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 remain amused by the casual bigotry exhibited by so many Silicon Valley denizens that OF COURSE all the smart, motivated, ambitious entrepreneurs will move to the Valley. Most of them would be incensed if a colleague displayed a comparable level of bigotry about race, or sex, or national background, or the rest of the litany. But it's socially acceptable -- at least west of I-5 -- to dismiss 99% of the country as full of failures. "Sure, maybe they did great in AAA ball, but they couldn't make it in the Big Show."
Which has led to the Valley being a hothouse of artificially-compressed geniuses building products for each other instead of for the real world.
But not everyone is a brilliant 23-year-old willing to share a flophouse with three other geniuses while coding 20 hours a day. In the real world, people have spouses... kids... mortgages... elderly parents... heck, maybe they just like sweet tea! There are all sorts of reasons that they won't move to the Valley, even if they have plenty of talent to compete at that level.
I submit that looking for the best of the best among that 99% of the country is a heck of a good way to make money. It's harder, because you can't sit on Sand Hill Road and watch the universe rotate around you. But with some hustle and some brains, there's plenty of opportunity for non-Valley entrepreneurs, and non-Valley investors, to do very very well.
I'm not going to try to embed a picture here on HN, but check out the link and let me know if you want a button! (I think Fred Wilson would wear one; I doubt that Paul Graham would.)
It's not bigotry at all; it's just the logical conclusion from a set of premises. If Silicon Valley is provably the best place for a technology startup to be, then the people who want their companies to succeed the most will go there. The factors you mention are things that affect one's motivation to do anything it takes to succeed. No one is saying people who don't move to Silicon Valley are untalented. The comment you replied to specifically said that, so I don't see how the talent issue was brought back up.
> But not everyone is a brilliant 23-year-old willing to share a flophouse with three other geniuses while coding 20 hours a day. In the real world, people have spouses... kids... mortgages... elderly parents... heck, maybe they just like sweet tea! There are all sorts of reasons that they won't move to the Valley, even if they have plenty of talent to compete at that level.
In short, they have other priorities. (BTW - Lots of Valley folk are not 23-year-olds.) Maybe that won't matter, but ....
No one is saying that folks can't succeed elsewhere or that there aren't opportunities elsewhere. (FWIW, I've found that people who attack strawmen are fighting at the level that they think they can win....) Instead, they're saying that the valley has some unique properties wrt certain kinds of success.
If those properties or that kind of success isn't relevant or important to you, the valley isn't for you. There's nothing wrong with making other choices, but there are consequences. If you like the ones somewhere else, go for it.
Other people may have looked at the unfavorable characteristics and conclude "fuel cells are bad." That would be sloppy and stupid.
My message would be that "HYDROGEN fuel cells are bad, especially for automotive use." I like fuel cells in general; my employer has some great work going on with methanol fuel cells.
As far as the quotes being out of context... you've got Google, right there in your toolbar. Look 'em up.
I have no problem with your content (with the exception that you failed to mention which technologies COULD be commercialized rather easily). I believe you gave all accurate information. I just didn't like your presentation.
So some critiques, if I may:
1) Slide 2 - Why? I know you're trying to demonstrate your credibility, but this just seems like bragging. Who cares if you achieved highest honors.
2) Slides 2,6,9,13,14,15,19,22,28,29,37 - waaaaay too verbose. If you came to give a seminar at my school, I would have been drawing stick figures by now. Brevity is key.
3) I still stand by my criticism of your quotes. They add absolutely nothing to your presentation. What are they supposed to accomplish? And I assumed you were giving this talk in front of a group of people...so which toolbar are you referring to...the one on my iphone?
Precisely. (Thank you for chiming in. I'm the author of the presentation in question, and am completely surprised to find it here on Hacker News nearly two years after publication!)
The best solution seems to be plug-in hybrid cars with batteries. They move the power generation problem from cars to power plants, where nuclear, solar or some unforeseen future technology can handle it. More importantly, you can actually buy them today, and they can fall back on gasoline when exceeding the range of their batteries, so drivers don't have to worry about getting stuck like they do with all-electric cars. If the US automotive fleet were entirely converted to plug-in hybrids, then the remaining demand for gasoline would be small enough to supply with synthetic fuel, which can in principle be made carbon-neutral as well.
In the near term, plug-in hybrids with flex-fuel engines, plus lots and lots of nuclear power plants, followed by space-based solar power satellites in the medium term. Fusion in the long term (defined as "after I'm dead, dammit").
Plenty of startup ideas, plenty of money, plenty of entrepreneurs in Atlanta. Not enough venture capital, but that's becoming less and less relevant to many classes of startups.
Practice in front of a live audience... even if just your roommates. Videotape yourself presenting and watch it (painful). I just put some points on presentation materials at http://academicvc.blogspot.com/2008/04/raising-capital-part-... and that might be interesting. Try to have a chance to test out the technology the night before... I know you use a Mac, so that eliminates a bunch of potential failure modes, but still..
Yes. My "main" desktop machine died several months ago. I popped out the hard disk, put it in an external FireWire enclosure, and I plug it into my MacBook Pro when I'm at home. So now I'm 100% reliant on the laptop, and perfectly happy. I'll buy peripheral machines (iPhone, tablet, etc.), but I don't plan to buy another desktop.
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.