I suppose the meaning of "tech" is somewhat subjective, but to me it seems like most of the companies mentioned purely provide a platform or a service to consumers or businesses, largely with the motivation of selling a consumer something.
I guess I hoped there would be some cool startup working on non-linear optics that I've never heard of, or some bioinformatics startup changing the way we do medicine. Research spin-offs, I guess. I understand there's a lot more intellectual overhead in some of these things, and maybe they just aren't as glamorous or something, but I was hoping to see something along those lines.
Historically, few successful software startups have been research spinoffs. That's not a recent trend. Even Google wasn't really. In biotech, yes, but there the founders are older.
"The Stanford Digital Libraries project is one participant in the 4-year, $24 million Digital Library Initiative, started in 1994 and supported by the NSF, DARPA, and NASA."
That's a huge initiative, especially in 1994, supporting many, many grad students like Larry and Sergey. There's a strong claim that without the research funding, we wouldn't have Google.
That's why I put the "really" in there. It was government funded in the sense that any side project people work on in grad school is government funded, since the government is paying their living expenses. If that makes the startup a spinoff, Apple was a spinoff of HP, because Woz was still working at HP when he started designing the Apple I.
A $24M project, over 4 years, at six universities is exactly supposed to encourage creative innovation among the next generation and surrounded by domain experts. That initiative was designed to produce projects like Backrub.
Was Woz's job description at HP written to specify novel hardware? Was he surrounded by mentors and other employees hired to support that initiative? Across six departments?
