The day before the Carolina-Duke game and I’m thinking about North Carolina. Specifically, I’m thinking about the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area of North Carolina. It used to be called the RTP area. Now it is The Triangle.
The Triangle has always had bits and pieces of an early stage community. Over the past 5 or 10 years a lot of the elements have coalesced I’ve watched the Triangle nurture and retain homegrown entrepreneurs who will become the base for a new angel class that understands what you have to go through to build a successful startup. I’ve seen the local community center – the Council for Entrepreneurial Development – graduate from being a social institution to an organization that puts its entrepreneurs and startups in the forefront. I’ve seen landlord based incubators become for profit / money up from accelerators much like Y Combinator. There have always been the cornerstone academic institutions – UNC, NC State and Duke and for about 40 years there has been the partnering base of corporations in the Research Triangle Park. I’ve seen startup and entrepreneur become part of the local lexicon.
The most exciting thing I’ve seen is the North Carolina School of science and Math. “The North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics is a public, residential, coeducational high school for juniors and seniors with high intellectual ability and commitment to scholarship. It was established by the North Carolina General Assembly in 1978 to provide challenging educational opportunities for students with special interests and potential in the sciences and mathematics.”
All of these kids are real smart. All of these kids have the ability to write real solid code. NCSSM is the real engine of the Triangle.
That is not the point – the point is that they are young and untainted by the sense of entitlement and self-importance you find in a lot of Stanford engineering kids.
What they don’t have is an understanding of what you have to go through as a startup entrepreneur. This is not to say that the NCSSM is a tech incubator meant to crank out CTOs. It is simply recognizes the fact that some NCSSM students will want to become startup folks and they should go into it with eyes wide open.
How do you handle manic depression and paranoia ? How do you maintain a humility and openness while clinging to your Idea ? Will you truly appreciate the joy of collaborative commiseration with others trying to live in the startup world ?
I asked an NCSSM graduate to introduce me to someone of the Board of NCSSM because I wanted to talk about what the Triangle’s early stage community could mean to NCSSM and vice versa.
And Now for the Story – I told the NCSSM Board guy about the time, about 30 years ago, when we had the #2 consumer software company in the United States (behind Microsoft). We were in Mountain View and found a really good coder kid at one of the local high schools. He tried to get to our office after school every day but most of the time he missed the bus. He was a really good software kid. He was also a nice kid. We bought him a Vespa. He ended up writing the number 1 game at the time.
I suggested to the NCSSM Board guy that he let the NCSSM kids hang out / intern / do something with startups in Durham. Let these kids find out if the startup life is right for them.
The NCSSM Board guy asked me, “will you pay them?”
A question that really didn’t get the gist of what I was trying to say, but I figured out a snappy answer, “if they are any good I’ll buy them a Vespa.”
The NCSSM Board guy responded with, “we don’t let our students have motor vehicles.”
I’ve been thinking about North Carolina. I’ve been thinking about all the startup pieces that are coming together in the Triangle.
And then I thought about Garrison Keillor’s quote from his book, Pontoon, “old people don’t have answers, only stories.”
Go Heels.
