What colleges have startup mentality?
12 comments
I can't speak for other schools, but the University of Maryland is working hard to become a "startup school." A few examples:
At least five professors in our electrical engineering department have companies.
The business school has successful entrepreneurs that can meet with students (in any major) trying to start companies.
There's a whole institute at the university called MTECH which has successful entrepreneurs and investors who help startups get off the ground. They have office hours once a month so if you impress them they can help introduce you to the right people.
At least five professors in our electrical engineering department have companies.
The business school has successful entrepreneurs that can meet with students (in any major) trying to start companies.
There's a whole institute at the university called MTECH which has successful entrepreneurs and investors who help startups get off the ground. They have office hours once a month so if you impress them they can help introduce you to the right people.
I'm going into UMD, majoring in Computer Science, in the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Honors College next year. Any recommendations for someone interested in getting into the startup scene at Maryland? I'm probably going to apply for Hinman CEOs for junior/senior year, and I've been researching MTech and the Tech Entrepreneurship minor.
My advice would be to network with other students interested in startups, and build stuff with them. Twice a semester, there is a business pitch competition called "Pitch Dingman," and there's an annual business plan competition through MTECH. Make it a goal to enter them at some point with friends you make! You'll learn a lot in the process and meet other aspiring entrepreneurs. The Pitch Dingman events are open to the public, so I'd encourage you to check them out and see what UMD entrepreneurs are up to.
That sounds pretty awesome!
No one has mentioned Canada yet, so I'll attempt to cover that.
I attend Brock University in Southern Ontario. There's not much startup mentality here but it's increasing. A business incubator was recently founded [1]. From the tech side, I'm usually the one encouraging the startup mentality (with a few friends). For example, we organized the school's first hackathon last semester. Some of our graduates have created startups, but I'm not aware of any tech startups. Sometimes startups do recruiting here but not often.
Some of the schools I would recommend in Canada are University of Waterloo and University of Toronto. Both of those have a strong startup mentality. Incubators at both schools, lots of successful tech startups from both, and their locations are great for recruiting talent.
[1]: http://www.busu.net/blueprint
I attend Brock University in Southern Ontario. There's not much startup mentality here but it's increasing. A business incubator was recently founded [1]. From the tech side, I'm usually the one encouraging the startup mentality (with a few friends). For example, we organized the school's first hackathon last semester. Some of our graduates have created startups, but I'm not aware of any tech startups. Sometimes startups do recruiting here but not often.
Some of the schools I would recommend in Canada are University of Waterloo and University of Toronto. Both of those have a strong startup mentality. Incubators at both schools, lots of successful tech startups from both, and their locations are great for recruiting talent.
[1]: http://www.busu.net/blueprint
Babson and Olin are two schools in Boston with a big focus on entrepreneurship. Babson is more business-focused, Olin more engineering-focused.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babson_College
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olin_College
I also see a lot of students from Northeastern University at startup events here, and hear nothing but good things about their Co-Op program, where internships with companies (including startups) are part of your degree program:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeastern_University
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babson_College
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olin_College
I also see a lot of students from Northeastern University at startup events here, and hear nothing but good things about their Co-Op program, where internships with companies (including startups) are part of your degree program:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeastern_University
The University of Michigan has a strong startup mentality which gets stronger and stronger by the day. Michigan has had a Center for Entrepreneurship for I believe roughly 8 years now. They've just partnered with the business school to start a Masters in Entrepreneurship in addition to the certificate program they currently have. They also have many other services such as a mentor network for people working on or looking to start a startup as well as TechArb which provide student startups with office space. And all these services are of course free as a student. I'd definitive encourage you to check them out.
As painful as it is for me to say this, the University of Miami isn't very startupy. We have a really great office on campus called the launchpad to help students start companies, but I haven't seen a single tech company come out of there. Most of our CS department is very theoretical and research oriented. However our ACM is pretty cool and we just had our first hackathon a few weeks ago. It was sponsored by twillio, microsoft, mongoDB, sendgrid, and a few other companies.
University of Utah is very close to MIT in the number of tech startups spun off of university research, and surpassed them in 2009:
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110301/how-the-university-of-u...
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110301/how-the-university-of-u...
I was surprised by this one! But I looked into it and it seems legit. Do you know anything about the computer science program? I checked out the courses and they seemed interesting, although many of the neat ones were for graduate students only :(
You could go to the University of San Francisco - they have an Entrepreneurship program (essentially a BA with startup-related requirements). The great thing is that you'll be a short bus ride from a ton of startup stuff if you're willing to seek it out. That's why I chose here and don't regret it at all.
Berkeley for sure! And it has a vibrant open source community too.
I can second this as a Cal student. We've got a lot of talented engineers working on startups all the time.
Any you can share? :)
Absolutely not Cabrini College (Radnor, PA)
As a guess, any of the universities associated with a National Lab would likely be startup friendly. This might be part of what makes Berkeley startup friendly. National Labs develop a lot of tech which then gets used to start new businesses. They also do internships, or did at one time. I applied and got as far as the initial interview. Last I checked, I had the impression they still do internships but the name of the program had changed.
Couldn't disagree more, but this is probably because of my exposure to different national labs. Proximity to LBL or LLNL may be a help, but the real help comes from the larger community and the schools themselves. Most of the other national labs don't have the startup-friendly communities to back them up.
National labs are great at coming up with new technologies. They are absolutely horrid at commercializing them, which is caused mostly by heavy-handed government policies.
National labs are great at coming up with new technologies. They are absolutely horrid at commercializing them, which is caused mostly by heavy-handed government policies.
Please elaborate on your exposure to different labs for the benefit of the OP.
Thanks.
Thanks.
No problem. My experience has been mostly with SNL, LANL, and ORNL. These labs are richly stocked with extremely bright people working on solving some very important problems.
Some of these problems have commercial applications, some are strictly of value to the government, and some are so far out there that no one's really sure where they'll end up (how again was ARPAnet supposed to be used for defense?).
Two different points:
The problem with commercializing government technology is that you need an entrepreneur to push it. The labs do make overtures to allow their well-paid and securely-employed scientists to leave the nest, but the scientists seldom want to stop being scientists, give up a comfortable and tenured six-figure income, to network and sell when if they wanted to network and sell they wouldn't have gone for the Ph.D. in the first place.
If I'm in a metro area where I can, without moving, find a job making a comfortable living doing what I like after my startup fails, I'm much more likely to take that plunge. In "company towns" like Los Alamos or Oak Ridge, there really isn't any chance of that.
This leaves a relay baton drop between scientists who don't sell and would-be entrepreneurs with nothing worth selling.
No problem, the labs can license their stuff out. Problem, the terms of these licenses usually carve out a pretty generous chunk for the lab that spawned the technology, and the implicit terms include delays and risk of expropriation.
The terms of the lab carveout are often pre-ordained, based on revenues instead of margins, and don't take into account whether or not a business model can support them (because it has to be fair and defensible, and how do you know ahead of time what's fair?).
This leaves a would-be licensor to choose between many worthy projects, and as you want to be close both to your inventor and possible funding sources, this creates a bias toward licensing big-city lab technologies like those found at ANL, LLNL, LBL, NREL, and SNL-Livermore.
Some of these problems have commercial applications, some are strictly of value to the government, and some are so far out there that no one's really sure where they'll end up (how again was ARPAnet supposed to be used for defense?).
Two different points:
The problem with commercializing government technology is that you need an entrepreneur to push it. The labs do make overtures to allow their well-paid and securely-employed scientists to leave the nest, but the scientists seldom want to stop being scientists, give up a comfortable and tenured six-figure income, to network and sell when if they wanted to network and sell they wouldn't have gone for the Ph.D. in the first place.
If I'm in a metro area where I can, without moving, find a job making a comfortable living doing what I like after my startup fails, I'm much more likely to take that plunge. In "company towns" like Los Alamos or Oak Ridge, there really isn't any chance of that.
This leaves a relay baton drop between scientists who don't sell and would-be entrepreneurs with nothing worth selling.
No problem, the labs can license their stuff out. Problem, the terms of these licenses usually carve out a pretty generous chunk for the lab that spawned the technology, and the implicit terms include delays and risk of expropriation.
The terms of the lab carveout are often pre-ordained, based on revenues instead of margins, and don't take into account whether or not a business model can support them (because it has to be fair and defensible, and how do you know ahead of time what's fair?).
This leaves a would-be licensor to choose between many worthy projects, and as you want to be close both to your inventor and possible funding sources, this creates a bias toward licensing big-city lab technologies like those found at ANL, LLNL, LBL, NREL, and SNL-Livermore.
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Note: By startup mentality, I mean colleges where the school and a decent amount of the student body is accepting of the entrepreneurial mindset and fosters the Silicon Valley culture (even if it isn't in Silicon Valley).