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.
A few years ago, I had a SaaS startup in the ATDC but at just about every meeting I was one of the few people in the group capable of coding.
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.
I'm a huge fan of what you guys do at VentureLab, I think it's nothing short of amazing. I'll admit, that first paragraph was a bit of an exaggeration - but I genuinely believe that the large majority of the undergrad population didn't know that startups were an option. I feel like that's a huge issue. We have an amazing support network around the school with VentureLab, ATDC, Hype, etc but the undergrads just don't know about it.
> 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.
Don't get me wrong, I definitely do know about the existing infrastructure set up for startups around Tech. I just don't feel like other undergrads do, and that's my problem. We work with them as closely as we can - we had Frank Moyer (http://frankmoyer.com/) come by most meetings we had at sX. We referred a bunch of teams to Startup Gauntlet (http://www.startupgauntlet.com/) and I know of at least two that went ahead with the program. By no means do we want to do this solo - we genuinely want to help change the culture at Georgia Tech, and there's no reason to re-invent the wheel when there are already so many amazing organizations to help startups at Tech. We're just trying to raise awareness about them, and about startup culture in general.
I had no idea that Tech was so pro-startup when it came into grad school, it's definitely something I'll look into.
Atlanta has been a hub for startups in my field (information security) for a decade & a half, mostly owing to ISSX (now part of IBM, but huge before then). There are lots of little security and network tech companies out there that were originally fed by ISSX.
What I'm feeling is that the large majority of students don't even know it's an option.
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.
> you probably don't have the technical side fulfilled as an undergrad
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.
To used an incredibly cliched example - Zuck and Facebook.
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.
Fresh college grads should always have a range of internships under their belt. Tech has one of the best co-op programs in the country. If you're graduating without interning or co-oping somewhere, you're doing it wrong
I'm an undergrad at GT, and I take issue with this sentiment.
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.
I've got a bone to pick with that class. Every single student who takes it comes out hating programming, and I think that's utter bullshit. At the same time, they're incredibly proud of the boat they've coded in Matlab, and that tells you something crucial about the students at Tech - they love building shit. They love that feeling of accomplishment when they've put hard work into something and it's worked out.
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.
I want to preface this by stating that I have tremendous respect for all the people at EI^2, the folks of VentureLab, the people in ATDC and Flashpoint. I really I owe much of where I am now to you folks.
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:
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.
Who sets a career goal of "making CTO"? Why would anyone want to do that? CTO is what they call you right before they take your commit privileges away.
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".
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 72.0 ms ] threadI 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.
> 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.
I had no idea that Tech was so pro-startup when it came into grad school, it's definitely something I'll look into.
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.
A fresh college grad may be able to design a web product, but let us not confuse this with running a real company.
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.
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.
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
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 was AE 2000-2005...I wonder if we overlapped?)