How we're going to change Georgia Tech
chintanparikh.github.io
chintanparikh.github.io
Well that was a big jump in assumption within two sentences.
I am going based upon what I have heard in various startup circle discussions. I am usually the "hacker" in the group of others. I have myself stayed as far away from raising funds as possible. I know I have watched friends in the startup community spend months or years courting the angel investment community, going to dinner theatre (pitch events) and come away empty handed and dejected. Most would be better off just building their MVP and marketing it with every ounce of passion that they put into attempting to raise an Angel round.
One thing lead to another and I ended up bowing out of the full on startup myself and ended up creating a Ruby on Rails development consultancy instead. It has been growing steadily for the last two years and I am pretty happy with this direction given the massive opportunity to work with a variety of startups build their products to test their product/market fit.
In my last 2 years the startup scene seemed to explode. The CS entrepreneurship class had been around for a while, but there was a huge amount of publicity around Titin Tech from the Innovation Competition, and then the announcement of Flashpoint, now this. Maybe I just wasn't as plugged in, but there's a lot of cool things happening now at GT.
The research going on at Georgia Tech is amazing. But its hard to build a startup out of that culture - especially a consumer internet one.
But the best opportunities are usually hard things.
Lots of universities train people to be able to work at startups; but only Stanford (and, distantly behind it, MIT and Harvard) trains people to own them. Very few schools inculcate the confidence, as a 22-year-old with no work history, to walk into an investor's office and ask for a million-dollar seed round. But at Stanford, where seed investment is a graduation present, that's normal to people.
The rest of the country has some fierce talent and there are capable people everywhere, but there are only a few places where it's normal for people to think of being a founder as a logical next step. Merely working at a startup isn't the same thing.
I think this can be overcome. There's a lot of talent outside of a small, privileged echo chamber and there's no good reason why it should be excluded from the highest levels of work autonomy. I'm just pointing things out as they are now.
Also, most of the ATL companies are bootstrapped and there is no cultural of handing out liberal stock options. This greatly reduces the number of early stage investors created due to exit events.
Now, ATL is a great place to bootstrap and start B2B companies. But that requires certain work and life experience.
Valley startups don't hand out liberal options, not anymore. Typical for a 20th employee is around 0.05%, which rarely makes up for what's lost by taking a below-market salary. (Plenty of Tumblr employees cashed out with less than a million.) Almost no one going into the VC-funded world now is going to get rich enough to become an angel investor. That ship sailed about ten years ago.
A fresh college grad may be able to design a web product, but let us not confuse this with running a real company.
Then again, its probably changed a lot in the last decade. I started school just after the last tech bubble popped.
(I was AE 2000-2005...I wonder if we overlapped?)
Then it dawned on me that he's probably sharing the view from the undergraduate school. I only experienced the graduate school at GT, but I could tell that the undergrad experience is dramatically different from the graduate school experience.
As an alum of the graduate school, I can tell you that there are tons of opportunities to turn your research into a commercial venture. GT is very flexible about licensing technologies to outside companies. It amazes me that there can be such a difference between the two bodies of students.
I hope the author can tie his efforts into the existing startup infrastructure and culture. That would be a huge benefit to get more undergraduates involved.
Resources absolutely should be there for those seeking, but I'm not sure pushing a startup culture hard at the undergraduate level is the best thing to do. Those years are for building up the foundations to do all the awesome things that GT people do later in life and short circuiting that with trying to do a startup is probably best left to those who actively want to pursue it. Looking back at my Senior Design semester, I know my attention to other classes that semester wasn't what it should have been as were were working to get our prototypes, had real customers expecting us to deliver, etc.
I had no idea that Tech was so pro-startup when it came into grad school, it's definitely something I'll look into.
Level RF- now Soylent (disclaimer:involved as ex-founder)
ViaCycle -same YC class as LevelRF/Soylent
Paul Stamatiou is a prolific entrepreneur/YC alum.
InstantCab is a YC company started by Tech alums.
--------additional------ Chris Quintero -ME 2011, went on to help start http://bolt.io
Bractlet is a GT alum company that is now in the surge accelerator program in Houston.
CallRail and Design-A-mosaic are both founded by GT alum Kevin Mann.
Robotic dragonflies came out of a kickstarter project.
Titintech came out of GT as well from a Mechanical engineer.(disclaimer:involved in Rice BPC)
One of the first VSats was launched by GT alums- Steve Chaddick who later went on to start Ciena, a massive telecommunications company.
There seems to be a set of people who 'have to be entrepreneurs' and there's a set that 'want to be.' IMHO, The set of people that 'have to be' can be pushed anywhere and don't have as big a concern about coworking spaces,environment, meetups, hackathons etc..
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I myself failed 2 physical product ventures(thermoelectric at JumpStartFoundry and LevelRF at YC) while at GT and also worked for 2 at the ATDC that were both venture backed and had physical technologies.
------------------------------ Interesting post in any case.
Doctime is founded by Tech alumni. They are currently based in ATV. I know the founder, used to work with him at AirWatch.
Also, don't forget FlashPoint... GT's own startup accelerator: http://flashpoint.gatech.edu/
That said, I think Atlanta would be a phenomenal place to do a startup. Good local engineering talent, low cost of living, and solid complement of supporting professional services. I don't know what the VC/funding situation is down there though.
ATL is absolutely booming right now for startups - Atlanta Tech Village, Hype. I feel like VC funding needs to innovate a little, they seem to be a bit stuck in their ways. Cummings is doing a great job though, and he's really giving back to the community
I don't know the situation closer to Atlanta though.
The other common non-big-company route is independent consultant. Lots of engineering alumni run profitable small consulting firms, which seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. However it's usually easier to do that if you work somewhere "in the trenches" for a few years first to build up credibility.
I've worked a little with local VC and they typically seem like they have money to put in but very few vehicles for getting information on where to put it. The startup communication channels aren't there yet, although you'd hope that GT would help to lead the way.
Atlanta is a great place for startups. I've been a part of several here. GT is a great source for new hires. I can't say that I've ever been disappointed with any of the dozen or so new-hire grads that I've worked with from there.
The airport is the busiest in the world and has direct flights to just about everywhere. The culture is a comfortable Southern-friendly mixed with a healthy amount of cultural diversity.
The weather isn't as hot and humid as Texas or Florida, but warm enough to avoid ever having to shovel snow off your driveway.
That said, there's nothing incredible about Atlanta. You'll never have the museum experience of New York, the historic experience of DC, the weather of California, the views of Colorado, or the food of Louisiana. It's got a whole lot of nice, not much bad, but nothing extreme either way.
Then again, it's hard to enjoy that acre of yard when mosquitos are biting the heck out of you. :)
Startups need to direct all of their competitive energies toward the external struggle; they have to support each other and fight the world only. When you have engineers sabotaging each other because you need to make CTO before you can even think about starting a family, you get internal competition that destroys everything. Many of these New York startups are deeply dysfunctional and raise capital on account of founder connections (ex-bankers) rather than merit.
The "journeyman" coders I meet all want to start their own companies. I've never met one that wanted to be a "CTO".
In NYC, I have no trouble believing there are lots of devs who want to make MD before they buy a house or start a family or whatnot. But that's something very different than "CTO".
I'm certainly not going to argue with anyone who says "A year ago, I’d hardly heard of startups. Neither had just about anyone at Georgia Tech." But I'll point out that our early-stage incubator, VentureLab, just got ranked #1 in the frickin' WORLD (out of 150 universities) by UBI. And we've been doing that for 12 years. And ATDC is consistently ranked as Top Ten in the country, and we've been doing that for 33 years. We just graduated our third Flashpoint cohort. So you might want to dig a little more deeply before you throw around "no one" and "never"...
That said, I'm loving the energy and the enthusiasm I'm seeing here. We're major fans of Startup Exchange and the rest of the undergraduate startup scene. I've found that most undergraduates seem reluctant to step into the Centergy building; they feel more comfortable at Hypepotamus. That's cool, we're friends, but don't forget that there's a heck of a lot of resources here in Centergy if you can get past our oh-so-corporate lobby.
Here's a post I wrote a year or so ago about what I'd like to see happen with GT undergraduates:
http://academicvc.com/2012/10/01/drownproofing-2-0/
Finally, a lot of this thread has talked about Atlanta in general. Traditionally, Atlanta hasn't been a great B2C town (although some folks are trying to change that). We do great B2B startups, and we do great hardware startups. There's a lot of the economy that doesn't read Hacker News. You're young; don't limit yourself.
> I've found that most undergraduates seem reluctant to step into the Centergy building; they feel more comfortable at Hypepotamus. That's cool, we're friends, but don't forget that there's a heck of a lot of resources here in Centergy if you can get past our oh-so-corporate lobby. Very true. Let's fix that. I'm meeting with Keith once I get back to Tech. I'd love to grab coffee with you as well and talk about how we can get more undergrads to come by the Centergy building. Heck, I've never been up there.
Love the blog post by the way, and I agree with it 100%. I would absolutely love to work with VentureLab on this. I feel like Georgia Tech has some critical years ahead of it and the more we can get the word out about various resources around Tech, the better.
The work the administration has done in building such well-renowned programs is commendable, but to many on the outside-- a very large subset of students!-- it is esoteric, inaccessible, and consequently meaningless. And beyond that, many simply don't know this system exists at all. I was excited reading your blog post, but by the end of it, I still had no clue what EI2 really is. If EI2 were a startup whose target client is undergraduate students, it would not be making the money that it should. There's something fundamentally wrong with that. You've built a cool product, but for whom?
I don't think we need to "drownproof" students. That's getting too many steps ahead of ourselves. We instead need to instill the entrepreneurial spirit into the average student before he or she will ever care about drowning.
From my (limited) perspective as a student, the problem is ignorance. The resources are already there. The culture is not. The solution is not to create more programs and bundle them in a palatable package. Please don't let those remarkable accolades obscure the obstacles.
That being said, I think your rebuttal missed Chintan's initial premise, which is that Georgia Tech's startup culture is a little underwhelming for the respective technical chops of its student body.
The article is simply one student's (correct) assessment about the present level of entrepreneurial activity at the undergraduate level in Georgia Tech. Talking about how great Flashpoint, ATDC, EI2 are as rebuttal against Chintan's premise is like saying that just because a MacBook Pro has a long battery life, you can go without charging it.
Surely you'd agree that the "build it and they will come" adage is entirely asinine in the context of a startup. Why should it be any different when it comes to communities? The "GT Establishment" has to market itself better and actively engage the entrepreneurial students where they are. In school.
This might seem like a ridiculous thing to ask but VCs and influencers elsewhere in the country do this:
---- Jason Mendelson of the Foundry Group: http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2012/11/new-online-courses-f...
Peter Theil (no explanation needed here) taught CS183:Startup-Stanford http://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup
David Skok teaches Startup Secrets at Harvard's i-Lab http://bostinno.streetwise.co/2012/12/05/some-vcs-blog-micha... ---- I really think that the bottom-up entrepreneurial movement that is taking place at Tech needs to be met with equal vigor from the top.
In the "Drownproofing" article you wrote nearly one year ago, you very clearly articulated some of these problems yourself.
You patently state that "EI2 and its predecessor organizations don’t have a strong history of student engagement." Additionally, you say, "And there are all sorts of funding mechanisms...It’s confusing to me. Imagine the poor student trying to navigate all this!"
What sort of progress has been made since then?
I've heard about the Techstarter initiative (which btw was branded as "funding for researchers") but they've been disappointing. In fact, even the link from the official press release doesn't work: http://www.gatech.edu/newsroom/release.html?nid=212581
For most students nothing has changed since that post was written or even since the release of the Strategic Plan 4 years ago. I'm not saying any of this to be harsh, I'm just trying to keep it honest.
Lets be better than average. Lets strong shooting for mediocrity when we clearly have the potential to be extraordinary. That means investing real time, real effort and real money. Lets collaborate more often, lets communicate more frequently and let make to finally centralize those resources.
Repectfully, Aswin
Georgia Tech is following the Stanford model for building local business, which focuses on spinning out new technologies as B2B startups. That happens at the graduate level. Some of them are good, but they're heads down working and not drumming up popular interest. And since they're busy working, the only way to know about them or get a job with them is to have a personal connection to them. Compared to senior high frequency trading or missile guidance engineers, undergraduates might as well be high schoolers who can't program, so it really helps to prove your salt by completing and documenting technical projects. Theoretically you do this in those expensive classes, but sadly we can't trust those anymore.
My advice to undergraduates is thus to build something more difficult than you at first think that you can complete, and write a couple of blog posts about what you have done. You'll learn a lot in the process, and you'll meet interesting people along the way. It might even turn into a startup. If you instead set out to "learn rails and do a startup", my prediction is that you'll slowly learn that most people talk a big game, web programming is more annoying and complicated than difficult, and making money is hard; all of which I can convince you of in 5 minutes.
Also, don't ever say "rockstar" unless you're shredding a guitar in front of a sold out stadium.
I disagree. What I'm feeling is that the large majority of students don't even know it's an option. Especially when you move out of CS. I've heard people with great ideas for products who never did anything with them because they had no idea how to. That's what we aim to fix. If someone wants to build something, and start a startup, they sure as hell should be able to. Georgia Tech has the resources out there, with VentureLab, ATDC, Flashpoint, etc, but you can't keep throwing money and programs at something and expect the culture to change. You need dedicated, motivated students for that.
> My advice to undergraduates is thus to build something more difficult than you at first think that you can complete, and write a couple of blog posts about what you have done.
I completely agree. It's an incredibly rewarding process.
> If you instead set out to "learn rails and do a startup", my prediction is that you'll slowly learn that most people talk a big game, web programming is more annoying and complicated than difficult, and making money is hard; all of which I can convince you of in 5 minutes.
Everything you say there is completely correct, but I'd argue it's a very valuable experience, and you even if/when you fail with that first startup, you come out with a tonne of skills and valuable insight. Maybe the first time around you didn't do any customer discovery. The second time around, you'll make damn sure there are customers before you build. And really, how many successful startup founders make it the first time. If you're going to fail, it's a hell of a lot better to fail in college where you have a support network to fall back on, and a backup plan if you absolutely can't handle it.
Honestly, at that level it kind of isn't. If you don't agree, you probably also think that high schoolers would benefit from starting businesses, which suggests more that you're a businessman among engineers than that engineers should be learning to run businesses. There are two sides to a successful startup, business and technical, and post-bubble you probably don't have the technical side fulfilled as an undergrad. Failing because you have a half baked implementation looks a lot like failing because you didn't find the right customers, so now you learned the wrong lesson.
The second time around, you'll make damn sure there are customers before you build.
This means your first startup was wasted because you weren't even thinking about the most basic aspects. You didn't learn anything other than that you started off clueless, which a mentor would have saved you from.
I'd argue it's a very valuable experience, and you even if/when you fail with that first startup, you come out with a tonne of skills and valuable insight.
You'll learn a lot from a failed startup, but I don't think that you'll learn as much as if you worked for a startup instead. Learning by direct experiment is less efficient than learning from someone else's mistakes, which is the whole reason you're at a university to begin with.
You would probably be better served by a weekly study of actual startups - how they began, what they created, how they ended, and invite local founders (business and technical) to speak. Combine that with a non-profit technical project that delivers a product and tracks adoption but avoids the requirements of profitable business and you'll impress the community while building a résumé that will help you raise VC when the time comes.
Anyone can throw pasta at the wall; Tech can do better than that.
I completely disagree. To used an incredibly cliched example - Zuck and Facebook. Let's just theoretically say that Georgia Tech has a Zuck, who has this great idea and the capability to build it. if people are saying "At [an undergrad] level it kind of isn't [an option]", you just killed what could have been an amazing product. Undergrads have the technical skills required, there is absolutely no denying that. And if they don't, they'll go off and learn them. It's 2013, MOOCs are everywhere. You can learn whatever the hell you want with enough dedication.
> This means your first startup was wasted because you weren't even thinking about the most basic aspects. You didn't learn anything other than that you started off clueless, which a mentor would have saved you from.
I never mentioned not having a mentor. I think it's incredibly important to have a mentor, and we're pushing that as hard as we can with Startup Semester
> You'll learn a lot from a failed startup, but I don't think that you'll learn as much as if you worked for a startup instead. Learning by direct experiment is less efficient than learning from someone else's mistakes, which is the whole reason you're at a university to begin with.
Completely agree with this. We're building ties with local ATL startups and hooking up students who want an internship with these startups. Realistically, it's a terrible idea to have everyone start a startup, and I think that's what you think our goal is. It absolutely isn't. We just want to raise awareness around the fact that working for/starting a startup is a valid option for an undergrad.
A poor example. Zuckerberg was very lucky that he stumbled onto something that his modest PHP and design skills didn't kill, and eight years and 5,000 employees later Facebook still doesn't make enough money (it's trading at 10 times the normal P/E). Every couple days someone wins the lottery, but it's foolish to make a profession out of playing.
Undergrads have the technical skills required, there is absolutely no denying that.
Respectfully, they don't. They can build things, but they aren't at the level that the public currently expects from our industry. Joining a startup with seasoned engineers gives you more realistic and productive feedback than the average user is able to provide.
We just want to raise awareness around the fact that working for/starting a startup is a valid option for an undergrad.
This is excellent, and why people are paying attention.
So, bravo for going after the administration. They need to let kids actually learn and build shit!
At the same time, reading "Hackers and Painters" and getting involved with the Georgia Entrepreneur Society, which encouraged startups on campus, changed the rest of my life.
Georgia Tech is a difficult place to deal with, but it does teach you lessons outside of the technical. Access to resources was there, you just had to fight tooth and nail to get it. That lesson in particular has served me well.
I love what these people are doing though. Clough ULC is incredible compared to what Skiles was, and with groups like these, it could really transform learning at GT for the better.
I hear you loud and clear—I should have kept at it. Unfortunately, I gave up after a couple of dead end phone calls :/
> I love what these people are doing though. Clough ULC is incredible compared to what Skiles was, and with groups like these, it could really transform learning at GT for the better.
Holy crap yes, Skiles was such an inhospitable hell hole. And I also love what these groups are doing; I wish there had been more activity in the arena when I was an undergrad there.
So, in other words, they love programming, they just don't know it yet. The intro class for CS absolutely needs to be something that gets students to build. That alone would go a long way in changing the culture at Tech.
- The technical know-how varies widely among teams in undergrad, and web technologies seem to be somewhat ignored at the prestigious school: though they are slowly getting better coverage, the fact is that the curriculum is really better for more traditional computer-science topics and things related to systems and computer engineering. The commuter school offers somewhat more vocational training (MIS/CS/ITish stuff not so theoretical), so the webdev talent there seems a bit higher.
- The commuter school seems to have a bit more business hustle than the prestigious university. The students there seem to instantly grasp that revenue is an important thing, and have ideas which would appeal to the mass market a bit better. Conversely, for the really hard technical problems (not webdev stuff, but hard engineering and systems and math) the university students have an edge.
- There are way, way, way too many teams (mostly at the prestigious university) that seem preoccupied with solving problems that only apply to affluent college undergrads. Worse, many ideas are adaptations of research or design projects which are "Let's build this thing cheaply for the third world", and they lack the skill (usually) to explain why that would be a lucrative investing opportunity.
- At the accelerator for the prestigious university (now finishing its first summer round) some of the undergrad teams seemed to have trouble making the mental shift from "this is a school project like all the other ones I've done before" to "oh god this is a real business there is no rubric to follow i need to start hustling".
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I'd be interested in hearing what others' experiences are doing similar work. I suspect that areas (say, Stanford, MIT, etc.) with more VC background probably have much different cultures.
Also, we had someone from Kennesaw State drive out to ATL for 3 Day Startup last Spring. Made our day at the hackathon.
I'd love to network with you guys. Feel free to email me.
I've been to a couple of their meetings and was impressed that they're doing some things the right way.
Harold.solomon@venturelab dot gatech dot edu