The University of Illinois’ Startup Ecosystem

I started a not to be named University entrepreneurship program. I drew similar pictures and it looked beautiful, as if the ecosystem was bursting with activity. But the reality was different. It lacked excitement, it lacked visibility, it lacked engagement and above all it lacked entrepreneurial culture (which I see as gluon or higgs boson of a robust entrepreneurial ecosystem).<p>So at the heart of this beautiful map, I created a cultural hub .. a space that was founded and run by students, who elevated the excitement and visibility of entrepreneurship. To top it up, I elected a student women entrepreneur to lead it. It had interesting implications:<p>1. Entrepreneurial ecosystems tend to be male dominated. By creating a community of student entrepreneurs, lead by a female student, it created a &#x27;safe zone&#x27; for other women entrepreneurs to come forward and engage.<p>2. Much of what we did at the space, was to encourage trying new things, new ideas and celebrating every tiny milestone of a student. I started a FB page, where every student activity was documented and celebrated.<p>3. In less than 2 years, I helped start over 60 new ventures. Some died or would have died or will die and a few get accepted into top incubators..and others are at limbo... but the process helped students to learn important lessons in entrepreneurship. It is best to do it while still a student.<p>4. The space helped connect all the dots in the picture (drawn in the article). It brought the organizations closer to the students and helped create visible linkages. It helped movement of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial ideas easily across those linkages and removed redundancies in the ecosystem.<p>5. I gained a lot of visibility in the media and it didn&#x27;t go well with the fossils of University who claimed entrepreneurship as their own and turned my exciting job into a political game and a living hell. Non of it leaked to my students, but being an entrepreneur myself, I already had many other projects that I was working on ... so I left the University and aside from championing my students from the sidelines now, I find utmost excitement in pursuing my own tiny startup. I am broke, but I am happy and every day take pride in the work I did, to create the nucleus of a successful entrepreneurial ecosystem in one of the top Universities, that would act as a cascading feeder to the community for many generations to come.

Currently working at UIUC at a relatively new startup and yes there is a good community building here. There is lots of agricultural innovation going on here and having giants like John deere, adm, ABinBev as well as tech companies like said yahoo hadoop analytics group. Cool to see some UIUC research park love here on hacker news. Can&#x27;t wait to get up and go back to work at the research park where I will be hacking on python all day!

Author says UI has &quot;a rich history&quot; with regard to startups. I am curious when the clock started ticking for &quot;history&quot; in this author&#x27;s view -- last 10 years? 15?<p>Startups were a very different story at UI in the late 60s, 70s, and early 80s. From what I&#x27;ve gathered, it seems doing a startup could be a very iffy proposition, vis a vis the university. Sometimes it could even get you in a heap o&#x27; trouble.

UIUC grad here. Pretty sure I was the author&#x27;s TA at one point too :)<p>All of these programs and events are a huge step in the right direction. I personally did my best to even help some of these programs grow, particularly iFoundry and the group that eventually became Hack Illinois. But the biggest challenge I found was bridging the chasm between this hacker&#x2F;entrepreneur culture and the existing academic&#x2F;research culture.<p>As a premier research university, the UIUC engineering curriculum is heavily focused on the theoretical. In my years there, I really had to go out of my way to obtain some hands-on learning experiences. Those are so important for breeding a hacker&#x2F;entrepreneur culture. It&#x27;s how you learn to work with real-world constraints, how to network and collaborate, and how to fail well. A textbook and a Powerpoint lecture just can&#x27;t teach that.<p>So the question I pose, to the author and to the readers, is this: How do we change the way students are taught?

Madison and the University of Wisconsin are developing their startup scene more since I&#x27;ve started here.<p>The nice part about Madison is that it <i>isn&#x27;t</i> just the university, like some are commenting about UIUC. The Ionic framework is based out of Madison, made by two Wisconsin grads. Gener8tor is an accelerator in this city and they&#x27;re growing. They really do provide good opportunities to founders, and they have funding from State Farm insurance that seems to be steady, so I have hope that things can really go somewhere. Though I have to say that having been around their office and at a few events they really don&#x27;t feel tech-oriented.<p>And then the university has their own stuff. To anyone at UW-Madison reading this: avoid them! WARF is a hungry parasite and if you do anything interesting they will do their best to take their perceived share.

So many points to answer...<p>1. I am willing to grant that Champaign&#x2F;Urbana is not the ideal place to live for everyone; however, it affords me the best of everything I want from a community, without a lot of what I perceive as the drawbacks of places like Chicago or SV or other large metro areas. I would not live anywhere else, and I know that others feel the same way that I do; and it is fine if others disagree.<p>2. (This ought to start a firestorm of comments...) I have worked for three different companies based in SV or SF and have lots of friends still in that area. It has been my personal experience that people there are motivated by money concerns much more than they are in CU. In conversations with my friends there, they say things like, &quot;Come work at XYZ and they&#x27;ll up your salary by X&quot;; or, &quot;If you come to this startup you&#x27;ll get tons of stock options&quot;; etc. This is totally my opinion, but I believe that people in SV are so worried about money because they really can&#x27;t afford to live there unless they make a <i>lot</i> of it. And again, my opinion is that this influences people to move jobs frequently in order to get a bump in pay, a big sign-on bonus, or the hope for a big stock payout. The SV culture encourages frequent moves. I certainly cannot deny that people in CU talk about money, but when my friends here try to pull me away to another job, they often talk about the cool tech they are working on or how much they love the culture of their company, and not about the money. It is because people in Tech in CU can afford to live very well on modest salaries. (My spouse doesn&#x27;t work and we still live really well.) Again, just my opinion, but I believe that this is the real reason why people stay longer in their jobs in CU. It isn&#x27;t because they don&#x27;t have options. (I feel that I have many options, and my options seem to be increasing all the time.) It is because they are not forced to move just to afford to live.<p>3. Rome wasn&#x27;t built in a day, and anyone who has been in the community for a while can see that there have been great improvements in our startup culture over the last decade or two. And, just as Rome fell, SV will not be the center of the Tech Universe forever.<p>4. Related to comments 2 and 3, see the article: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;id&#x2F;102697372" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;id&#x2F;102697372</a><p>5. The University has done an amazing amount of good for the community, if only by being one of the major economic engines in CU, and I appreciate that. It isn&#x27;t their &quot;responsibility&quot; to build a startup community in CU. However, they have done a lot to advance it. The U of I Research Park is a great example of that.<p>6. A few people in this thread seem to be blaming UIUC for what they perceive as startup culture issues. It takes a lot of hard work from many players (individuals and organizations) to build a great startup community, so if there are failings, stop blaming others and do something about it.

Urbana-Champaign is in the middle of no-where. The University is <i>Urbana-Champaign</i> - there is very little city around the campus. It would be one of the worst places to start a company. Not to mention that Illinois is one of the last states where I would want to start a company.