This article first appeared in the June 2015 issue of the Venture Atlanta Newsletter.
They may be a mere year out of college, but the Georgia Tech students behind vending machine software startup Gimme Vending are not shooting out résumés or fetching coffee. Instead, co-founders Cory Hewett and Evan Jarecki are being awarded $50,000 and a host of professional support services to grow their business. Gimme aims to put data insights in the hands of small- and medium-sized vending operators so that they may make more informed decisions.
Gimme, one of eight student-led companies to emerge from Georgia Tech’s 2014 Startup Summer program, is in good company. In its inaugural year, the program saw startups building technologies that include 3D cameras, “goop-free” ultrasound equipment, wireless drone kits, a Bluetooth-enabled mobile app to diagnose car problems and a pacifier that serves as an infant thermometer!
The goals for the upcoming and subsequent summers are equally ambitious. According to Dr. Raghupathy Sivakumar, who leads the program with support from the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, the CREATE-X/Startup Summer suite of programs could scale to 300 student-led startups each year. “Achieving this goal will fundamentally change the profiles of Georgia Tech, Atlanta, and Georgia,” he contends.
Georgia Tech students are known for being a brainy bunch, but deep academic knowledge does not always translate into real-world savoir faire. That’s why the university’s 12-week pilot program can be particularly helpful to student entrepreneurs who might not have had the training and resources to see their business ventures to fruition.
“Students during Startup Summer actually launch their own startup, including incorporating their company, dealing with founder equity allocations, creating their web presence, performing customer discovery, building the first iteration of their product, figuring out pricing strategies, protecting intellectual property rights and taking their product to market and gaining customer traction. This profoundly changes their confidence levels when it comes to entrepreneurship and doing startups.”
Dr. Raghupathy Sivakumar
Students also receive $20,000 per team as part of the program. The funding comes from former Georgia Tech student Chris Klaus, who donated $2 million following his own success in the field of internet security. Thanks to Klaus’ investment, from May 11 to August 7, eight teams will refine their product, polish their pitch and — perhaps most importantly — learn how to build a business model that will hold up to market realities.
“One of the challenges that I think Startup Summer (and the entire CREATE-X suite of experiences) is helping with is teaching students how to be methodical as entrepreneurs. Often entrepreneurs are easily distracted and prone to make generalizations without clear proof of their beliefs. Through Startup Summer…we’re teaching that systematic approach so that the teams really understand their customer and can make sure they are building a product/service that addresses a real and quantified customer need.”
Sanjay Parekh, Georgia Tech alumni and startup founder
Georgia Tech’s summer program is not the university’s first foray into supporting student entrepreneurship. An unpaid iteration of the program, Startup Semester, has existed since 2012. It served as a resource-building network for students. Both are indicative of a greater trend taking root in colleges and universities across the world. As a sort of 21st century answer to the apprenticeship or internship, startup incubators represent academia’s growing interest in fostering practical, tangible innovation with real-world implications.
The Startup Semester FAQs warn would-be participants that the program is not for those who would like to beef up their résumés or impress admissions officers at graduate schools. It is for “people who want to achieve results.”
In the sphere of academia, this shifting focus on cultivating the next crop of young mavericks is a sign of the times. As business acumen expands beyond the boundaries of traditional MBAs and programs like Startup Summer sprout up in universities around the globe, we are headed for an exciting age in technology innovation.
