How Colleges Can Better Nurture Startups

While I was in undergrad for my CS degree at NC State University, I took an "Innovating in Technology" course. We were split into groups and tasked with coming up with a startup idea/concept, and then spent the remainder of the course working on it. Throughout the semester, our professor provided thought experiments, examples, and principles we should keep in mind.

In the middle and near the end of the semester, an angel investor came in to hear our ideas, and provided helpful feedback for our ideas and presentations.

While this course wasn't as extensive as the programs the article discusses, I think it was a great intro to entrepreneurship, and I found it to be the most helpful and influential course I took in undergrad. Personally, I would like to see the CS degree at NCSU have some more classes on the subject.

I generally advise founders of web startups simply to ignore universities' supposed IP claims. If you're really worried, rewrite all the code; it will probably turn out better. But it's about 1000x more likely that founders will hose themselves by not delivering something users love than that they will and their university will then crush them with a lawsuit, so if you're going to worry about something, worry about the former.

Previous employers are another matter. They can be adversarial, so you want to be more careful about IP with them. But universities are not going to sue you about software IP. I can't think of a single case of that happening.

I went to cal and work in silicon valley filled with students from stanford. It hurts me. Especially because I am constantly impressed with the quality of the students that come out of stanford. The students I've interviewed coming out from Cal are intelligent and have learned CS but the Stanford students have so much real world experience. Because of their internships they learn about relevant technologies. Because they understand relevant technologies, they can build fun little web apps in their spare time. Fun little apps like "Zombies". Also, the grading system is significantly more lenient. As such, a student can afford to spend a little time learning javascript instead of determining if a problem reduces to a k-SAT problem. So that's my magic formula for encouraging startups (and the startup mentality). Bright Kids + Technology + free time to fool around. I don't think you need a class in that.

one of the best things colleges (and entrepreneurs) need to do is realize when a startup idea is beyond the realm of a classroom. it can cause severe conflict of interest and be inhibitive at best.

we're currently having trouble with our entrepreneurial senior design because a) they don't understand a software startup and b) they are first and foremost concerned with the pedagogical value of being an entrepreneurship advisor/instructor.

examples: we're forced to have 8 underling employees in our already 5 person group (13 person startup) and forced to do a startup pitch to Plexus engineers (they give the program money) as the final task of the year.

our fault not reading between the lines, make sure the mystique of the program doesn't shadow the fact that you have misaligned interests