"A year ago, I’d hardly heard of startups. Neither had just about anyone at Georgia Tech."
Well that was a big jump in assumption within two sentences.
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.
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.
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?)