But a good idea and a strong team can find money all day long. That combination is rare though. And team is much more important than idea.

As I've said many times, a strong team can make a middling idea work. A bad team can kill the best (or any) idea.

It's simple enough to go online and send stuff out to California.

Apparently NYU has announced they are starting a seed and VC fund for NYU-originated startups.

Being an entrepreneurial spirit there was pretty isolating. It was only by way of my own activities (running a business while going to school) that I was able to experiment with entrepreneurial thought.

I do think the program could be enhanced to do more to instill an entrepreneurial spirit in the students. One tweak would be to introduce a marketplace-like lab environment in which the students form teams, produce products, and compete for real, live grade-points to be awarded by the other students (the customers).

People at Hopkins think nothing of devoting 8~12 years of their lives in return for a *guaranteed* $300-500k++ once they're done with school. It's an equation that makes sense to them.

They want to “make a lot of money”. They don't necessarily want to take any risks to do that though. To me, the ROI of entrepreneurship just makes sense, considering potential for outsized returns.. but it does not get a moment's consideration from the vast majority of Hopkins alumni who from day one are focused on the low-risk high-reward paths that they've obsessively been preparing themselves for since highschool (probably thinking that medicine/law/etc are all sexy and the top of the job chain).

How do you change that mode of thinking? I think people need to see that real success can come from entrepreneurship. I think places like Stanford breed success in no small part because kids there actually see how others have gone out, risked it all, and become successful. Dropping out of Stanford to start a company is a badge of honor.

That mentality does not exist over here. We need examples of massive success to point at here, so that people can say “hey, if that guy did it, why can't I?”

Unfortunately there was no discussion of starting the company here because the perception is that Austin has a much stronger ecosystem for young web companies – a plethora of early-stage investors, lots of advisors and peers, and more success stories, anchored by big institutions like the University of Texas, Dell, and Texas Instruments. The potential employees there know about risk vs reward and are savvy about stock options vs cash and like issues.

And yet we do have more than handful of success stories, or interesting stories in progress. Companies like Advertising.com, Millenial Media, Bill Me Later, Tidal TV, plus a lot of smaller ones you don't hear so much about like MP3Car and Figure53 and other companies at the ETC. So if it's a “chicken and egg” problem we may be further along than some might realize.

Here's one suggestion for a way that Hopkins and Baltimore in general could seriously differentiate ourselves and stimulate more activity around the Internet economy. In the Internet sector, the University of Texas does not necessarily confer much advantage to Austin. We're hiring in Austin right now, and I interview a lot of UT grads for those jobs. It seems like they are still getting an out-of-date, old-fashioned computer science education that doesn't bear much relevance to what my company needs. They are not learning anything about software development as a craft, about making real world products that solve real world problems. I've thought about going back to Hopkins for a CS degree in grad school, but when I look over the curriculum I see the same problems. I don't see anything there that's relevant to what I do; in fact it's so mechanical and mathematical that it's easy to see the jobs requiring those skills being completely moved offshore.

The result is, anyone who's worth hiring as a programmer for the web is largely self-taught. But what if there was a leading institution pushing a different approach? One that taught programming as a means of crafting products, a “high touch” discipline not easily exported to developing countries? There's an awesome proposal for such a program, the Master of Fine Arts in Software:

http://www.dreamsongs.com/MFASoftware.html

Imagine if we had that in Baltimore, the kinds of talent we might attract and the companies and dreams we might hatch?