Ask HN: Which universities provide the best environment for startups?

NYU is a great school to start a startup right now. This month alone we have:

> Fred Wilson speaking on campus about biotech startups,

> NYU Startup Week, with discussions on raising investment, working at a startup, etc,

> and a hackathon sponsored by hackNY[0], a fellowship for students interested in founding or working at a startup.

NYU is also 10 minutes away from General Assembly[1], possibly the largest tech co-working space in Manhattan.

[0] http://hackny.org/a/

[1] http://www.generalassemb.ly/

Disclaimer: I'm a grad student at NYU, and I actually chose this program over others because of the startup environment in New York.

I think that the University of Chicago is cultivating a great startup culture at Booth.

The Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship has some amazing resources: http://www.chicagobooth.edu/entrepreneurship/

The Booth School of Business has at least 6 Nobel Laureates as professors: http://www.chicagobooth.edu/

The New Venture Challenge (http://research.chicagobooth.edu/nvc/) has launched companies like http://grubhub.com, http://benchprep.com, http://bu.mp, http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/, http://www.prepme.com/, etc.

UIUC - University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Though I may be biased since it is my alma mater. They have the Technology Entrepreneurship Center, as well as a great Research Park. Most of the startups are more big data focused, or come straight out of R&D projects. They also have the National Center for Supercomputing Applications located there; so all in all great technical resources at your behest. How you utilize them is a completely different part of the equation. Inevitably, startups are more dependent on the founders and their zeal than anything else.

Georgia Tech is a great entrepreneurial hub in the South. I would highly recommend looking them up and also checking out their affiliate program, ATDC: http://atdc.org/

I know they run incubator-like programs specifically for undergraduates, so that's pretty cool.

I live in Atlanta right now, so feel free to contact me if you're curious about anything. Also, I graduated from the University of Michigan a few months back, so I know a bit about their tech/entrepreneurial culture as well.

MIT has some partnership programs with Stanford and also host an entrepreneurship competition now where the winner can win money as well. See here: http://mit100k.org/

There's also this: http://www.vlab.org/

As a disclaimer, I'm not associated with MIT and never attended or even been on their campus so I can't say much other than the above. I come from the Stanford side of things. Although I did attend some VLAB events.

Does it have to be in U.S.? UWaterloo (Canada) has dedicated student residence as a startup incubator http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/

I know caltech is trying to be but isn't. It's way more academic.