

What colleges have startup mentality? - alex_g

I'm a junior in high school, looking at colleges. I know Stanford would be #1 in startup mentality, but I'm looking for some more. I'd rather look at a list of colleges with top startup mentality than the USNews College rankings.<p>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).
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flom
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.

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thetabyte
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.

~~~
flom
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.

~~~
alex_g
That sounds pretty awesome!

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reledi
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>

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JayNeely
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>

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blcArmadillo
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.

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aorshan
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.

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csdual
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-utah-
launches-tech-start-ups.html)

~~~
alex_g
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 :(

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jiganti
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.

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dm8
Berkeley for sure! And it has a vibrant open source community too.

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grizzlylazer
I can second this as a Cal student. We've got a lot of talented engineers
working on startups all the time.

~~~
alex_g
Any you can share? :)

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acoyfellow
Absolutely not Cabrini College (Radnor, PA)

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Mz
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.

~~~
mchannon
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.

~~~
Mz
Please elaborate on your exposure to different labs for the benefit of the OP.

Thanks.

~~~
mchannon
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.

