9 ms·

"A year ago, I’d hardly heard of startups. Neither had just about anyone at Georgia Tech." Well that was a big jump in assumption within two sentences.

mjn 13y ago
When I was at Georgia Tech (2004-07) nearly everyone had heard of startups in the CS department, and grad students being involved in machine-learning / data-mining startups was a common summer job, so I'm not sure where this is coming from. Here's one big one cofounded by a professor: http://www.skytree.net/ http://www.skytree.net/
- timtamboy63 13y ago
  That was worded poorly - as far as I've seen, a startup isn't really a viable option for undegrads. Yes, we've definitely had our share of successes, but it's not something that is particularly encouraged, especially outside of CS. I really want to see engineering based startups coming out of Tech. We've got the talent, and we have some amazing hardware hackers but it's incredibly rare to see them start a startup.
  - conjecTech 13y ago
    I know you're very well intentioned, but I don't think your methods support this. You aren't going to get people making companies in engineering simply by putting them in a room with a few arduinos and macs. And things like "3 day startup" completely miss the complexity that goes along with actual engineering projects and is heavily biased towards generic internet based ideas. You needs something more fundamental to get across what you are trying to do, and I think there are things on campus which are aiding in that. RoboJackets, for instance, has been rather influential in this regards. 2 of our old officers that are still in the Atlanta area are both involved in very successful startups, one of our electrical guys was at YCombinator last year working on a hardware startup, and we regularly have startup job postings go out on our email headers. I'm aiming for this to grow more, and things are slowly being put into action. I think the most fundamental thing you can do to get people to take these kinds of risks is to show them that it's possible to succeed. I'll be posting some stuff on the CS facebook group in the next few weeks dealing with one of our initiatives. If you'd like to talk about this at some point, I'm the treasurer of RJ and my name shouldn't be too hard to find with a bit of googling.
    - timtamboy63 13y ago
      I'd love to chat. I have no doubt you know more about how to engage the hardware community than me, and I'd absolutely love your thoughts on how we can further encourage engineering startups. Will shoot you an email soon :)
    - willyum 13y ago
      Hey appreciate your thoughts on this matter and would really love to collaborate with you in finding ways to engage with those passionate in hardware/robotics. However, 3 alumni working in startups is hardly influential. I've made an effort to speak with Hunter and although he definitely one of the most intelligent people I've met at Tech, he had to be convinced to go to the YCominbator interview because he had no clue what it was. I'm sure you left out a couple other people in your organization that are involved in entrepreneurship but you are right when it comes to changing the culture to show students that it is possible to succeed. That is definitely the core of our vision.
- ghc 13y ago
  Agreed, when I was at Tech (03-08) startups were all the rage and there were tons of them forming around campus. I think times have probably changed in Atlanta thanks to the financial crisis, and startups are no longer as common.
  - ja27 13y ago
    He should look at the name on the Klaus building and realize that we'd actually heard of startups in the early 1990s and before. The ATDC has even been around for 33 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Klaus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Klaus
    - timtamboy63 13y ago
      Klaus is a bit of a personal hero. Not saying that no-one had heard of/started a startup, more that the culture at Tech isn't particularly conducive to it.
  - timtamboy63 13y ago
    Definitely didn't know this, and it's super interesting. Weird that they've died down so much.
  - rietta 13y ago
    The Atlanta startup culture is a bit different from the Bay Area. Less consumer internet, more B2B. The investors tend to come from a real-estate, or similar background, and do not always understand technology. That's partly why the bootstrapping/lean startup approach is so critical around here. It's just not worth wasting time trying to get a permission slip from an old rich guy in most cases.
    - kmassey 13y ago
      "investors tend to come from real estate" Yowza, you're about 20 years behind the times. Local angel group has 100+ investors, is 15 years old and has invested in probably 60+ companies in tech space by now. 4 GA VC firms are raising new funds, ATV has just created a new accelerator, state of GA has just created a state based $100M fund, Flashpoint has helped raise roughly $30M in 18 months and so on and so on.
- caw 13y ago
  In my time at GT (06-11), I didn't really hear about startups until senior/super senior year. A few friends got either internships or post-graduation jobs in Tech square, mostly due to their recruitment via the Co-op/Internship office or ugrad research. I always seemed to learn about them after they hired someone though, and not before. In my last 2 years the startup scene seemed to explode. The CS entrepreneurship class had been around for a while, but there was a huge amount of publicity around Titin Tech from the Innovation Competition, and then the announcement of Flashpoint, now this. Maybe I just wasn't as plugged in, but there's a lot of cool things happening now at GT.
- rietta 13y ago
  Georgia Tech was a mixed bag during that period if I remember correctly. I fought to keep the ACM chapter relevant to encourage entrepreneurship from 2002 to 2004, but it didn't quite stick way I had dreamed. The research going on at Georgia Tech is amazing. But its hard to build a startup out of that culture - especially a consumer internet one. But the best opportunities are usually hard things.
jdchizzle 13y ago
Good point, but as an undergraduate from the school of Biomedical Engineering. I can say for sure most undergrads in this building have never realized the possibility of beginning a startup in their career. The startup culture is largely, and almost entirely isolated to the CS department.
- rafeed 13y ago
  The problem with BME is that there are way too many regulatory hurdles to clear, making the barrier to entry very high.
- dpeck 13y ago
  A bit of the nature of the beast. CS, EE and to a lesser extent a few other engineering/science disciplines can create something and get it into the market/mvp stage with few hurdles, in most others there can be an enormous number of entrenched interests standing in your way.
michaelochurch 13y ago
I'm going to say something obnoxious but true. Lots of universities train people to be able to work at startups; but only Stanford (and, distantly behind it, MIT and Harvard) trains people to own them. Very few schools inculcate the confidence, as a 22-year-old with no work history, to walk into an investor's office and ask for a million-dollar seed round. But at Stanford, where seed investment is a graduation present, that's normal to people. The rest of the country has some fierce talent and there are capable people everywhere, but there are only a few places where it's normal for people to think of being a founder as a logical next step. Merely working at a startup isn't the same thing. I think this can be overcome. There's a lot of talent outside of a small, privileged echo chamber and there's no good reason why it should be excluded from the highest levels of work autonomy. I'm just pointing things out as they are now.
- hpagey 13y ago
  The primary reason of Stanford's success is the availability of high risk capital from local angels and VC firms. ATL has no such setup which prevents Tech's startup environment from being like Stanford's. It will remain so for foreseeable future. Also, most of the ATL companies are bootstrapped and there is no cultural of handing out liberal stock options. This greatly reduces the number of early stage investors created due to exit events. Now, ATL is a great place to bootstrap and start B2B companies. But that requires certain work and life experience.
  - michaelochurch 13y ago
    Also, most of the ATL companies are bootstrapped and there is no cultural of handing out liberal stock options. Valley startups don't hand out liberal options, not anymore. Typical for a 20th employee is around 0.05%, which rarely makes up for what's lost by taking a below-market salary. (Plenty of Tumblr employees cashed out with less than a million.) Almost no one going into the VC-funded world now is going to get rich enough to become an angel investor. That ship sailed about ten years ago.
  - kmassey 13y ago
    "ATL has no set up..." Please. See my comments above regarding angel investing in ATL and VC firms in GA, etc.
asynchronous13 13y ago
VentureLabs is ranked as the #1 early-phase university incubator! (while I no longer have any direct connections, that was a stepping stone that got me to where I am today). I was wondering how the author could be so clueless about the startup culture that already exists at Georgia Tech. Then it dawned on me that he's probably sharing the view from the undergraduate school. I only experienced the graduate school at GT, but I could tell that the undergrad experience is dramatically different from the graduate school experience. As an alum of the graduate school, I can tell you that there are tons of opportunities to turn your research into a commercial venture. GT is very flexible about licensing technologies to outside companies. It amazes me that there can be such a difference between the two bodies of students. I hope the author can tie his efforts into the existing startup infrastructure and culture. That would be a huge benefit to get more undergraduates involved.
- dpeck 13y ago
  I think you're right with the graduate side of things. During my time (early 2000s) as a CS undergrad at GT I don't remember too much about startups but thinking back I'm not really sure I should have. Resources absolutely should be there for those seeking, but I'm not sure pushing a startup culture hard at the undergraduate level is the best thing to do. Those years are for building up the foundations to do all the awesome things that GT people do later in life and short circuiting that with trying to do a startup is probably best left to those who actively want to pursue it. Looking back at my Senior Design semester, I know my attention to other classes that semester wasn't what it should have been as were were working to get our prototypes, had real customers expecting us to deliver, etc.
- timtamboy63 13y ago
  Don't get me wrong, I definitely do know about the existing infrastructure set up for startups around Tech. I just don't feel like other undergrads do, and that's my problem. We work with them as closely as we can - we had Frank Moyer (http://frankmoyer.com/ http://frankmoyer.com/) come by most meetings we had at sX. We referred a bunch of teams to Startup Gauntlet (http://www.startupgauntlet.com/ http://www.startupgauntlet.com/) and I know of at least two that went ahead with the program. By no means do we want to do this solo - we genuinely want to help change the culture at Georgia Tech, and there's no reason to re-invent the wheel when there are already so many amazing organizations to help startups at Tech. We're just trying to raise awareness about them, and about startup culture in general. I had no idea that Tech was so pro-startup when it came into grad school, it's definitely something I'll look into.

mjn 13y ago

When I was at Georgia Tech (2004-07) nearly everyone had heard of startups in the CS department, and grad students being involved in machine-learning / data-mining startups was a common summer job, so I'm not sure where this is coming from. Here's one big one cofounded by a professor: http://www.skytree.net/ http://www.skytree.net/

timtamboy63 13y ago
That was worded poorly - as far as I've seen, a startup isn't really a viable option for undegrads. Yes, we've definitely had our share of successes, but it's not something that is particularly encouraged, especially outside of CS. I really want to see engineering based startups coming out of Tech. We've got the talent, and we have some amazing hardware hackers but it's incredibly rare to see them start a startup.
- conjecTech 13y ago
  I know you're very well intentioned, but I don't think your methods support this. You aren't going to get people making companies in engineering simply by putting them in a room with a few arduinos and macs. And things like "3 day startup" completely miss the complexity that goes along with actual engineering projects and is heavily biased towards generic internet based ideas. You needs something more fundamental to get across what you are trying to do, and I think there are things on campus which are aiding in that. RoboJackets, for instance, has been rather influential in this regards. 2 of our old officers that are still in the Atlanta area are both involved in very successful startups, one of our electrical guys was at YCombinator last year working on a hardware startup, and we regularly have startup job postings go out on our email headers. I'm aiming for this to grow more, and things are slowly being put into action. I think the most fundamental thing you can do to get people to take these kinds of risks is to show them that it's possible to succeed. I'll be posting some stuff on the CS facebook group in the next few weeks dealing with one of our initiatives. If you'd like to talk about this at some point, I'm the treasurer of RJ and my name shouldn't be too hard to find with a bit of googling.
  - timtamboy63 13y ago
    I'd love to chat. I have no doubt you know more about how to engage the hardware community than me, and I'd absolutely love your thoughts on how we can further encourage engineering startups. Will shoot you an email soon :)
  - willyum 13y ago
    Hey appreciate your thoughts on this matter and would really love to collaborate with you in finding ways to engage with those passionate in hardware/robotics. However, 3 alumni working in startups is hardly influential. I've made an effort to speak with Hunter and although he definitely one of the most intelligent people I've met at Tech, he had to be convinced to go to the YCominbator interview because he had no clue what it was. I'm sure you left out a couple other people in your organization that are involved in entrepreneurship but you are right when it comes to changing the culture to show students that it is possible to succeed. That is definitely the core of our vision.
ghc 13y ago
Agreed, when I was at Tech (03-08) startups were all the rage and there were tons of them forming around campus. I think times have probably changed in Atlanta thanks to the financial crisis, and startups are no longer as common.
- ja27 13y ago
  He should look at the name on the Klaus building and realize that we'd actually heard of startups in the early 1990s and before. The ATDC has even been around for 33 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Klaus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Klaus
  - timtamboy63 13y ago
    Klaus is a bit of a personal hero. Not saying that no-one had heard of/started a startup, more that the culture at Tech isn't particularly conducive to it.
- timtamboy63 13y ago
  Definitely didn't know this, and it's super interesting. Weird that they've died down so much.
- rietta 13y ago
  The Atlanta startup culture is a bit different from the Bay Area. Less consumer internet, more B2B. The investors tend to come from a real-estate, or similar background, and do not always understand technology. That's partly why the bootstrapping/lean startup approach is so critical around here. It's just not worth wasting time trying to get a permission slip from an old rich guy in most cases.
  - kmassey 13y ago
    "investors tend to come from real estate" Yowza, you're about 20 years behind the times. Local angel group has 100+ investors, is 15 years old and has invested in probably 60+ companies in tech space by now. 4 GA VC firms are raising new funds, ATV has just created a new accelerator, state of GA has just created a state based $100M fund, Flashpoint has helped raise roughly $30M in 18 months and so on and so on.
caw 13y ago
In my time at GT (06-11), I didn't really hear about startups until senior/super senior year. A few friends got either internships or post-graduation jobs in Tech square, mostly due to their recruitment via the Co-op/Internship office or ugrad research. I always seemed to learn about them after they hired someone though, and not before. In my last 2 years the startup scene seemed to explode. The CS entrepreneurship class had been around for a while, but there was a huge amount of publicity around Titin Tech from the Innovation Competition, and then the announcement of Flashpoint, now this. Maybe I just wasn't as plugged in, but there's a lot of cool things happening now at GT.
rietta 13y ago
Georgia Tech was a mixed bag during that period if I remember correctly. I fought to keep the ACM chapter relevant to encourage entrepreneurship from 2002 to 2004, but it didn't quite stick way I had dreamed. The research going on at Georgia Tech is amazing. But its hard to build a startup out of that culture - especially a consumer internet one. But the best opportunities are usually hard things.

jdchizzle 13y ago

Good point, but as an undergraduate from the school of Biomedical Engineering. I can say for sure most undergrads in this building have never realized the possibility of beginning a startup in their career. The startup culture is largely, and almost entirely isolated to the CS department.

rafeed 13y ago
The problem with BME is that there are way too many regulatory hurdles to clear, making the barrier to entry very high.
dpeck 13y ago
A bit of the nature of the beast. CS, EE and to a lesser extent a few other engineering/science disciplines can create something and get it into the market/mvp stage with few hurdles, in most others there can be an enormous number of entrenched interests standing in your way.

michaelochurch 13y ago

I'm going to say something obnoxious but true. Lots of universities train people to be able to work at startups; but only Stanford (and, distantly behind it, MIT and Harvard) trains people to own them. Very few schools inculcate the confidence, as a 22-year-old with no work history, to walk into an investor's office and ask for a million-dollar seed round. But at Stanford, where seed investment is a graduation present, that's normal to people. The rest of the country has some fierce talent and there are capable people everywhere, but there are only a few places where it's normal for people to think of being a founder as a logical next step. Merely working at a startup isn't the same thing. I think this can be overcome. There's a lot of talent outside of a small, privileged echo chamber and there's no good reason why it should be excluded from the highest levels of work autonomy. I'm just pointing things out as they are now.

hpagey 13y ago
The primary reason of Stanford's success is the availability of high risk capital from local angels and VC firms. ATL has no such setup which prevents Tech's startup environment from being like Stanford's. It will remain so for foreseeable future. Also, most of the ATL companies are bootstrapped and there is no cultural of handing out liberal stock options. This greatly reduces the number of early stage investors created due to exit events. Now, ATL is a great place to bootstrap and start B2B companies. But that requires certain work and life experience.
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  Also, most of the ATL companies are bootstrapped and there is no cultural of handing out liberal stock options. Valley startups don't hand out liberal options, not anymore. Typical for a 20th employee is around 0.05%, which rarely makes up for what's lost by taking a below-market salary. (Plenty of Tumblr employees cashed out with less than a million.) Almost no one going into the VC-funded world now is going to get rich enough to become an angel investor. That ship sailed about ten years ago.
- kmassey 13y ago
  "ATL has no set up..." Please. See my comments above regarding angel investing in ATL and VC firms in GA, etc.

asynchronous13 13y ago

VentureLabs is ranked as the #1 early-phase university incubator! (while I no longer have any direct connections, that was a stepping stone that got me to where I am today). I was wondering how the author could be so clueless about the startup culture that already exists at Georgia Tech. Then it dawned on me that he's probably sharing the view from the undergraduate school. I only experienced the graduate school at GT, but I could tell that the undergrad experience is dramatically different from the graduate school experience. As an alum of the graduate school, I can tell you that there are tons of opportunities to turn your research into a commercial venture. GT is very flexible about licensing technologies to outside companies. It amazes me that there can be such a difference between the two bodies of students. I hope the author can tie his efforts into the existing startup infrastructure and culture. That would be a huge benefit to get more undergraduates involved.

dpeck 13y ago
I think you're right with the graduate side of things. During my time (early 2000s) as a CS undergrad at GT I don't remember too much about startups but thinking back I'm not really sure I should have. Resources absolutely should be there for those seeking, but I'm not sure pushing a startup culture hard at the undergraduate level is the best thing to do. Those years are for building up the foundations to do all the awesome things that GT people do later in life and short circuiting that with trying to do a startup is probably best left to those who actively want to pursue it. Looking back at my Senior Design semester, I know my attention to other classes that semester wasn't what it should have been as were were working to get our prototypes, had real customers expecting us to deliver, etc.
timtamboy63 13y ago
Don't get me wrong, I definitely do know about the existing infrastructure set up for startups around Tech. I just don't feel like other undergrads do, and that's my problem. We work with them as closely as we can - we had Frank Moyer (http://frankmoyer.com/ http://frankmoyer.com/) come by most meetings we had at sX. We referred a bunch of teams to Startup Gauntlet (http://www.startupgauntlet.com/ http://www.startupgauntlet.com/) and I know of at least two that went ahead with the program. By no means do we want to do this solo - we genuinely want to help change the culture at Georgia Tech, and there's no reason to re-invent the wheel when there are already so many amazing organizations to help startups at Tech. We're just trying to raise awareness about them, and about startup culture in general. I had no idea that Tech was so pro-startup when it came into grad school, it's definitely something I'll look into.