Reaching for Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

Reaching for Silicon Valley

nytimes.com

95 pointswallflower13 comments

The analysis is a bit off in a way that's relevant to the narrative. At least when I was there, nobody at GT had Stanford on their radar. Georgia Tech is a Big Industry kind of place. The perceived competitor is MIT, not Stanford. The traditional engineering fields (chemical, mechanical, aerospace) dominate and the links to industry are places like Lockheed or Boeing, not Google or Yahoo. The net result is that GT is a conservative and somewhat bureaucratic sort of place. Unsurprisingly, the administration had a hard time with someone who played fast and loose.

I agree, and I think that's true with startup / spinoff ambitions as well. The perceived peers aren't really Stanford+Valley, but rather the clusters of engineering/biotech/etc. spinoffs that top engineering schools accumulate (UT, UIUC, MIT, etc.). Those tend to have less of a "do whatever you want" view, and more of a view that spinoffs are good, but need to take place within a set of rules that ensures that public money and payroll isn't being abused.

I took the article to mean they were "reaching for Silicon Valley" in the sense that folks at the top (e.g., the Board of Regents or whomever is responsible for managing GT's endowment) were interested in establishing the kind of reputation for public/private collaboration that Stanford is known for, not necessarily that Stanford was constantly on the minds of Georgia Tech's students and faculty or that there was kind of "Stanford envy" at Georgia Tech.

My point is that even if the administration, understandably wants to model Stanford in ways, the students and faculty don't see Stanford or Silicon Valley as the model. The model is quite consciously MIT. It's a place where chairs are endowed by Boeing and Lockheed and getting a DARPA grant is more on people's minds than getting VC funding. Those affinities with traditional Big Industry drive the culture at GT.

The article title appears to be a clear attempt to bait people into reading by making some connection to silicon valley.

Mention of Silicon Valley comes way down in the article and the point they almost seem to be making is how whatever was done wrong wouldn't have been a problem if GT was more like Stanford.

In any case try and think of what the title of the article would be if not the one listed? "Academic at Georgia Tech's house raided?"

I tend to agree with your point that the title is bad. Techmeme has the same article on their front page and the title is: "Case of Georgia Tech professor illustrates risks in taking university research commercial" which pretty accurate.

I won't say the article is wrong exactly, but I barely heard Stanford uttered in my time at Georgia Tech. MIT was the competition and the role model. I graduated a few years before this incident happened, but I would be surprised if the entrepreneurial climate improved much.

Like Chris Klaus, I dropped out to start my first company, as did several others in my year. Unlike Chris Klaus, I returned to finish my degree, but entrepreneurial spirit was not high on the priority list at the school and I was now an outsider.

Doing research on a massive scale was always the goal at Tech, so I did what everyone else who wanted to start companies did: I moved elsewhere (Cambridge) after graduating.

Georgia Tech is meh for entrepreneurship.

-GT Grad

It is improving. GT Startup Exchange went from nonexistent to a pretty big organization in a year.

-GT Student

I never went to GT. I have hanged out with the Tech Square folks of different stripes. Stanford and Silicon Valley might not be mentioned among the student populous in general, but among the crowd that are actually in the Tech Square building (the Centergy building), there were a lot more entrepreneurial folks, many of them not students or faculty. There were comparisons to Silicon Valley. There were complaints about conservative Georgia investors.

Tech Square isn't physically located near the rest of the main campus. You had to cross a bridge over the I-85/I-75 canyon. I knew folks who had their startups hosted in that building, as well as others who show up for the Ruby meetup there. These folks were not thinking about big industry, they were thinking about VCs, valuations, MVPs, etc. I remember hearing many of them talk, way back in 2007, about the lack of interest in high tech startups in general.

The sentiment this professor reported in the articles were things I have heard echoed among the folks hanging out there.

It does not surprise me at all that the main student population are not aware of this. For example, as popular as the Atlanta Ruby User's Group is, we hardly get any GT students who show up there.

I suppose you wouldn't realize it if you didn't go to Tech, but it would be strange if any Tech students weren't well acquainted with Tech Square. The school bookstore is there and we all had lots of classes in buildings there.

The fact that none of us talked about or knew about companies in that particular building, but were well acquainted with GTRI's building on 14th, speaks volumes.

In fact, in my time being part of the Georgia Entrepreneur Society crowd (which associated with people like Klaus), we never became acquainted with companies in that building either (circa 2005-2007).

I've seen a similar phenomenon in other universities trying to encourage entrepreneurship, including Yale with its Science Park initiative and Harvard with its Innovation Lab. My personal feeling is that university-sponsored entrepreneurship is doomed from the start. University-sponsored incubators in particular seem bad at producing good companies.

Seriously. I was there 2002-2007 and I perceived no inkling of any tech startup type stuff. It's where the College of Management building is and that's the only association I perceived.

My experience as an entrepreneur at Georgia Tech has been that it is a great place to start a B2B startup, especially if it falls within one of the verticals the Atlanta investment and startup community has "adopted" such as security.

It can also be a good place to start other kinds of B2B startups, but it takes more work in some areas than it would in the valley.

On the plus side, Georgia Tech and ATDC give you access to great advisors who, with no expectation of compensation, have provided me and others I know with excellent advice on everything from hiring to sales. Multiple startups started at Tech as Pindrop Security and RideCell / InstantCab (disclaimer: founder) have bootstrapped at Tech, sold their first few customers and then raised money from some of the best investors on both coasts. And yes, the cost of living, and therefore the cost of running your company is much lower than it would be in the valley.

On the minus side, Georgia Tech and Atlanta are both tough places to start consumer startups and that will take time to change. It is tougher to raise money for all kinds of startups, save perhaps security, than in Silicon Valley. There is definitely a higher risk averseness amongst local investors and they expect a higher level of control on the companies they invest in. Unfortunately for them, as PG says, some of the best ideas are frighteningly ambitious. It's hard for an ecosystem to have multiple large exits without funding a few of these. Without large exits being reinvested locally, the virtuous circle takes longer to take off. Also, given that more and more west coast investors believe that startups are better off with founders at the steering wheel, entrepreneurs are unlikely to compromise on that just to raise money locally.

I hope Atlanta and Georgia Tech will continue to improve as a birthing place for all kinds of startups. I am definitely curious about what happened here. If, as the article suggests, the crux of the matter lies in $50K worth of chips being sent to Korea - the reaction from the University and the GBI seems quite extreme.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com