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.
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:
http://academicvc.com/2012/10/01/drownproofing-2-0/
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.