The #1 University in the U.S. for spinning off startups may surprise you | Hacker News Reader

The #1 University in the U.S. for spinning off startups may surprise you

thenextweb.com

33 pointsrgonzalez24 comments

If you read about computer history much, and the university of utah is mentioned quite a bit. They were one of the first four computers on the ARPANet, a hotbed for graphics research, and the alma mater of Alan Kay, Ed Catmull and John Warnock. A bunch of early Pixar people came from there, and a number from PARC. Perhaps its because I don't know much about Utah, but it always surprised me how important it was to computer history, especially in relation to graphics.

Also Jim Clark (SGI and Netscape).

I don't know if it is related but they seem to have been consistently open and inviting to outsiders. I grew up within walking distance to campus back in the 70s and 80s. Two of my older brothers used to "sneak" computer time on a teletype system they had. I found out later just about anyone could show up and someone was around willing to show how to use it. They often have engineering weekends where high school kids can come through and explore projects other students are working on - more than an open house, less than a course. My oldest son visits regularly and just sent in his application yesterday.

I believe it was Dealers in Lightning that had an anecdote about someone piping up with the perfect answer during a all hands meeting, while telling off the bigwig who was saying it wouldn't work. As it turns out, it was someone just touring PARC, who happened to be an expert.

That sort of all-comers-welcome mentality seems to be common in many successful hacker spaces. Though I am not sure if it is a cause of a result of it.

Also, you forgot Ivan Sutherland.

This could really be titled "University of Utah is the number one University in US for spinning off startups."

It's a good article, but I prefer my HN de-linkbaited. (NB: the linkbait worked, and I clicked on the link).

"other top schools included Brigham Young University, Columbia, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Purdue, Cal Tech, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Michigan"

Where is Stanford in this list? It seems like they're counting startups that come out of university-sponsored research instead of startups that come from university people.

I think that's where the "spinning off" comes from? I mean Standford University didn't exactly "spin off" Google.

Edit: very wrong about the above.

Yeah they did...

Was the university itself really involved in the business itself, giving lots of assistance to Brin/Page? I mean I know it hosted the original site or whatever, but I was under the impression that they weren't super-involved in the business side.

Stanford owns the PageRank patent and licenses it to Google.

Spinning off research as a business is somewhat different than entrepreneurial students starting their own ventures. At the very least, it sounds like the University gets to hold on to the IP.

Besides, it's #1 (by whatever metric) out of just 9 schools examined.

"In total, the 2010 AUTM survey reports information collected from 183 institutions across the U.S. -- 155 universities, 27 hospitals and research institutions, and one third-party management company." (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/u-of-utah-repeats-as-no-1-u...)

This is specifically a count of the number of companies which have paid money to these universities to license technology developed by their professors, which doesn't really IMHO have anything to do with software startups anymore.

Didn't surprise me in the least. U Utah has a long and important part of computer science history, and the Mormon culture (U of U is 50% Mormon) is very highly entrepreneurial.

They also have a lot of involvement in bio-medical engineering. That field doesn't intersect a whole lot with the web-heavy types of things that we discuss here on hacker news.

(I only know that because I attended "The U" - I'm very web-heavy myself.)

Brigham Young, which is also in Utah, is number 3 on the list.

I've found that people new to start-ups haven't heard of Utah Based Start-ups because their community is so isolated. Utah based start-ups are in the Valley as well, but they are a very self-segregated group. Nevertheless they make valuable contributions to computing so I'm not complaining.

Fusion IO and Omniture deserve a bit of recognition for recent performance. Both Salt Lake / Utah Valley based startups.

Another #1 for the University of Utah: Best Ubuntu mirror in the west. I think they lag behind a couple of hours from some of the primary mirrors, but it's oh so worth it for the speed.

I hate to be churlish, but the link-baity title is pretty silly. It's unclear what the "Association of University Technology Managers" is even measuring here.

I'll just say that if you're a high schooler whose only priority is to be around lots of people in start ups and to join or start one yourself, Utah may not, in actuality, be the best place to go.

(Which isn't to say it's a bad choice or doesn't have substantial strengths.)

This might be surprising, but people are forgetting about medical/genetics research and the money it brings in. The U has one of the best medical schools and genetics research in the nation, things that are less visible to the general public (unless it's a gene patent case from Myriad Genetics or something)

what about successful startups?

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