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.
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.
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.