stephenfleming

Alright, I guess I'm the voice of the GT Establishment here.

I'm certainly not going to argue with anyone who says "A year ago, I’d hardly heard of startups. Neither had just about anyone at Georgia Tech." But I'll point out that our early-stage incubator, VentureLab, just got ranked #1 in the frickin' WORLD (out of 150 universities) by UBI. And we've been doing that for 12 years. And ATDC is consistently ranked as Top Ten in the country, and we've been doing that for 33 years. We just graduated our third Flashpoint cohort. So you might want to dig a little more deeply before you throw around "no one" and "never"...

That said, I'm loving the energy and the enthusiasm I'm seeing here. We're major fans of Startup Exchange and the rest of the undergraduate startup scene. I've found that most undergraduates seem reluctant to step into the Centergy building; they feel more comfortable at Hypepotamus. That's cool, we're friends, but don't forget that there's a heck of a lot of resources here in Centergy if you can get past our oh-so-corporate lobby.

Here's a post I wrote a year or so ago about what I'd like to see happen with GT undergraduates:

http://academicvc.com/2012/10/01/drownproofing-2-0/

Finally, a lot of this thread has talked about Atlanta in general. Traditionally, Atlanta hasn't been a great B2C town (although some folks are trying to change that). We do great B2B startups, and we do great hardware startups. There's a lot of the economy that doesn't read Hacker News. You're young; don't limit yourself.

I remain amused by the casual bigotry exhibited by so many Silicon Valley denizens that OF COURSE all the smart, motivated, ambitious entrepreneurs will move to the Valley. Most of them would be incensed if a colleague displayed a comparable level of bigotry about race, or sex, or national background, or the rest of the litany. But it's socially acceptable -- at least west of I-5 -- to dismiss 99% of the country as full of failures. "Sure, maybe they did great in AAA ball, but they couldn't make it in the Big Show."

Which has led to the Valley being a hothouse of artificially-compressed geniuses building products for each other instead of for the real world.

But not everyone is a brilliant 23-year-old willing to share a flophouse with three other geniuses while coding 20 hours a day. In the real world, people have spouses... kids... mortgages... elderly parents... heck, maybe they just like sweet tea! There are all sorts of reasons that they won't move to the Valley, even if they have plenty of talent to compete at that level.

I submit that looking for the best of the best among that 99% of the country is a heck of a good way to make money. It's harder, because you can't sit on Sand Hill Road and watch the universe rotate around you. But with some hustle and some brains, there's plenty of opportunity for non-Valley entrepreneurs, and non-Valley investors, to do very very well.

I'm not going to try to embed a picture here on HN, but check out the link and let me know if you want a button! (I think Fred Wilson would wear one; I doubt that Paul Graham would.)

http://academicvc.com/2009/07/not-the-valley/

And, of course, Shotput Ventures DID hold a Demo Day, on August 10 in one of my auditoriums, and packed it to standing-room-only.

I didn't check IDs for state of origin, but there were certainly a bunch of angel and VC investors in the room.

In the near term, plug-in hybrids with flex-fuel engines, plus lots and lots of nuclear power plants, followed by space-based solar power satellites in the medium term. Fusion in the long term (defined as "after I'm dead, dammit").

Nope, got plenty of Oreos, right here.

Other people may have looked at the unfavorable characteristics and conclude "fuel cells are bad." That would be sloppy and stupid.

My message would be that "HYDROGEN fuel cells are bad, especially for automotive use." I like fuel cells in general; my employer has some great work going on with methanol fuel cells.

As far as the quotes being out of context... you've got Google, right there in your toolbar. Look 'em up.

Precisely. (Thank you for chiming in. I'm the author of the presentation in question, and am completely surprised to find it here on Hacker News nearly two years after publication!)

Plenty of startup ideas, plenty of money, plenty of entrepreneurs in Atlanta. Not enough venture capital, but that's becoming less and less relevant to many classes of startups.

Practice in front of a live audience... even if just your roommates. Videotape yourself presenting and watch it (painful). I just put some points on presentation materials at http://academicvc.blogspot.com/2008/04/raising-capital-part-... and that might be interesting. Try to have a chance to test out the technology the night before... I know you use a Mac, so that eliminates a bunch of potential failure modes, but still..

Yes. My "main" desktop machine died several months ago. I popped out the hard disk, put it in an external FireWire enclosure, and I plug it into my MacBook Pro when I'm at home. So now I'm 100% reliant on the laptop, and perfectly happy. I'll buy peripheral machines (iPhone, tablet, etc.), but I don't plan to buy another desktop.