From the time I arrived at MIT in '08 to the time I left in '11, I witnessed a pretty huge shift in the interests of MIT students towards startups. Many people who probably would have gone into finance or defense diverted themselves to the startup world. The 100K competition at MIT and things like StartLabs have gotten big. Dropbox being homegrown was a big thing.

For me, it's been awesome to see the best engineers doing their own companies instead of joining defense contractors or GS.