Because Some Students At Stanford Go To Startups, That Somehow Means Stanford Is No Longer A University?

from the huh? dept

First off, I should note that I like Nick Thompson, the editor of The New Yorker's website. I thought he was great back when he was at Wired, and later when he was an editor for The New Yorker magazine as well. So I'm a bit perplexed by his recent blog post bemoaning the fact that some students at Stanford drop out to do startups and that those startups often have strong ties to Stanford. I should note that I've got no personal connection to Stanford (though it appears Thompson is an alum). However, I'm really struggling to see what the problem is. Having real world skills and being able to do something with them seems like a good thing. Having a university right in the heart of Silicon Valley with close ties to Silicon Valley seems worthwhile.

The article even mentions how this has historically been the case as well, as many of Silicon Valley's most successful companies have close ties to Stanford, going back to Federal Telegraph and Hewlett Packard -- often considered the two "founding" tech companies of Silicon Valley. But where things get really confusing is that Thompson seems to leap from the idea that some rather small percentage of students have created startups, with a few of them having close connections to faculty and administrators, to the idea that this is some sort of "requirement" for students at Stanford:

But what’s the point of having a great university among the palm trees if students feel like they have to treat their professors as potential investors, found companies before they can legally drink, and drop out in an effort to get rich fast? Shouldn't it be a place to drift, to think, to read, to meet new people, and to work at whatever inspires you? And Stanford has, in its day, produced a great variety of graduates: compost-flipping hippies, novelists, politicians, liberal firebrands, conservative firebrands, brilliant dropouts, and, of course, athletes.

All I can say is... huh? At what point are students forced to do all of that stuff? It certainly looks like a few (a very small number of total enrolled) students are choosing to go down that path, and that's fine for them. But there is no indication that many other students feel the need to do any of the things Thompson suggests.

Making this even more bizarre is the fact that Thompson himself is an entrepreneur. His own bio notes that he's a co-founder of Atavist, a digital publishing platform with investments from some of the top Silicon Valley investors: Eric Schmidt, Andreessen Horowitz, IAC and Founders' Fund. Should we question if it's bad for The New Yorker that one of its editors is also treating possible subjects as potential investors, and isn't living the carefree, ideologically pure life of a magazine editor? Of course not. But it seems odd that he'd then complain about students in a similar situation.

Filed Under: silicon valley, stanford, startups

Notable: Harvard Didn't Try To Claim Ownership Of Facebook

from the hopefully-that's-policy,-not-luck dept

With the big Facebook IPO dominating the tech news, the folks over at the Boston Globe have highlighted a point that hasn't received much, if any, attention. Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook (with the vestigial "the" as a prefix) while he was a student at Harvard. Many universities these days claim ownership of any kind of company that students create while there. But, in this case, Harvard did absolutely nothing. The article contrasts that to Google (Stanford took a chunk) and Netscape (University of Illinois got into a nasty legal fight leading to a cash settlement).

A lot of this goes back to the ridiculous infatuation universities have had over the past few decades with trying to justify their failing tech transfer offices. Tons of universities set up "tech transfer" offices in the 80s (at the urging of the federal government, and driven by the disastrous Bayh-Dole Act). These universities had visions of massive profits flowing back when companies used the ideas of their brilliant researchers and commercialized them. The problem, of course, is that this is not how innovation actually works. Turning pure research into a product is not a simple process, and it doesn't happen very often. Great companies are usually driven by fulfilling consumer needs, not spotting some random bit of research. But the tech transfer offices overvalued their research, insisting that the idea was the key part, and thus they should be paid handsomely for it. For the vast majority of universities that has proven to be a huge failure. Tech transfer offices cost significant money to set up and staff, however, so universities have recognized that what was supposed to be a profit center has been a significant black hole for money. In response, there's been an increased focus on trying to claim ownership of any successful startup created by students, really as a weak attempt to justify the massive disaster of their tech transfer setup.

But Harvard -- whether it was wisely or due to ignorance -- chose not to go that path. And, as the article notes, this actually has reflected quite well on the school:

Fortunately, Harvard’s minor role in Facebook’s history has attracted a different reaction: a star-studded Hollywood blockbuster, a reinvigorated reputation as a dream school for entrepreneurial teens, and warm feelings among millionaire alumni who may become large donors. By contrast, few know that modern web browsing was born at the University of Illinois, and Netscape’s embittered founders vowed never to give another dime to their alma mater-turned-adversary.

The article covers a few other crazy cases, including one where a former student ended up in jail in a dispute with the University of South Florida. Similarly, the University of Missouri apparently tried to claim ownership of a popular iPhone app, because the student had entered it into a university business plan competition.

In an age where we see so much overclaiming and this ridiculous growth of "ownership society" where everyone tries to claim ownership over "ideas" they had little to do with, Harvard really does deserve kudos for not going down that path.

Filed Under: harvard, ipo, mark zuckerberg, stanford, university of illinois
Companies: facebook, google, netscape

Stanford Creates Database Of Patent Litigation

from the looks-useful dept

Over at Stanford, some law professors have been putting together a database of IP litigation from the past few years, called the Stanford IP Litigation Clearinghouse. The Law.com article claims that there are "surprising" facts already coming out of the database, but they don't seem to be any different than what's been known for a while (specifically, that the number of patent lawsuits has been relatively constant over the past few years). Of course, part of the reason is that more infringement lawsuits have been filed against many defendants at once, rather than against just one or two. In fact, the database does show a big jump in the number of defendants.

Also, it's worth noting that the database leaves out all of the folks who paid up a settlement because it's simply not worth going to court or (even worse) those who never even bothered to create a product due to chilling effects from those claiming IP ownership. Still, it's good to have more data and to have that data more widely available for analysis.

Filed Under: data, patents, stanford

MBAs Being Taught To Fight Open Source By Offering Closed Source Alternatives?

from the get-a-refund dept

The Slashdot crowd is reasonably up in arms of a paper jointly written by a Harvard Business School professor and a Stanford Graduate School of Business professor on ways to compete with open source competitors. Amusingly, nowhere in the paper does it suggest that one of those strategies might be to go open source yourself, embracing the actual benefits of openness and infinite goods, and focusing on better business models involving scarce goods. In fact, it doesn't even seem like the paper recognizes the rather large businesses created around open source software, with the totally false implication being that open source isn't a business, but a hobby. Frankly, the whole thing gives MBAs a bad name, by suggesting that they're not being taught to actually understand how open source can be used within a business model. That's unfortunate, because it's simply not true -- at least at some schools. Much of my own journey down the path in exploring the economics of infinite goods started thanks to my own MBA professor Alan McAdams at Cornell, who was teaching how important open source models were to the success of the internet and businesses back when I first took his class in 1996 or 1997.

Filed Under: competition, cornell, harvard, mbas, open source software, stanford