omar Alrifai (MBA, ’23) won first prize at CUNY CLASH, an annual business pitch competition sponsored by CUNY Startups and held on May 5 at the Lawrence N. Field Center for Entrepreneurship.
Omar Alrifai (MBA, ’23)
Omar took home $10,000 in seed money for “Urban Oasis,” his plan to build a moss wall garden on the Clivner=Field Plaza. The wall would be both beautiful and practical, as the moss would double as a natural air filter.
“One square foot of moss can sequester as much carbon dioxide and pollutants as a young tree,” Omar explains. “It’s compact and highly effective, making it an excellent fit for cities like New York, where we’re constrained for space and can’t just plop a tree down next to a subway station.”
The newly minted MBA says the concept started to grow on him back in his undergraduate days, when he read a paper about a European company using moss as a natural filter. After his travels took him to other cities featuring “living walls” of live plants, the idea of a wall of moss occurred to him.
Omar even presented the moss wall idea in the business communications class he took during his first semester in the Zicklin School’s Full-Time MBA program: “It’s serendipitous that now with this prize money I’ll actually be able to implement it.”
A prototype of how the moss wall would look
To build the wall, Omar is collaborating with CUNY’s Spitzer School of Architecture and the Bronx Community College. Architectural alumni are providing renderings and drawings of the wall and a chemistry department chair is donating sensors to measure how well the wall is improving air quality. Omar has also begun discussions on next steps with Baruch’s director of facilities, planning, and construction.
Once the wall is up—which Omar hopes will happen “in the near future”—he plans to start his own company in an entirely different area: enterprise risk management. “It’s based partly on what my team and I built for the Zurich Enterprise Challenge,” he explains, referring to another competition he won. “The startup would quantify qualitative data on geopolitical risk and economic policy uncertainty.” He’s even invited his Zurich Challenge teammate Daniel De Blois (MBA, ’23) to join the endeavor: “We’ve talked about him joining the team. I’d love to have him on board.”