The University of Illinois’ Startup Ecosystem
hack.vc
hack.vc
So at the heart of this beautiful map, I created a cultural hub .. a space that was founded and run by students, who elevated the excitement and visibility of entrepreneurship. To top it up, I elected a student women entrepreneur to lead it. It had interesting implications:
1. Entrepreneurial ecosystems tend to be male dominated. By creating a community of student entrepreneurs, lead by a female student, it created a 'safe zone' for other women entrepreneurs to come forward and engage.
2. Much of what we did at the space, was to encourage trying new things, new ideas and celebrating every tiny milestone of a student. I started a FB page, where every student activity was documented and celebrated.
3. In less than 2 years, I helped start over 60 new ventures. Some died or would have died or will die and a few get accepted into top incubators..and others are at limbo... but the process helped students to learn important lessons in entrepreneurship. It is best to do it while still a student.
4. The space helped connect all the dots in the picture (drawn in the article). It brought the organizations closer to the students and helped create visible linkages. It helped movement of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial ideas easily across those linkages and removed redundancies in the ecosystem.
5. I gained a lot of visibility in the media and it didn't go well with the fossils of University who claimed entrepreneurship as their own and turned my exciting job into a political game and a living hell. Non of it leaked to my students, but being an entrepreneur myself, I already had many other projects that I was working on ... so I left the University and aside from championing my students from the sidelines now, I find utmost excitement in pursuing my own tiny startup. I am broke, but I am happy and every day take pride in the work I did, to create the nucleus of a successful entrepreneurial ecosystem in one of the top Universities, that would act as a cascading feeder to the community for many generations to come.
Startups were a very different story at UI in the late 60s, 70s, and early 80s. From what I've gathered, it seems doing a startup could be a very iffy proposition, vis a vis the university. Sometimes it could even get you in a heap o' trouble.
https://hack.vc/tech-companies-started-by-university-of-illi...
UIUC has historically done little to negative work in making their graduates successful beyond the diploma. I don't see much changing here except a lot of handwaving, throwing cash around, and grand announcements like UILabs which will make a lot of noise and smoke but eventually do very little toward the dream of being more like Stanford or MIT or Fraunhofer.
"The list is still a work in progress but shows just how many great entrepreneurs were at one point roaming around in central Illinois"
Sums it up right there. They roamed until they roamed all the way to the west coast. And that's the eternal agony of the University of Illinois.
UIUC suing (or almost suing?) Andreessen is definitely a terrible step, but that was one event 21 years ago. In fact it happened before I was born (I'm a senior at UIUC now). Definitely a dark chapter of entrepreneurship on campus, but the goal of this post is to highlight the current ecosystem.
The university and the ecosystem is continuously evolving and hopefully we can tailor it to learn from other schools that have done a good job.
Then I found out much later that they had refused to let Andreessen use the Mosaic name for his company. They also turned down equity in the company that became Netscape. They also Andreessen later said burned any bridge to receiving alumni support from him. But the Dean told us at the time that IU had a 'close relationship' with Andreessen and the rest of the alums creating Netscape.
Then they licensed the Mosaic source code to Microsoft which proceeded to use it to bludgeon Netscape.
The goal of the post was not to try and take credit for the successes of alumni, I rather wrote it to highlight how some of our alumni have gone on to do great things. I decided to write it after an experience I had this summer while I was interning at a VC firm in NYC. While there, I met the managing partner for one of NYC's biggest VC firms (I'll leave it unnamed) who basically said: 'oh, you go to UIUC.... they've produced one famous tech entrepreneur (Marc Andreessen), maybe you can be the second'. That's a sentiment I saw echoed throughout my time there and through previous experiences (especially on the East Coast).
In terms of the helping alumni with their ventures after graduation, I'd argue that the school has actually done a lot to help founders through the resources and early-stage funding available (a lot of these have sprung up recently). It's hard to compare it to Stanford/MIT/Harvard which are based in thriving tech cities where alumni and VCs can hop by on campus whenever.
Update: I'd also love to know (from everyone that sees this) what programs other universities have done to help alumni after graduation. Just because UIUC hasn't already done this doesn't mean we (students and alumni) can't start it. Just take a look at the awesome stuff that alumni from Harvard do for their community (http://harvard.splashthat.com/). It's entirely alumni managed + organized.
Let's get history straight first. UIUC didn't turn pmarca into an entrepreneur. Jim Clark did that.
My posts were meant to highlight entrepreneurship which is why I didn't mention them (they'd be in a class of amazing innovators who studied/worked at UIUC). There's also a ton of awesome alumni that have gone on to be C level execs at big companies, but again they were omitted because these posts were specifically targeted at entrepreneurial alumni.
They are also not forgotten on campus. Max was on campus last year and there was a ton of excitement in the college of engineering among students.
Don't take my word for it: the west coast absolutely dwarfs Chicago in VC (20x as much capital is raised in the Bay Area than Chicago), which is made even worse considering the relative population skew in Chicago's favor: http://www.citylab.com/work/2013/06/americas-top-metros-vent...
Well, we all would. The fact that Chicago is building things like 1871 and UILabs shows they want the image of being a vibrant startup-friendly community but we all know what the true reality is.
Northern Illinois has a extremely valuable legacy in tech, especially in the bio and manufacturing sectors. Think of Motorola, Bell Labs, Teletype, Abbott, Baxter, Sundstrand, ITW, Zenith, Bally, Kraft, Caterpillar, CME, Molex... there's a huge list. But that legacy isn't what's hot and cool with the VC community. Chicago's modus operandi is about going heads-down and getting shit done. But that isn't what's hot and cool with the VC community either.
Pete Koomen was a Google a few years before Optimizely (the post says he got his BS in '06, but that was his MS).
Dan Kador was at Salesforce for a while as well before Keen.io.
Pete Koomen's degree was a typo on my part. I've updated the blog post to reflect the correct info.
All of these programs and events are a huge step in the right direction. I personally did my best to even help some of these programs grow, particularly iFoundry and the group that eventually became Hack Illinois. But the biggest challenge I found was bridging the chasm between this hacker/entrepreneur culture and the existing academic/research culture.
As a premier research university, the UIUC engineering curriculum is heavily focused on the theoretical. In my years there, I really had to go out of my way to obtain some hands-on learning experiences. Those are so important for breeding a hacker/entrepreneur culture. It's how you learn to work with real-world constraints, how to network and collaborate, and how to fail well. A textbook and a Powerpoint lecture just can't teach that.
So the question I pose, to the author and to the readers, is this: How do we change the way students are taught?
Asking universities to teach "hands-on learning" isn't productive; you'll get plenty of that, that's more recent and marketable, from practical work experience. I'd rather the universities go even further in the theoretical direction.
What I got from engineering school wasn't just another 2-3 years of work experience, it was much deeper things like numeracy, learning to write well, lifelong relationships, appreciation for rigor, and a hell of a work ethic. It was a fantastic value for the time and money I put in and it was absolutely worth it.
(UIUC alumnus living/working in SF)
Theory is definitely important, but the number of hands-on/practical courses needs to be increased as well.
Your experience might be different if you're dealing with money guys with no operating experience who trust the Harvard/Stanford pedigree uber alles, second/third-tier startup founders who dropped out because they're "the next steve jobs" and would rather drop acid than finish their degrees, "journalists" writing schlok "content" for valleywag/techcrunch etc. without an iota of fact-checking, and other hilarious SV stereotypes that this area seems to attract in droves. Try not to let it get you down too much. There's more to life that the front page of Techcrunch.
The nice part about Madison is that it isn't just the university, like some are commenting about UIUC. The Ionic framework is based out of Madison, made by two Wisconsin grads. Gener8tor is an accelerator in this city and they're growing. They really do provide good opportunities to founders, and they have funding from State Farm insurance that seems to be steady, so I have hope that things can really go somewhere. Though I have to say that having been around their office and at a few events they really don't feel tech-oriented.
And then the university has their own stuff. To anyone at UW-Madison reading this: avoid them! WARF is a hungry parasite and if you do anything interesting they will do their best to take their perceived share.
1. I am willing to grant that Champaign/Urbana is not the ideal place to live for everyone; however, it affords me the best of everything I want from a community, without a lot of what I perceive as the drawbacks of places like Chicago or SV or other large metro areas. I would not live anywhere else, and I know that others feel the same way that I do; and it is fine if others disagree.
2. (This ought to start a firestorm of comments...) I have worked for three different companies based in SV or SF and have lots of friends still in that area. It has been my personal experience that people there are motivated by money concerns much more than they are in CU. In conversations with my friends there, they say things like, "Come work at XYZ and they'll up your salary by X"; or, "If you come to this startup you'll get tons of stock options"; etc. This is totally my opinion, but I believe that people in SV are so worried about money because they really can't afford to live there unless they make a lot of it. And again, my opinion is that this influences people to move jobs frequently in order to get a bump in pay, a big sign-on bonus, or the hope for a big stock payout. The SV culture encourages frequent moves. I certainly cannot deny that people in CU talk about money, but when my friends here try to pull me away to another job, they often talk about the cool tech they are working on or how much they love the culture of their company, and not about the money. It is because people in Tech in CU can afford to live very well on modest salaries. (My spouse doesn't work and we still live really well.) Again, just my opinion, but I believe that this is the real reason why people stay longer in their jobs in CU. It isn't because they don't have options. (I feel that I have many options, and my options seem to be increasing all the time.) It is because they are not forced to move just to afford to live.
3. Rome wasn't built in a day, and anyone who has been in the community for a while can see that there have been great improvements in our startup culture over the last decade or two. And, just as Rome fell, SV will not be the center of the Tech Universe forever.
4. Related to comments 2 and 3, see the article: http://www.cnbc.com/id/102697372
5. The University has done an amazing amount of good for the community, if only by being one of the major economic engines in CU, and I appreciate that. It isn't their "responsibility" to build a startup community in CU. However, they have done a lot to advance it. The U of I Research Park is a great example of that.
6. A few people in this thread seem to be blaming UIUC for what they perceive as startup culture issues. It takes a lot of hard work from many players (individuals and organizations) to build a great startup community, so if there are failings, stop blaming others and do something about it.
Its very affordable. You want to spend millions on rent or hire your staff?
college town - perfect for those college grads to entertain themselves after work
Hire students from UIUC, Parkland, ISU, and few other campuses around.
Not great restaurants but pretty good variety of cuisines
Chicago is less than 2 hours away by car
no sitting in traffic for hours every day
only drawback is you cant jump companies every 6 months
air connectivity is limited but Bloomington next door has decent options
excellent place to have a family and raise children
Yahoo is increasing its presence in Champaign, so is Intel, Caterpillar, and a few more. I know they are not startups but there is a reason why they are growing there.
EDIT: But yeah, Illinois :(
Additionally, there are some benefits for startups that stay in town. Rent is extremely cheap (you can get your own bedroom in an apartment for ~$300/month) and you get access to a lot of talented students coming out of the university.