When I was at Georgia Tech (2004-07) nearly everyone had heard of startups in the CS department, and grad students being involved in machine-learning / data-mining startups was a common summer job, so I'm not sure where this is coming from. Here's one big one cofounded by a professor: http://www.skytree.net/
In my time at GT (06-11), I didn't really hear about startups until senior/super senior year. A few friends got either internships or post-graduation jobs in Tech square, mostly due to their recruitment via the Co-op/Internship office or ugrad research. I always seemed to learn about them after they hired someone though, and not before.
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.
Agreed, when I was at Tech (03-08) startups were all the rage and there were tons of them forming around campus. I think times have probably changed in Atlanta thanks to the financial crisis, and startups are no longer as common.
He should look at the name on the Klaus building and realize that we'd actually heard of startups in the early 1990s and before. The ATDC has even been around for 33 years.
Klaus is a bit of a personal hero. Not saying that no-one had heard of/started a startup, more that the culture at Tech isn't particularly conducive to it.
The Atlanta startup culture is a bit different from the Bay Area. Less consumer internet, more B2B. The investors tend to come from a real-estate, or similar background, and do not always understand technology. That's partly why the bootstrapping/lean startup approach is so critical around here. It's just not worth wasting time trying to get a permission slip from an old rich guy in most cases.
"investors tend to come from real estate" Yowza, you're about 20 years behind the times. Local angel group has 100+ investors, is 15 years old and has invested in probably 60+ companies in tech space by now. 4 GA VC firms are raising new funds, ATV has just created a new accelerator, state of GA has just created a state based $100M fund, Flashpoint has helped raise roughly $30M in 18 months and so on and so on.
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.
That was worded poorly - as far as I've seen, a startup isn't really a viable option for undegrads. Yes, we've definitely had our share of successes, but it's not something that is particularly encouraged, especially outside of CS. I really want to see engineering based startups coming out of Tech. We've got the talent, and we have some amazing hardware hackers but it's incredibly rare to see them start a startup.
I know you're very well intentioned, but I don't think your methods support this. You aren't going to get people making companies in engineering simply by putting them in a room with a few arduinos and macs. And things like "3 day startup" completely miss the complexity that goes along with actual engineering projects and is heavily biased towards generic internet based ideas. You needs something more fundamental to get across what you are trying to do, and I think there are things on campus which are aiding in that. RoboJackets, for instance, has been rather influential in this regards. 2 of our old officers that are still in the Atlanta area are both involved in very successful startups, one of our electrical guys was at YCombinator last year working on a hardware startup, and we regularly have startup job postings go out on our email headers. I'm aiming for this to grow more, and things are slowly being put into action. I think the most fundamental thing you can do to get people to take these kinds of risks is to show them that it's possible to succeed. I'll be posting some stuff on the CS facebook group in the next few weeks dealing with one of our initiatives. If you'd like to talk about this at some point, I'm the treasurer of RJ and my name shouldn't be too hard to find with a bit of googling.
Hey appreciate your thoughts on this matter and would really love to collaborate with you in finding ways to engage with those passionate in hardware/robotics. However, 3 alumni working in startups is hardly influential. I've made an effort to speak with Hunter and although he definitely one of the most intelligent people I've met at Tech, he had to be convinced to go to the YCominbator interview because he had no clue what it was. I'm sure you left out a couple other people in your organization that are involved in entrepreneurship but you are right when it comes to changing the culture to show students that it is possible to succeed. That is definitely the core of our vision.
I'd love to chat. I have no doubt you know more about how to engage the hardware community than me, and I'd absolutely love your thoughts on how we can further encourage engineering startups. Will shoot you an email soon :)
Georgia Tech was a mixed bag during that period if I remember correctly. I fought to keep the ACM chapter relevant to encourage entrepreneurship from 2002 to 2004, but it didn't quite stick way I had dreamed.
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.
VentureLabs is ranked as the #1 early-phase university incubator! (while I no longer have any direct connections, that was a stepping stone that got me to where I am today). I was wondering how the author could be so clueless about the startup culture that already exists at Georgia Tech.
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.
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.
I think you're right with the graduate side of things. During my time (early 2000s) as a CS undergrad at GT I don't remember too much about startups but thinking back I'm not really sure I should have.
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.
Good point, but as an undergraduate from the school of Biomedical Engineering. I can say for sure most undergrads in this building have never realized the possibility of beginning a startup in their career. The startup culture is largely, and almost entirely isolated to the CS department.
A bit of the nature of the beast. CS, EE and to a lesser extent a few other engineering/science disciplines can create something and get it into the market/mvp stage with few hurdles, in most others there can be an enormous number of entrenched interests standing in your way.
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.
My experience as an undergrad in the AE department was thus: you're irrelevant to the professors working on grant projects, and if you're not PHD material well just do your problem sets, finish your degree, then get the hell out. Throw in the absolutely awful adminstrative side, and its an exercise in teaching students how not to take ownership. It seems geared to training worker bees for Big Engineering, and identiying the few suitable for Big Academia.
Then again, its probably changed a lot in the last decade. I started school just after the last tech bubble popped.
The primary reason of Stanford's success is the availability of high risk capital from local angels and VC firms. ATL has no such setup which prevents Tech's startup environment from being like Stanford's. It will remain so for foreseeable future.
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.
Also, most of the ATL companies are bootstrapped and there is no cultural of handing out liberal stock options.
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.
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
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.
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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.
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Interesting post in any case.
Great list. Some awesome companies on that list, and I know some of the co-founders as well. I think it's clear that GT has a startup culture, but they're coming from highly motivated people who are passionate about what they're working on. Having openly available resources to any student openly would be a great start. If something like this were around while I was at Tech, it would have made things a lot easier in terms of networking and connecting with like-minded individuals.
AirWatch was founded by Tech alumni. The company was bootstrapped for 8 years and recently raised a massive 200 M series A round (one of the largest ever rounds).
Doctime is founded by Tech alumni. They are currently based in ATV. I know the founder, used to work with him at AirWatch.
I'd be interested to see if you can rope in people from the non-CS departments at GT. In my time there, my impression was that the culture was dominated by the old-school engineering departments, so there was a definite bent towards working for big corporations (e.g. Lockheed Martin in the city) rather than doing startups.
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.
Wow, you did time at the North Avenue Trade School as well? Small world.
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.
I've spent 7 years in New York. Paying the absurd rents isn't that bad. You don't mind it in your 20s, because it's pretty easy to keep expenses low. I hate what it does to the culture, though.
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.
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".
That's definitely the plan, and it's something I've put a lot of thought towards. I really believe that hackathons are a great way to get people involved. Even if they don't code, a 10 hour bus ride with our hacker community is going to convert anyone :)
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
Georgia Tech ECE alumni here. I think the ECE department students would be on board, and be successful, too. There's lots of opportunity for hardware startups, in my opinion. Little single purpose PCBs seem like they've done just as well lately as clever code.
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.
The engineering side produces entrepreneurs as well, but with a somewhat different culture, with more of a focus on R&D inputs. The style is less of the Silicon Valley one of: go to a hackathon, brainstorm ideas that can be built with <48 hours of R&D, built an MVP over the weekend. There's a bigger focus on finding a nice chunk of uncommercialized but commercial-potential research that could be spun off into a company.
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.
Definitely agreeed. Atlanta's community is great, but Georgia Tech still has some catching up to do. David Cummings is doing absolutely amazing things with ATV and Atlanta Ventures, high hopes there.
Alright, I guess I'm the voice of the GT Establishment here.
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:
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'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'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.
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...
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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.
There are quite a few startups around Atlanta, and many of them involve GT alum. What you're probably feeling is that they're not making things that show up on Hacker News that you're excited about. This comes from the lack of local VC investing in the B2C technologies that get people excited about startups, which in turn comes from a lack of local B2C successes. But honestly, there are few B2C successes anywhere lately. An interesting new thing is more likely to have come from Google or Apple than a new kid on the block.
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.
> What you're probably feeling is that they're not making things that show up on Hacker News that you're excited about.
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.
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.
wow this is eerily similar to what we are doing at Purdue with The Anvil Cowowrking space: http://theanvil.us/ and the BoilerMake hackathon: http://boilermake.org/. Glad to see other students making moves as well. I'll be sure to reach out
When I was at Georgia Tech, I didn't care about startups per se—I just wanted to learn and build stuff. I was very disappointed to learn that, as a mechanical engineering major, I could NOT sign up for a computer science course I wanted to take because it wasn't in my college or curriculum. I also couldn't have access to a machine shop (even with proper training) unless I got a job in one of the labs. I truly had much more freedom in high school, where I had a master machinist helping me with all my side projects on weekends.
So, bravo for going after the administration. They need to let kids actually learn and build shit!
Exactly how I feel - we've been butting heads with the administration for a while now. There are definitely some members who kick ass and who have our back 100%, but as an institution, Georgia Tech is pretty stuck in it's ways. I've got another ~4 years there, so if nothing else, I want to change that by the end of my college career.
When I was at Georgia Tech (graduated '08), I was forced to take CS and EE classes. You could easily get exceptions to prerequisites for classes if you asked, and so I did. Having open access to CS/EE changed my life, and I changed my major.
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.
Exemptions are a thing, my friend. I have never been denied enrollment in a class (tbh I've been granted entry in a few classes that I wasn't even ready for yet). It's just a matter of persistence.
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.
> Exemptions are a thing, my friend. I have never been denied enrollment in a class (tbh I've been granted entry in a few classes that I wasn't even ready for yet). It's just a matter of persistence.
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.
I was at Tech from 2006-2010 in BME. So many senior design projects were being spun out as startups. Inventure also came out while I was there and was a big hit. If you had a good idea or executed on something well, it was probably going to be spun with the help of professors (you had to ask). The pace is definitely different at Tech, and for a major like BME, it was hard to come by free electives let alone free time (especially if you were doing pre-med). I do agree I would have loved to see more of a startup culture, but I think it was already brewing while I was there. I'd have loved to see more programming options offered for BME and other engineering majors beyond CS 1371, so we didn't have to get overrides and permits. CS 1371 basically made everyone shit their pants and left a sour taste of programming, although we needed to use the skills we had learned for future classes.
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 do some work with undergrads who are interested in startup stuff, both at a modestly prestigious private institution and a commuter public university. Data points I have are drawn from several 3DayStartup events, hackathons, daily interactions in labs, and working as a technical mentor to a few teams trying to make a startup. Some observations:
- 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.
I graduated from GT a couple years ago, and I have to agree with everyone who is saying they wish this had been around sooner. I wasn't interested in startups until after I graduated (read: I didn't KNOW I was interested). I always knew that I liked building and creating things, and I always struggled to feel engaged in a majority of my classes. Great job to those who started this. Hopefully all those struggling like I did will find their passion sooner than I was able to.
I love this - wish we had this when I studied at Tech (BS+MS in ECE, over a decade ago). I'm now working on my own startup (outside the US), and was actually thinking to try and meet up with investors in Atlanta. As others mentioned in this thread, ATL is a great city to live in - perhaps it's not as hyped as SF or NYC, but I enjoyed my time there and would love to come back one day. Keep up the good work!
Recent Kennesaw State grad here. Some classmates and I had a few ideas for start ups but didn't have a place to further our knowledge and learn how to get started. This would be great for the Atlanta area I know of other start ups in the area but they usually aren't from college students or recent grads. It would be great to have a place to share ideas with younger people and hack ideas.
You're exactly who we're trying to target. Tech has a bunch of great resources, but nothing that's really entry level. Flashpoint, Startup Gauntlet, ATDC are all great, but there's nothing out there that's going to take in people with ideas and show them everything we have to offer.
Also, we had someone from Kennesaw State drive out to ATL for 3 Day Startup last Spring. Made our day at the hackathon.
I'm at Georgia Tech's ATDC startup incubator [1]. OP/Author should definitely integrate this effort with what the ATDC is doing and take advantage of its available services and resources.
I'd love to network with you guys. Feel free to email me.
Chintan - I'm with VentureLab at Gatech. This post is fantastic! Aswin is a rock-star, and it's great that you are stepping into leadership at StartupExchange. Let's get together next week if you're in town.
Well that was a big jump in assumption within two sentences.