I think this article is spot on. Unless daddy can afford to give you some major dough, you need a good tech founder. I was fortunate enough to happen into a rock-star Tech Co-Founder, and there’s no way we could have done it without him. Unless you get extremely lucky, there’s way too much post MVP iteration required to nail a product, which means that even once you have your MVP, your tech needs are far from over.
I’ve tried to help more than one friend find tech founders and I see 2 big problems from the university level based on my experience:
1- The different schools at BYU are very siloed. I always minded my own business at the business school and so did the engineers. It would be HUGE for BYU and Utah’s tech community if we could help bridge that gap. Utah is hungry for tech and this may be the single most important thing we could do to fuel that fire.
2- Mindset and Exposure: I’ve observed that engineers tend to be more risk averse than the average Biz school student. Almost all of my Business partner’s friends say they wouldn’t leave their high paying tech jobs for a startup. While almost all of my friends are either working part time on a startup or have already left their jobs to start companies.
While the risk aversion on the engineer side is understandable (eg. my tech co-founder could go out and get $120k + /year on the market and he’s not even that far removed from school), I disagree that this is the root of the problem.
There’s plenty of CS majors in Silicon Valley going to better colleges that could go out and make even more than BYU grads, but they do a startup at much higher rates anyways because they’re in an environment where the mindset is different. It’s not just about the possibility of making big money. From my experience working and speaking with entrepreneurial minded developers, it’s about building something cool that lots of people see and use. And that’s what you have to sell them on. So I’d have to respectfully disagree with the CS majors who are calling opportunity cost the problem.
Plus, if you think about it, it’s even less risky for a CS student to do a startup because they can make their money back even faster if the startup fails. And they can do side work and charge $80/hour like my business partner does when he needs it.
The idea the author is trying to present here isn’t that we’re trying to convert all CS majors into entrepreneurs, in the same way that all business majors aren’t going to be entrepreneurs. Which means if you’re a risk averse CS major commenting that you’d never join a startup you’re part of the majority of engineers that this article isn’t trying to capture. The idea is that there’s a population of CS majors that would be entrepreneurs if the environment and their mindset was different and if they had the opportunity to do so. And that group is 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 times larger than the very small sliver of CS majors currently jumping into entrepreneurial ventures (which would still be a very small percentage of CS majors). Utah already has a booming tech community, but imagine if we could suddenly match two or three times as many ambitious entrepreneurs with the tech talent they need to build their products? That’s the exciting potential the author is getting at here.
When entrepreneurship isn’t presented to you as an option, it never crosses your mind to become an entrepreneur. Which means we need to get developers exposed to entrepreneurship earlier on. And we need to create an environment and be capable of selling them on the vision the way Silicon Valley does so much better than we do. I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, but it took the right opportunity/connection and a change in mindset for me to make that leap. And if we do it right, we can provide the right environment to start tapping into more of those CS majors who just need a bit of a nudge to break from the singular “go get a job” mindset that I perceive currently dominates the CS department.
