It’s funny how little things can change your entire perspective. In 2011 I enrolled in a fourth year electrical engineering elective at Sydney University that was recommended to me by friend who knew I was interested in entrepreneurship and technology.
Although I didn’t call it startups at the time, the course was essentially taking the students through the motions of founding a high-growth technology company and the life of such a venture — from startup, ideation, pitching (which was worth 40% of the course), venture financing all the way to exit and IPO. Inspired by a similar subject at Stanford University the course was started by an alumnus and now well known Australian entrepreneur, Matt Barrie, founder of Freelancer.com.
For me, it was one of the most important subjects I took at university as it demonstrated the value entrepreneurial engineers bring when they build a company based on technological innovation and fittingly is called Technology Venture Creation. On top of this, the class is heavily interactive and brings in world class entrepreneurs as guest speakers.
Astoundingly, this was the first time anyone at university had encouraged me to think about starting a technology company and building something of value. I thought this was crazy and ultimately doing that course influenced me to start an accelerator, INCUBATE, and a bunch of my classmates to do their own startups.
At a quick glance;
Ben started Brainworth — and edu-tech company that had a lofty ambitions but ultimately failed. That led him to co-found Meta Glasses, an augmented reality startup that went through Y-Combinator in 2013 and to date has raised over $23 million.
Chris, started Minefold after the class which provided easy-setup game hosting to just over 100k people and went through YC in 2012 but that also failed. Now they’ve gone on to start Assembly which is a platform for developers to collaborate and recently raised $2.9m.
And more recently;
Nick, started Edisse after the class which is a smart-watch that detects falls for the elderly. They ended up going through the first accelerator cycle of INCUBATE (a couple of years after I had graduated from the same class!) and last year raised $380k seed to build out their first product.
Allen, started Tzukuri, designer sunglasses with bespoke technology that alerts you if you’ve left them behind, raised $500k seed last year (and I’m now a founding Advisor).
And many more from the class have started or gone on to work for startups and I’m sure will continue to help build technology companies.
While I know my class mates mentioned above were always entrepreneurial the value of being able to study technology ventures as part of your degree is enormous in shaping your actions and perspective post university.
I send out a weekly(ish) personal email on entrepreneurs, student founders and tech innovation. This blog post appeared originally as an email in Issue 7 and I got a great response so I thought to share it wider 😃
