zoudini

Maybe it's an unfair criticism, but my school (Cornell) seems to lack the kind of ambition/enthusiasm for startups that you hear about at a Stanford or MIT.

I've got my own ideas about why that's the case (see below), but my real question is what I/others can do to get other talented and brilliant people excited/passionate about startups, open source and the future of tech (among other things -- given that these are very broad and not always overlapping areas to begin with)?

Possible causes:

0. Location location location -- Ithaca, NY is not Silicon Valley or Cambridge, MA. Cornell is pretty much the central hub of activity. But I do think the conditions are ripe for a Research Triangle, NC type of scene (Syracuse was recently named among the most affordable cities in the US, there are major research institutions like Cornell, RIT, University of Rochester, among others in the area)

1. A certain amount of group think -- CS at Cornell seems to focus a lot more on theory/research. I know this is the case at any reputable CS school but the top CS students either aim to go get their PhDs and pursue the most abstract research or go work for an IBM/Accenture (in my experience, a lot more people opt for MS over Google and I know of a handful at FB)

2. Lack of a nurturing environment -- There are some brilliant minds among the faculty (Jon Kleinberg for example) but again the focus seems to be almost solely on theory and not as "modern" languages (Cornell is for all intents and purposes now a Java school, C++/Matlab/Functional languages). Profs seem way too absorbed in their own research and much of the "teaching" falls on incompetent/inexperienced lecturers/grad students so it's hard to really motivated. Doing CS at Cornell feels more like surviving the gauntlet then doing something you're passionate about.

Part of this is that every major/school at Cornell is like its own little silo, you really have to go out of your way to "embed" yourself with the art students, stats heads, etc. That's why even though Cornell has a big emphasis on "entrepreneurship", it seems to focus on the "business co-founder types" and it's really sad how absent software/tech is missing from the scene (the entrepreneurship seems to revolve a lot of times around tech transfer and turning research into companies in materials, nanotech, etc.)