Is it still possible in today's Academia setting to conceive a company like Google without oweing anything to the institution in which it was created? It looks like the first version of Google was even hosted on Stanford's computers.
I heard if you work for a company while also developing a startup depending on the contract the company can claim they own the startup - even if you were working on it at home with your computer you bought with your own money and off the clock for them.
Stanford didn't own Google, they owned the PageRank patent, which they licensed to Google in return for equity.
Do they get paid to do this sort of stuff too? I know I heard of people working in like the library to help pay down their loans. Just never really thought of colleges owning IP. So just a bit of a surprise to me.
Undergraduate students get scholarships for doing research, grad students do research as part of their studies and professors are usually researchers as well.
https://www.thenation.com/article/universities-are-becoming-...
Undergraduate students generally are not employed by the university and are not required to sign IAAs, so they keep the rights to their own inventions. (Though there can be some tricky situations where significant university resources are used.)
I was a Stanford grad student in the 1980s when these policies were still being worked out. There were cases of grad students being abused by the commercial interests of their professors before the university clamped down. These abuses included postponing the publication of results which could delay graduation or an academic career. Now profs and students can only spend 20% of their time on commercial interest or should take a leave of absence and leave Stanford facilities if they want to work more. The just retired Stanford President did such when creating his RISC computer company MIPS. Also you can only delay publication one year.