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Comment by ghc | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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