If you're a good engineer, who's also a recent graduate, deciding to do a startup comes at a cost (e.g. reduced salary) -- more so depending on how much debt you've accumulated.
With that said, I'm all for informing students about all the options that are available and allowing them to choose.
Though, I would love to see more engineering graduates of Seattle colleges join startups.
Many of the students that wanted to go into startups after graduation instead of a job either had started on some product during school and wanted to see that through to completion, or were of the mind that they could just work for a few years at {Amazon, Google, Microsoft, ...} and then do the risky thing.
There is also a lack of exposure in the curriculum. They are in the middle of re-designing it, but before that only one class let you create a small team, come up with a product, and build it. It was seen as a painful course (it was) and it was also taken by most everyone (including people who couldn't care less, so it was hard to find a group of 4-5 motivated people). I don't recall any hackathons when I was there aside from ACM programming competitions.
This sounds valuable enough that I'd be willing to plunk down some of my company's time to make this happen. That said, I suspect we'd be a rather poor choice to drive this as we're running pretty independent of the rest of the Seattle startup scene.
Given our community, though, there's gotta be someone whose a decent fit for this.
Anyone?
My original comment was a bit too focused on the companies' side of things. I think the main issue is a lack of awareness on the part of students. In my experience (as a current undergrad at UW), students simply don't know about the local startup scene and thus don't take the steps to capitalize on it. Given the decent number of organizations and meetups in the area that would provide good avenues for students to get involved (Seattle Tech Startups, Startup Weekend, Hops & Chops, TechCafe, etc), it's more a matter of connecting the dots than developing new social structures.
In my opinion, people here seem pretty risk-averse (ie few want to jump and do a startup, especially people in their twenties).
It kind of seems like people lack the drive to "change the world". Instead, people seem pretty laid back here. It's almost as if they get too comfortable here.
I think getting the patrons moving is a huge win - they all have stacks they want startups using and/or hiring problems. Getting a vibrant startup community makes things much better.
I'd like to first introduce myself to everyone. My name is Rishi Talwar and I'm a senior majoring in Informatics at UW. I can't believe this is my first post on HN ever. I guess this topic really resonates with me because I've been passionate about the Seattle startup tech scene since the beginning of freshman year.
I too agree that there needs to be a more emphasis on startups at UW and building software that ultimately help others/create value. From my personal experience I have seen that there are a few people who feel as passionate and inspired about startups. I found this out when I was looking to work with a UW CSE student on a project I had in mind which is now up here: http://www.fratapps.com/. I'm not a CS major but I'm still up on different types of technologies. Mainly, I'm a front-end and product guy who loves building stuff. Therefore I was seeking someone who was majoring in cs.
After meeting with multiple students I finally found a friend who was willing to partner up and work with me who was a UW CSE student. But most of these students that I met didn't have any clue about the startup scene in Seattle or didn't care about building anything. This makes me feel that these students majoring in CSE are not passionate about their industry and ultimately get gobbled up by a big-co knowing that they will receive an $80,000+ salary. Maybe its not in their DNA or other factors drive them or its not in their curriculum. But there was definitely an utter lack of fire that is not money driven or by notoriety.
However, this past year I've been happy to know that these students are out there like Mongoose and a few others who has been a tremendous advocate for startups and do it purely out of passion. Also, I have had the honor to meet a freshman business student who is probably way more well connected in the Startup scene then me (twitter:@mikeytom) who has worked on FratApps.com.
When I read blog posts like this from Mark Suster it makes me want to hustle. Maybe there needs to be a startupWeekend for UW like StartupUW. Something that brings all facets of knowledge ie business, engineering, and Informatics or anyone else together on campus.
I appreciate you reading this and would like to hear your thoughts.
Thanks,
Rishi Talwar twitter: @rishtal
This 'problem' is so fixable; we just need another catalyst (like what www.GeneralAssemb.ly and New Work City are doing in NYC... and what TechStars did in Boulder, Seattle, Boston and NYC, and many other examples).
We're just a few nudges away, and there's no doubt we'll get there -- we just need to keep focusing on the good stuff, and it's going to happen.
We're a startup working out of an architecture firm right now. The space is relatively inexpensive, it would be stellar if there were other startups around who are interested in putting together something similar with programming around design and technology.
If you're intersted, reach out to me via twitter (@ashbhoopathy) or email, ash@bettr.at. I'll also email Seattle Tech Startups about it.
Ya, they're not enough "crazy" people.
I think Seattle needs a big consumer-based (2.0 or 3.0) hit. It needs a Facebook, a Groupon, a Twitter, a Skype, a LinkedIn, an Etsy, a Dropbox.
In the 5 years after college that I lived in the city proper, the only tech group I managed to hang around was Seattle.RB, and only a few meeting at that.
We're not lacking the meetups, the events (Seattle 2.0 awards tonight!) We're lacking the leadership and super-stars participation in the community. While I see Dave Schappell at Hops and Chops, I don't feel like others mingling with us casual masses without it being self promotional.
I want to go to some event (and Hops and Chops seems like a good venue), have a real conversation with the CTO of a startup about solving some tech or product challenge. Or I want to hear about how some CEO got started over a beer. And I want to meet another super-star who's actively looking for help.
Or maybe I'm just a poster-child for Pemco ads. I am wearing sandals and gore-tex and typing this from a Starbucks...
All the literature about the program mentions that you can optionally take 1 capstone course (which are the big project courses that let you have free creative reign over what you produce). My solution was to just do 3 capstones instead.
I ended up taking the Google/Hadoop project course, distributed systems capstone, and Dan Weld's web services capstone. Each quarter I had 3-4 people on a team, and we were able to build something awesome.
To me it always seemed like a problem of advertising the opportunity within the department, and encouraging big risky projects vs. focused, assigned classwork.
You were actually one of the people I was thinking of when I originally put in an aside about the really motivated people still doing it. I then removed that aside, but I probably should not have. The really motivated people are going to go into startups; they caught the itch at some point and need to scratch it to remain happy.
The subset of people that could go either way (startup or corporate) don't quite have the opportunity to see what a startup would be like at UW. The capstones are good, but for most they are an afterthought to be done in the final quarter or two, when they have most likely landed a job already. Software Engineering (CSE 403) is more about satisfying a requirement than about building something, and that is all most students end up with.
It's not necessarily an insurmountable gap but it's enough to intimidate most people who aren't already outgoing, or who are accustomed to a friendlier town.
I grew up in Redmond, went to college at WSU, and moved into Seattle in 2002. For the longest time after that, when walking into a bar or show, I had to keep persuading myself that people were not going to point and scream at me like Donald Sutherland in the 70's Body Snatchers movie.
On topic, that feature of Seattle may have some bearing on entrepreneurs in search of capital or employees or a support network. But it seems orthogonal to actually taking the plunge; you're either going to do it, or keep talking about it.
(Also, I think we may have been in some classes together at WSU! We must know some of the same people, you're 3 degrees away on LinkedIn.)
Case in point: if I'd known there were more startups looking for talent, I probably wouldn't have moved out to the eastern part of the state in 2007. At the time, my options after burnout+dismissal seemed to be 'work for another large company'(which I'm still wary of), 'pursue your own idea on your lonesome'(which I didn't have any of at the time) or 'don't work at all'.
(My best classes at WSU were with Hagemeister, Wang(CS460 FTW), and Biker Bob. Contributing to my slight-insecurity as a dev, I was also part of the Benson class that petitioned to have him removed: for tossing us a description of car/cdr and expecting us to build a complete Lisp in SML)
or, if you want to be cynical that Amazon's a long time ago... how about like an AWS, or a Kindle? The innovation's here -- we just need to get more commingling going on
it's going to happen -- if you're in town, reach out, please -- would love to have you help
I think parent poster has a point - there aren't a lot of recent examples of taking the risk and having it pay off, which may lead to some risk aversion in the community.
For example Big Fish Games. There's also Tableau Software (although not consumer). Neither large compared to Skype, but both ~$100M revenue companies founded about the time of Skype.
UPDATE: After I wrote this I realized what is different about Seattle than the Bay Area, which is something a previous poster put in parentheticals... (web 2.0/3.0). Look at this list:
Facebook, a Groupon, a Twitter, a Skype, a LinkedIn, an Etsy, a Dropbox
These companies, except maybe Dropbox, are about connecting users together. Not about product. Seattle tends to be more focused on providing product. Is it the case that you are less likely to see a Tableau or Mathematica come out of the Bay Area?