
Reaching for Silicon Valley - wallflower
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/technology/reaching-for-silicon-valley.html?_r=0&pagewanted=all
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rayiner
The analysis is a bit off in a way that's relevant to the narrative. At least
when I was there, nobody at GT had Stanford on their radar. Georgia Tech is a
Big Industry kind of place. The perceived competitor is MIT, not Stanford. The
traditional engineering fields (chemical, mechanical, aerospace) dominate and
the links to industry are places like Lockheed or Boeing, not Google or Yahoo.
The net result is that GT is a conservative and somewhat bureaucratic sort of
place. Unsurprisingly, the administration had a hard time with someone who
played fast and loose.

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jfarmer
I took the article to mean they were "reaching for Silicon Valley" in the
sense that folks at the top (e.g., the Board of Regents or whomever is
responsible for managing GT's endowment) were interested in establishing the
kind of reputation for public/private collaboration that Stanford is known
for, not necessarily that Stanford was constantly on the minds of Georgia
Tech's students and faculty or that there was kind of "Stanford envy" at
Georgia Tech.

~~~
rayiner
My point is that even if the administration, understandably wants to model
Stanford in ways, the students and faculty don't see Stanford or Silicon
Valley as the model. The model is quite consciously MIT. It's a place where
chairs are endowed by Boeing and Lockheed and getting a DARPA grant is more on
people's minds than getting VC funding. Those affinities with traditional Big
Industry drive the culture at GT.

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ghc
I won't say the article is wrong exactly, but I barely heard Stanford uttered
in my time at Georgia Tech. MIT was the competition and the role model. I
graduated a few years before this incident happened, but I would be surprised
if the entrepreneurial climate improved much.

Like Chris Klaus, I dropped out to start my first company, as did several
others in my year. Unlike Chris Klaus, I returned to finish my degree, but
entrepreneurial spirit was not high on the priority list at the school and I
was now an outsider.

Doing research on a massive scale was always the goal at Tech, so I did what
everyone else who wanted to start companies did: I moved elsewhere (Cambridge)
after graduating.

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hosh
I never went to GT. I have hanged out with the Tech Square folks of different
stripes. Stanford and Silicon Valley might not be mentioned among the student
populous in general, but among the crowd that are actually in the Tech Square
building (the Centergy building), there were a lot more entrepreneurial folks,
many of them not students or faculty. There were comparisons to Silicon
Valley. There were complaints about conservative Georgia investors.

Tech Square isn't physically located near the rest of the main campus. You had
to cross a bridge over the I-85/I-75 canyon. I knew folks who had their
startups hosted in that building, as well as others who show up for the Ruby
meetup there. These folks were not thinking about big industry, they were
thinking about VCs, valuations, MVPs, etc. I remember hearing many of them
talk, way back in 2007, about the lack of interest in high tech startups in
general.

The sentiment this professor reported in the articles were things I have heard
echoed among the folks hanging out there.

It does not surprise me at all that the main student population are not aware
of this. For example, as popular as the Atlanta Ruby User's Group is, we
hardly get any GT students who show up there.

~~~
ghc
I suppose you wouldn't realize it if you didn't go to Tech, but it would be
strange if any Tech students weren't well acquainted with Tech Square. The
school bookstore is there and we all had lots of classes in buildings there.

The fact that none of us talked about or knew about companies in that
particular building, but were well acquainted with GTRI's building on 14th,
speaks volumes.

In fact, in my time being part of the Georgia Entrepreneur Society crowd
(which associated with people like Klaus), we never became acquainted with
companies in that building either (circa 2005-2007).

I've seen a similar phenomenon in other universities trying to encourage
entrepreneurship, including Yale with its Science Park initiative and Harvard
with its Innovation Lab. My personal feeling is that university-sponsored
entrepreneurship is doomed from the start. University-sponsored incubators in
particular seem bad at producing good companies.

~~~
rayiner
Seriously. I was there 2002-2007 and I perceived no inkling of any tech
startup type stuff. It's where the College of Management building is and
that's the only association I perceived.

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ajju
My experience as an entrepreneur at Georgia Tech has been that it is a great
place to start a B2B startup, especially if it falls within one of the
verticals the Atlanta investment and startup community has "adopted" such as
security.

It can also be a good place to start other kinds of B2B startups, but it takes
more work in some areas than it would in the valley.

On the plus side, Georgia Tech and ATDC give you access to great advisors who,
with no expectation of compensation, have provided me and others I know with
excellent advice on everything from hiring to sales. Multiple startups started
at Tech as Pindrop Security and RideCell / InstantCab (disclaimer: founder)
have bootstrapped at Tech, sold their first few customers and then raised
money from some of the best investors on both coasts. And yes, the cost of
living, and therefore the cost of running your company is much lower than it
would be in the valley.

On the minus side, Georgia Tech and Atlanta are both tough places to start
consumer startups and that will take time to change. It is tougher to raise
money for all kinds of startups, save perhaps security, than in Silicon
Valley. There is definitely a higher risk averseness amongst local investors
and they expect a higher level of control on the companies they invest in.
Unfortunately for them, as PG says, some of the best ideas are frighteningly
ambitious. It's hard for an ecosystem to have multiple large exits without
funding a few of these. Without large exits being reinvested locally, the
virtuous circle takes longer to take off. Also, given that more and more west
coast investors believe that startups are better off with founders at the
steering wheel, entrepreneurs are unlikely to compromise on that just to raise
money locally.

I hope Atlanta and Georgia Tech will continue to improve as a birthing place
for all kinds of startups. I am definitely curious about what happened here.
If, as the article suggests, the crux of the matter lies in $50K worth of
chips being sent to Korea - the reaction from the University and the GBI seems
quite extreme.

