venture capital
The Rise of College Tech Incubators
A tech incubator is typically backed by one or more venture capital (VC) firms and is used to test different startups and their teams, usually with a time limit of some sort japan business mailing list and specific goals, after which they either go to a funding round or don’t go go or raise $200. Before the last decade, these incubators were rare and exclusive, limited almost entirely to Silicon Valley and its dozen or so major VC firms on Sand Hill Road. However, over the last decade, VCs have moved beyond Silicon Valley and, with tech partners like Google, Microsoft, and others, have begun setting up incubators at universities across the country. Let’s take a quick look at how we got here.
Perhaps we should start by defining what a hackathon is. Most people think it’s just for computer programmers who stay up all night hacking until someone builds something awesome. That’s part of it, but the trend is to include disciplines other than computer science, such as electrical engineering, medicine, finance, etc. Hackathons are no longer just about computer programmers, they are a fertile ground for spotting talent from a wide range of disciplines through their entrepreneurial merit and by their very nature, their leadership and perseverance.
