I recently joined the University of Colorado Computer Science Department advisory board. I attended a day long meeting with the department and consciously went in “listen and learn” mode, as it was my first meeting. I learned quite a bit that day that I hope to keep acting upon. Let me tell you how I got there in the first place.
Over the past three years, I’ve been a participant in many lunch meetings where folks have wondered how the local entrepreneurial community can help the department more. Intentions have always been good and these meetings have been “brainstorming” sessions for the most part. Usually the discussion has centered around one of more of the following:
- Wishing the department would grow enrollment and ultimately crank out more graduates into the local work force.
- Wishing those who are graduating would have a better grasp on modern development technologies, such as web scripting languages.
- Wondering how they could help elevate the national reputation of the school.
- Wondering how they could help the university and the department become more focused on entrepreneurship.
In the end, the last point always seemed to be one that felt like the most important one, as it can ultimately drive the rest. I think it’s a very fair statement to say that the Computer Science department at CU is not focused on encouraging students to follow an entrepreneurial path. Ultimately, this is what we as a community should be working to change. But we can’t do it by throwing our hands up in the air and exclaiming “they just don’t get it.” I’ve been guilty of this in the past.
Most of us have noticed the great work going on at CU that seems to emanate from Silicon Flatirons. There are now regular fantastic events and real direction and leadership coming from this group, among others on campus. A few months ago, Jason Mendelson introduced me to Tom Lookabaugh. As I understand it, Tom had grown a little sick of hearing about these “brainstorming” sessions that were going on across town, and the fact that none of them were actually including folks from the department who could obviously be additive to the discussion. So much to Tom’s credit, he began organizing and paying for a series of small, manageable dinners with attendees from the local entrepreneurial community and folks from the CS department.
I attended one of these dinners and had a fantastic time. Tom baited the entrepreneurs into enumerating the points mentioned at the beginning of this post. He had the CS department reacting to the observations. As it turns out, most of these observations were actually assumptions.
Those dinners continued, and in fact I went to another one last night. The first such dinner I went to was respectfully adversarial, but now the tone is much more cooperative. They’ve resulted in real and successful initiatives to bridge the community and the department, such as Startup2Student and a sponsored intern program for which we raised $10,000 from Oracle, Rally, Webroot, Brad Feld, and Microsoft BizSpark to allow CU CS students to experience entrepreneurship through Techstars this summer.
As with most things in the world, the devil is in the details. When you learn about the incentive structures that are in place at CU (and most schools) and you meet the people who live and breathe the issues daily, you realize that many (but not all) of them do in fact “get it.” There are certainly thought leaders in the department that are working to affect these very changes, and who fully understand their value. But they live in a world where things do not change overnight, and the issues are complicated.
When Computer Science and other departments in a university become an entrepreneurial engine, the results can be absolutely stunning. Just read this report from MIT if you really want to understand the scope of what can be accomplished when such a culture exists. You can be a part of making it happen here. It’s going to take a long time – probably ten to twenty years. But it will be very worthwhile if we can help bring a more entrepreneurial focus to CU.
How can you help? Keep talking about it. Keep brainstorming. But do it with the right folks and really get involved. Figure out a way to help expose CU students to entreprneurship through creative internships. Organize events targeted at bringing students and entrepreneurs together. Support on campus organizations like CUDiv and Silicon Flatirons. Reach out to me or Paul Jerde, Brad Bernthal, Kurt Smith, Dirk Grunwald, Gary Nutt, Brad Feld, Jason Mendelson, Tom Lookabaugh, and others. I guarantee you they “get it.” When the call comes, just stand up and help. It’s what we do so well as a community. Just remember, CU is a big part of that community. And it will be even bigger in the future if we focus on it.
And what if entrepreneurship focused on bootstrapping rather than Vulture Capital? No room to play for the VC boys? Force the principles to innovate, to secure deals and business partnerships sans OPM? What an interesting paradigm.
It seems like you're focusing on computer science a bit too much. If you look at other aspects of CU's engineering college or even arts and sciences, you will find more commercial activity.
Great topic. IMPORTANT topic. No question that one of the great resources of the Boulder area is the intellectual capital located in CU-Boulder: both from a raw talent and inspirational perspective. One of my funnest things is occasionally helping Frank Moyes with his business planning class for the MBA and Undergrad business programs. CU-Boulder consistently turns out great students and great plans because Frank is a great instructor and he thoroughly incorporates the business community along the path. He has 21 year old students turning out plans that I didn't figure out how to do until I was 35 or 40. This might happen more than I'm aware, but just like TechStars encourage 3 person teams, it would be great to "create the opportunity" for more interaction between the business school and the engineering school. Some of the best of the best plans in the MBA classes are when an MBA team connects with an engineering student and builds a plan around the engineer's idea or incorporating the enginneer's acumen.
In my 2 years at CTEK (Colorado Technology Incubator), I saw a lot of engineering driven companies: some good ideas. Some just a technology looking for a problem (and not finding it.) When you find the "good engineering idea", it usually comes with a prototype (that's what the engineer has been working on every night and weekend while a student). And a prototype of a good solution is relatively easy to fund and find the marketing resources to work with.
HOWEVER, the tough one to fund is the marketing/sales dude that has been in industry and sees a gap in solutions. They have a GREAT idea… but no engineering resource nor money to build the prototype.
I think the REAL opportunity for entrepreneurship is to have those marketing/sales driven ideas matched to the engineering talent that can make them happen.
THAT is the interaction that needs to be happening at CU. Meetup Boulder and TechStars are forums for some of that type interaction. But I think we could proactively force opportunities like that to happen in the CU community.
You know, planned serendipity. 😉
Jim
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JimPollock at AWhere.com
Top down organizations like the CS department, or even Silicon Flatirons for that matter, have a hard time encouraging students because many simply aren't exposed to enough cutting-edge web technologies through the curriculum to see where they could take them. ATLAS has done a really good job at doing this, and a number of their most promising students come from the CS department to explore more web and design related courses.
David, I have full confidence that you can really help the department to understand what it can do to bridge to the community and encourage students. Clearly the community is more than willing to help. Keeping students interested when they are young is key – I have heard of far too many CS students with less than positive experiences, and losing interest because their are too few "end goals" that the curriculum presents them with. CU Div was able to catch a number of seniors (as well as some younger students) who had already found their way to web development, however, fall semester freshman year is really the time to engage kids.
Jim – you have to be careful with this. CS students have their own ideas – you can't simply seek to pair them up with business-savvy "idea guys". Students can make this connection themselves, once they see what Boulder has to offer them, however, from the ones I have spoken to, many are wary of getting pulled into some venture where they are treated like code-monkeys and given no room to architect on their own.
Bottomline: focus on grassroots (student up) initiatives and giving students the options they need in the curriculum to see all the great entrepreneurial opportunities on campus and in Boulder.
could not agree more on the grass roots bottom up approach. we've been hearing that consistently from the department as well.
This semester my company worked with CU's Construction Engineering Management School. A group of graduate students helped me with some R&D for a class project. I brought them two ideas to work on for the semester. It was a Win-Win for both of us. The experience was great and I look forward to working with them next year.
I think that local entrepreneurs sometime expect universities like CU to have well established relationships with the local industry and entrepreneurial community. Just because CU isn't knocking on your door to participate with developing the next big thing shouldn't stop entrepreneurs from approaching professors and pushing them to get involved.
Smaller start-ups are ideal companies for universities to work with for so many reasons. CU has great opportunities for start-up companies through their engineering, business, and law schools. We as entrepreneurs need to make contact with CU and encourage them to serve our community. They will "Get it" and so will the students.