Million Dollar Carrot Dangled As St. Louis Redefines Itself In Start-Up Space | Hacker News Reader

Million Dollar Carrot Dangled As St. Louis Redefines Itself In Start-Up Space

forbes.com

42 pointsthecoffman29 comments

The opening line:

"When you think of technology start-ups, a small cluster of cities comes to mind – Silicon Valley, Seattle, Austin and Charlotte."

Charlotte?? I thought Raleigh-Durham was bad for startups - Charlotte has to be worse. And where is the mention of New York City? Strange perspective. Maybe someone from Charlotte can shed light on their Ive league status.

Raleigh-Durham has quite the burgeoning startup scene, but I don't know anyone (except maybe Charlotte fanboys) who would say Charlotte has a better tech-startup scene. The RTP area is at least sometimes acknowledged by non-locals, but I've never heard anybody mention Charlotte as a startup hotbed (well, until now).

The article touches on this, but the real reason St. Louis could be a great place to start a company is because it has one of the most underrated Universities in the country. Wash U attracts very talented students to St. Louis, but because the school doesn't have much name recognition, very few tech companies recruit there. When I was at Wash U, the best tech jobs at the career fair were (in order): Microsoft, Raytheon, and General Mills. Unless things have changed dramatically in the last five years, I think it's safe to say that there's not much competition if you're trying to hire developers there.

Combine that with the low cost of living, and St. Louis might be the easiest place in the country to hire talented young people.

Ok, I'll bite. What would be the most effective way for my company to recruit at WUSTL, bearing in mind that we'd be relocating people from STL to Chicago (or NYC or SFBA, if that's what they wanted).

We've got WUSTL people on staff, and I'm sold on the caliber of its grads, but direct-to-school recruiting has been a dead-end for us at other schools.

> What would be the most effective way for my company to recruit at WUSTL

As a recent (Spring 2012) graduate of the WUSTL School of Engineering, I would highly recommend that you contact the Career Center[0] for opportunities to participate in career fairs and register as an employer on CareerLink[1], WUSTL's career website. The Career Center pushes CareerLink hard with students, so if you post jobs on there, there's a good chance you'll get some bites.

I attended a career fair just this spring, and it was packed with students - there were sometimes lines up to 10 people deep just to talk with industry representatives. Don't give up so quickly on direct-to-school recruiting.

You should also look into offering summer internships for current students. IIRC, WUSTL will match whatever you pay interns, making it less of a financial burden for you, while still making it worth the student's while. This is another way to grow your "reputation" on campus.

Finally, the students may find it easier to connect with an alum - get your WUSTL grads involved in the recruiting process.

0: http://careercenter.wustl.edu/

1: http://careercenter.wustl.edu/tools/careerlink/Pages/default...

For engineering, Michael Chapin [1] is who you want to speak with at the WU career center.

[1] http://careercenter.wustl.edu/people/Pages/mchapin.aspx

I think that srunni's answer is probably a good start, but I'd also add another approach. Until recently, the Wash U CS program was run with a heavy focus toward academics rather than industry. As a result, most of the really talented students weren't really going to career fairs, they were instead looking for interesting research positions. It's possible that things have changed since I left (there's a new dean and department head), but I'd guess it's still about the same.

If that's the case, you really need a way to reach those top tier students. Do you have any positions that would seem intellectually rigorous and interesting? If so, I'd find a professor with relevant interests and shoot them an email saying you're looking for a top-tier intern and that you have some really cool problems for them to work on. Some professors are obviously more industry-friendly than others, but in my experience, there are at least a few who would probably be willing to help.

Another option would be to host an event at Wash U. I'm not entirely sure how this works from a logistical standpoint, but it's common at Wash U for companies to reserve rooms for different types of recruiting events. Some companies might host hack-a-thons. Some might do giveaways. EA did a presentation on how video games get made. Those events generally get a lot more attention from the top tier students than the career fair booths, and professors often promote them at the end of class. I'd guess that contacting the Career Center would be your first step if you want to set something like that up.

Hope that helps.

The best programmers I've worked with at WashU come out of the operations research classes in the Systems Engineering department (disclaimer: I'm a SSE senior there). The classes emphasize algorithms, programming, and math, and the graduates get swallowed up by consulting firms. I love going from a verbal problem to the chalkboard where it's described in perfect mathematical set theory to MATLAB / GAMS / Python as we formulate a solution.

My favorite OR classes are when we come in and reverse engineer a popular internet service (e.g. starting with Google Maps, and spending a week going from integer programming to linear programming to heuristics as we iterate through better methods).

I detailed WUTE [1] in my last comment, but it is one of the best tools for direct recruiting. Stan, the President, does a great job of keeping the correct type of members and managing company requests.

[1] http://wute.wustl.edu

I don't know anything about WUSTL, but I had similar issues with my local University, which has a great CS department, but we found the normal channels too complex.

We contacted the University ACM chapter and threw them a party -- pizza, wings, XBox, music, etc. Told them to bring resumes and had enough of our engineers around to answer questions. It was fun and we got our hire.

And the whole area around WUSTL is quite nice. The Delmar Loop is reminiscent of Harvard Square.

Harvard Square isn't a warzone at night. Central West End is more like Harvard Square.

It isn't well known in tech partly because it doesn't have a very strong engineering focus. While other departments are seeing incredible growth and development, the school of engineering is relatively quiet. It simply hasn't been a priority when huge grants for health and biomedical sciences are ripe for the picking.

There was a good entrepreneurial bent at the school, but in remarkably traditional industries like retail and small-scale supply chaining.

I would love to see more tech innovation focus at the school. Might make me more willing to read those alum letters.

> While other departments are seeing incredible growth and development, the school of engineering is relatively quiet. It simply hasn't been a priority when huge grants for health and biomedical sciences are ripe for the picking.

It also doesn't help that the Department of Biomedical Engineering has been growing like crazy, both at the graduate and undergraduate levels - the Spring 2012 (undergraduate) graduating class sizes for each department in the School of Engineering were as follows:

    Biomedical Engineering: 100
    Computer Science & Engineering: 35
    Electrical Engineering: 18
    Systems Science & Engineering: 23
    Chemical Engineering: 32
    Civil Engineering: 3
    Chemical Engineering: 56
    Information Management: 3

Interest in biomedical (and, to a lesser degree, chemical) engineering simply outstrips interest in any other engineering discipline (and interest is still growing - the graduating class size of 2016 will probably be at least 150 for biomedical), and the School of Engineering doesn't want to fix something that isn't broken. There's nothing wrong with biomedical engineering, but if other departments, such as CS or EE, want to grow, they'll have to take the initiative on their own, because the School of Engineering as a whole is happy with the way things are trending right now.

Actually, I've met recently with the Dean of Engineering about encouraging more entrepreneurship from undergrad engineering students. It's a top priority and there will be related initiatives coming in the fall.

Biomed is so popular because so many students go to WashU for undergrad to be premed and then switch to other majors later--biomed being the best premed choice of the engineering disciplines.

> Biomed is so popular because so many students go to WashU for undergrad to be premed and then switch to other majors later--biomed being the best premed choice of the engineering disciplines.

Undoubtedly, many students who are initially in biomedical engineering switch to other majors. However, the data I posted above was the graduating class sizes. So even after all those people who switch to other majors have left, biomedical engineering has a plurality of students.

As an entering WUSTL Senior, I affirm your statements. The WUTE [1] club is a chill gathering of the hacker-types at WashU. We have a speaker come in from a local company every couple weeks, and the deal is that they have to write a check that covers pizza for us the meeting. Apparently we receive so many speaker requests that this is how we meter them - pizza money. We get the higher-ups from companies, ranging from the bootstrapped startup down the street to Jim McKelvey, using us both as a focus group and as a hiring source. The group is fairly underground, but those that are in it know their stuff and are dedicated members.

[1] http://wute.wustl.edu

very few tech companies recruit there

"What's a tech company?" -- me, at graduation from WashU, circa 2004. Seriously, it was not on our collective radar screen, even in the engineering department. There was one girl from my CS class flown out to Silicon Valley to interview with $HOUSEHOLD_NAME and we all felt that was really exotic.

You went to Wash U? Cool stuff. If you're ever back it'd be great to hear Bingo Card stories at the Wash U Tech Entrepreneurs student group http://wute.wustl.edu/

I'm a wee bit far from St. Louis these days. If you want to do something virtual like a Skype call, email me a few dates and I'll make it happen.

The comments suggesting Wash U's CS program has (too much of) an academic slant have a point but also miss it entirely. In my experience, the academic is certainly emphasized over the pragmatic (for example, lots of talk about algorithmic complexity but zero mention of testing or version-control). That isn't in-and-of itself a problem, it's just a mistake in the order-of-operations. I needed a lot of real experience to motivate the academic in me.

In college, you couldn't pay me to read cutting edge CS literature because I was sure the academics were never going to teach me anything practical. Fast-forward five years and I'm bored of what I was doing and interested in the same hard problems academics are. (Of course, I'm coming to worse but occasionally good-enough solutions.)

It'll be good for Saint Louis and Wash U to have an injection of that context earlier because it might motivate the academic side of CS early enough for students with a couple of years left to give more of a shit.

Sounds great. Now where are the Who's Hiring posts/comments for St. Louis?

I'd love to see St Louis start to develop a tech startup scene.

Low cost of living, really cool neighborhoods and lots of smart programmers at stodgy big companies. It seems like the city just needs some capital & a few experienced tech entrepreneurs to get it going.

That being said, I don't know of any Wash U CS grads that stayed in St Louis for startups - they all headed for the coasts (me included.) Hopefully that'll change over time.

Hey Philip, I'm working with the WUTE group leaders to (hopefully) launch this fall an extension of the group called WUTE-VC where we can bring in VCs and entrepreneurs to talk about the fundraising process from both sides of the table. Sounds like you'll be out and about, but let me or someone with WUTE know who in CS might be interested. Thanks!

As a college student and St. Louis native, this really excites me. I wish all the startups in these programs the best of luck.

Hey! I'm an Associate Partner at Cultivation Capital, one of the venture funds mentioned in the article. I run an all-night programming Meetup called Code til Dawn (http://www.meetup.com/allnightlong/), next one is on Friday night if you want to come hang out and talk shop.

I was going to drop a mention for Code til Dawn, but you beat me to to it, Israel. Cool to see St. Louis get some Hacker News love...

The STL startup/tech scene is getting better every month. Join us!

http://startlouis.com

http://stljs.org

Coming soon... http://istl.co :-)

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