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How Wesleyan’s Counter Culture Came To Rule New York’s Tech Scene

32 points by jrlevine 15y ago

benwerd 15y ago
This is neat. But it also leads me to a tangential question: Where are the publicly-educated tech moguls? We continually hear about Stanford, Harvard, and places like Wesleyan. There are plenty of entrepreneurs who came from state universities or other public institutions, as well as those from less wealthy backgrounds. It's time for you guys to speak up and inspire the next generation, for the good of our economy, and for the health of our entrepreneurial ecosystem.
- symbiotic 15y ago
  It's great to see that there are other Wesleyan tech entrepreneurs out there. I moved to Madison, Wisconsin after graduating from Wes, so I didn't realize there was such a big Wesleyan tech scene in NY. That being said, there are a number of great start-ups coming out of University of Wisconsin, supported by a really exciting entrepreneurship community here. There was a TechCrunch article a while back about Wisconsin start-ups and Capital Entrepreneurs, a group that really supports the start-up community here in Madison (http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/24/wisconsin-land-of-beer-cheese-and-startups/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/24/wisconsin-land-of-beer-chee...). Start ups from public institutions are out there! 94 labs, a Wisconsin incubator program that I went through just graduated 14 companies, many of which had founders from UW schools.
- lsc 15y ago
  Meh, the whole point of going to an elite school is to have some proof of how great you are before you actually accomplish something. If you didn't go to an elite school, you have to talk about your accomplishments.
- SkyMarshal 15y ago
  Sergey Brin: BS, University of Maryland Mark Cuban: University of Pittsburgh/Indiana University Just off the top of my head, I'm sure there are more.
  - rdouble 15y ago
    Larry Page went to the University of Michigan.
- tikhonj 15y ago
  Both Steve Wozniak and Bill Joy went to Berkeley. These are the most famous ones that come to mind, but there are a ton of other ones--we have a very strong startup culture here. As for "moguls" rather than founders, I think the current CEOs of both Intel and Qualcomm are from here, as well as Eric Schmidt.
tobobo 15y ago
I'm currently a student at Wesleyan, and seeing this article was awfully surprising to me. If we really do rule the tech scene in one of the largest cities in the US, I certainly wouldn't know it from being here. Our CS department is tiny (but excellent) and is focused almost entirely on the science of computing rather than applications of the craft. I've heard of some Wesleyan grads going on to high positions in the tech world but I assumed these were exceptions to the rule. I came to Wesleyan not because I thought it would have the best programs for what I wanted to study, but because of the student community. I have never seen such a high volume of creative output from any group of people, and it inspires me daily. If there are programmers somewhere on campus that exhibit this level of excellence and inspiration in their work, they've been quiet about it. Jake, what advice would you have for a current Wesleyan student who wishes to be active in the tech world? And if you're reading this, other Wesleyan students, can we hang out? I like web development a lot but I'm not smart enough to do it all by myself. Let's build stuff!
- philco 15y ago
  Hey Tobobo - Wes '06 - happy to chat! Wesleyan was instrumental in my path in tech - happy to talk more about it. philip at meeteor dot com
- cmhamill 15y ago
  Recent Wes grad, here. I think a lot of the lack-of-visibility is because of the Career Center's complete-and-utter-mindless-focus on placing folks into consulting, finance, or legal jobs. The Hollywood Mafia we've got operates almost entirely independently of the Career Center; the Film Studies department is practically their own placement agency. Anyway, I'm not sure what the reasons are. I'm around on campus, working, if you want to build something. Lemme know. cmhamill at wes...
  - philco 15y ago
    Sorry you feel that way...I'm part of the career advisory board and hosted about 15 students every year to speak with execs at Bloomberg (on the tech side). I can assure you that if you want to get a job at google, etc, the career center is just as happy to help you and can make inroads there. Would love to talk to you more about this...pcortes at wes....
noname123 15y ago
As a Wesleyan graduate of CS, I have to say that this piece amuses me. None of the people mentioned in the article actually are CS majors (there were only 5 of us the year I graduated), but are "McKinsey consultants" and "[guys] where Hollywood didn't really work out for us, but now are trying our luck in Hollywood." And the picture of the urban rooftop party featured in the article vaguely reminds me of the NYC rooftop party at the hedge fund office where I worked for previously staffed with attractive hipster receptionists, HR people and managers who dressed the part and were quite clueless about the technology or the domain area we were involved in - but were very good at making mixed drinks and dj-ing. These guys in essense, are very much part of the "party people" that look and play the part, complete down to the prep school pedigree and the sensibly choosen retro flannel mix-and-match - that a lot of programmers both in the Valley/Alley are looking up to. There was a phase in my life when I drank the kool-aid, partook in the festivities and read James Joyce and attempted to think deeply about the Hegelian dialectic but then I realized that these "lofty" concerns belied a more pressing issue, how Joyce or that indie band might have impressed that hipster chick that I ran into at the MGMT show last Saturday and had the hots for - because she was French (and therefore social-consensenually hot). Fast forward to present-times, I work in IT and my co-workers consist of one guy from Belarus and another guy from India both on H1B but both of them could write amazing code and we are three months ahead the schedule in shipping out a informatics platform with about 100+ users. It's not the sexiest work a la "changing the way one shops on the Internet" but we ship, get paid and have free time to pursue our other interests - because impressing programmers/tech bloggers isn't really my concern as you can't get laid anyways by doing it. It took me awhile to love and embrace the atom bomb but I have to be grateful for my alma matter for teaching me unexpectedly to distinguish between what's crap and what's substance. So while I am unfortunately no longer part of the "Wesleyan mafia," I try to keep my head up and am confident that I'll be around when the IT/startup market crashes in the next cycle.
draggnar 15y ago
Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks as mentioned in the article. http://www.benkler.org/Benkler_Wealth_Of_Networks.pdf http://www.benkler.org/Benkler_Wealth_Of_Networks.pdf
necubi 15y ago
As with the other Wesleyan students in this thread, I find this article pretty bizarre. I'm one of 6 current CS seniors and our "department" (actually part of the Math department) consists of only five professors. Furthermore, there is almost no emphasis on programming in the major; all of the core classes (and most of the electives, which are few and far between) are focused strictly on computer science. While I personally appreciate this rigorous focus on theory as it complements my own practical experience, for most students it means never seeing a real, large programming project or the tools to manage it. As a result of all this, many Wesleyan CS graduates go to grad school instead of start ups. This isn't helped by the single-minded focus of the career center on careers in finance and consulting, which leads to a complete absence of technical recruiting on campus. I and several other students including @samdk and @rubergly have tried to change this to some degree by offering more outlets for students on campus to program, but it's definitely an uphill battle. That said, if NY/Boston startups feel like making the commute up to central Connecticut, they'll find many smart students with a strong grounding in computing theory and math. I just wish the school was more interested in making that happen.
msciola 15y ago
Hi folks - director of the Wes Career Center here. Happy to see this article is getting some notice. On campus recruiting is a game of yield - the companies that come back to campus year after year have multiple positions to fill and consistently get a good turn out from Wes students. Google returns every year because we get a great response from students. Other, less well-known tech firms that have tried haven't gotten a big enough response to keep coming back for on campus recruiting. BUT - most people will not get a job through on-campus recruiting in the first place. We have lots of resources for folks interested in tech fields, and, as the article underlines, we have a great network of alumni out there that we can help you connect to. Indeed, the whole point to Digital Wesleyan is to create awareness and real networking opportunities for alumni and for students that turn into business opportunities and job opportunities. That's why the career center jumped at the change to work with Jake to get it launched. Come on down to Butterfield A - happy to work with you!
alexmr 15y ago
[Disclosure: I went to wes and didn't major in CS (though wish I had taken more classes in it)] I think the main point from this article is that the type of thought wesleyan teaches has proven itself well-suited to the creative, innovative thinking valued in the tech and startups especially. While this isn't necessarily programming focused, there are other roles in the industry Wesleyan is showing it has done really well in. Also, while more grads move to NYC than anywhere else, I will say there's plenty of wesleyan tech talent out here in the bay area (CEO of rdio, a bunch of folks at google, and startups). The school would definitely be well served by beefing up it's CS department and trying to attract more talent. With a solid programming community on campus, I bet we'd see some awesome projects emerge especially as tech mixes more with the strong arts and music scenes.

32 points by jrlevine 15y ago

This is neat. But it also leads me to a tangential question: Where are the publicly-educated tech moguls? We continually hear about Stanford, Harvard, and places like Wesleyan. There are plenty of entrepreneurs who came from state universities or other public institutions, as well as those from less wealthy backgrounds. It's time for you guys to speak up and inspire the next generation, for the good of our economy, and for the health of our entrepreneurial ecosystem.

symbiotic 15y ago
It's great to see that there are other Wesleyan tech entrepreneurs out there. I moved to Madison, Wisconsin after graduating from Wes, so I didn't realize there was such a big Wesleyan tech scene in NY. That being said, there are a number of great start-ups coming out of University of Wisconsin, supported by a really exciting entrepreneurship community here. There was a TechCrunch article a while back about Wisconsin start-ups and Capital Entrepreneurs, a group that really supports the start-up community here in Madison (http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/24/wisconsin-land-of-beer-cheese-and-startups/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/24/wisconsin-land-of-beer-chee...). Start ups from public institutions are out there! 94 labs, a Wisconsin incubator program that I went through just graduated 14 companies, many of which had founders from UW schools.
lsc 15y ago
Meh, the whole point of going to an elite school is to have some proof of how great you are before you actually accomplish something. If you didn't go to an elite school, you have to talk about your accomplishments.
SkyMarshal 15y ago
Sergey Brin: BS, University of Maryland Mark Cuban: University of Pittsburgh/Indiana University Just off the top of my head, I'm sure there are more.
- rdouble 15y ago
  Larry Page went to the University of Michigan.
tikhonj 15y ago
Both Steve Wozniak and Bill Joy went to Berkeley. These are the most famous ones that come to mind, but there are a ton of other ones--we have a very strong startup culture here. As for "moguls" rather than founders, I think the current CEOs of both Intel and Qualcomm are from here, as well as Eric Schmidt.

tobobo 15y ago

I'm currently a student at Wesleyan, and seeing this article was awfully surprising to me. If we really do rule the tech scene in one of the largest cities in the US, I certainly wouldn't know it from being here. Our CS department is tiny (but excellent) and is focused almost entirely on the science of computing rather than applications of the craft. I've heard of some Wesleyan grads going on to high positions in the tech world but I assumed these were exceptions to the rule. I came to Wesleyan not because I thought it would have the best programs for what I wanted to study, but because of the student community. I have never seen such a high volume of creative output from any group of people, and it inspires me daily. If there are programmers somewhere on campus that exhibit this level of excellence and inspiration in their work, they've been quiet about it. Jake, what advice would you have for a current Wesleyan student who wishes to be active in the tech world? And if you're reading this, other Wesleyan students, can we hang out? I like web development a lot but I'm not smart enough to do it all by myself. Let's build stuff!

philco 15y ago
Hey Tobobo - Wes '06 - happy to chat! Wesleyan was instrumental in my path in tech - happy to talk more about it. philip at meeteor dot com
cmhamill 15y ago
Recent Wes grad, here. I think a lot of the lack-of-visibility is because of the Career Center's complete-and-utter-mindless-focus on placing folks into consulting, finance, or legal jobs. The Hollywood Mafia we've got operates almost entirely independently of the Career Center; the Film Studies department is practically their own placement agency. Anyway, I'm not sure what the reasons are. I'm around on campus, working, if you want to build something. Lemme know. cmhamill at wes...
- philco 15y ago
  Sorry you feel that way...I'm part of the career advisory board and hosted about 15 students every year to speak with execs at Bloomberg (on the tech side). I can assure you that if you want to get a job at google, etc, the career center is just as happy to help you and can make inroads there. Would love to talk to you more about this...pcortes at wes....

noname123 15y ago

As a Wesleyan graduate of CS, I have to say that this piece amuses me. None of the people mentioned in the article actually are CS majors (there were only 5 of us the year I graduated), but are "McKinsey consultants" and "[guys] where Hollywood didn't really work out for us, but now are trying our luck in Hollywood." And the picture of the urban rooftop party featured in the article vaguely reminds me of the NYC rooftop party at the hedge fund office where I worked for previously staffed with attractive hipster receptionists, HR people and managers who dressed the part and were quite clueless about the technology or the domain area we were involved in - but were very good at making mixed drinks and dj-ing. These guys in essense, are very much part of the "party people" that look and play the part, complete down to the prep school pedigree and the sensibly choosen retro flannel mix-and-match - that a lot of programmers both in the Valley/Alley are looking up to. There was a phase in my life when I drank the kool-aid, partook in the festivities and read James Joyce and attempted to think deeply about the Hegelian dialectic but then I realized that these "lofty" concerns belied a more pressing issue, how Joyce or that indie band might have impressed that hipster chick that I ran into at the MGMT show last Saturday and had the hots for - because she was French (and therefore social-consensenually hot). Fast forward to present-times, I work in IT and my co-workers consist of one guy from Belarus and another guy from India both on H1B but both of them could write amazing code and we are three months ahead the schedule in shipping out a informatics platform with about 100+ users. It's not the sexiest work a la "changing the way one shops on the Internet" but we ship, get paid and have free time to pursue our other interests - because impressing programmers/tech bloggers isn't really my concern as you can't get laid anyways by doing it. It took me awhile to love and embrace the atom bomb but I have to be grateful for my alma matter for teaching me unexpectedly to distinguish between what's crap and what's substance. So while I am unfortunately no longer part of the "Wesleyan mafia," I try to keep my head up and am confident that I'll be around when the IT/startup market crashes in the next cycle.

draggnar 15y ago

Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks as mentioned in the article. http://www.benkler.org/Benkler_Wealth_Of_Networks.pdf http://www.benkler.org/Benkler_Wealth_Of_Networks.pdf

necubi 15y ago

As with the other Wesleyan students in this thread, I find this article pretty bizarre. I'm one of 6 current CS seniors and our "department" (actually part of the Math department) consists of only five professors. Furthermore, there is almost no emphasis on programming in the major; all of the core classes (and most of the electives, which are few and far between) are focused strictly on computer science. While I personally appreciate this rigorous focus on theory as it complements my own practical experience, for most students it means never seeing a real, large programming project or the tools to manage it. As a result of all this, many Wesleyan CS graduates go to grad school instead of start ups. This isn't helped by the single-minded focus of the career center on careers in finance and consulting, which leads to a complete absence of technical recruiting on campus. I and several other students including @samdk and @rubergly have tried to change this to some degree by offering more outlets for students on campus to program, but it's definitely an uphill battle. That said, if NY/Boston startups feel like making the commute up to central Connecticut, they'll find many smart students with a strong grounding in computing theory and math. I just wish the school was more interested in making that happen.

msciola 15y ago

Hi folks - director of the Wes Career Center here. Happy to see this article is getting some notice. On campus recruiting is a game of yield - the companies that come back to campus year after year have multiple positions to fill and consistently get a good turn out from Wes students. Google returns every year because we get a great response from students. Other, less well-known tech firms that have tried haven't gotten a big enough response to keep coming back for on campus recruiting. BUT - most people will not get a job through on-campus recruiting in the first place. We have lots of resources for folks interested in tech fields, and, as the article underlines, we have a great network of alumni out there that we can help you connect to. Indeed, the whole point to Digital Wesleyan is to create awareness and real networking opportunities for alumni and for students that turn into business opportunities and job opportunities. That's why the career center jumped at the change to work with Jake to get it launched. Come on down to Butterfield A - happy to work with you!

alexmr 15y ago

[Disclosure: I went to wes and didn't major in CS (though wish I had taken more classes in it)] I think the main point from this article is that the type of thought wesleyan teaches has proven itself well-suited to the creative, innovative thinking valued in the tech and startups especially. While this isn't necessarily programming focused, there are other roles in the industry Wesleyan is showing it has done really well in. Also, while more grads move to NYC than anywhere else, I will say there's plenty of wesleyan tech talent out here in the bay area (CEO of rdio, a bunch of folks at google, and startups). The school would definitely be well served by beefing up it's CS department and trying to attract more talent. With a solid programming community on campus, I bet we'd see some awesome projects emerge especially as tech mixes more with the strong arts and music scenes.