Two of my friends had successful startups from UT Austin: audiogalaxy.com (founded in the Napster days, now doing mobile audio streaming) and adtuition/adtuitiv

Two of my friends had successful startups from UT Austin: audiogalaxy.com (founded in the Napster days, now doing mobile audio streaming) and adtuition/adtuitive (acquired by Etsy). Maybe UT could be a better place for startups, but I never got the impression that it slowed them down for one second. They were just too focused on getting stuff done to worry about product competitions or entrepreneurship classes or whatnot. In fact, I have to wonder in some cases if those sort of things can be a distraction and give people the illusion that they are an entrepreneur without actually taking any risk or producing anything of value (the two essential ingredients, imho).