State Schools Prep Homegrown Engineering, CS Talent For Startups

Chicago's startup community wants to hire young people like Ravi Pilla.

As a high school student at the Illinois Math and Science Academy, Pilla and a few friends created a cloud-based music startup they later sold. Pilla, now a junior electrical engineering major at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is working on a new company whose online platform allows students and teachers to collaborate and communicate. The startup, StudyCloud, recently won third place at U. of I.'s Cozad New Venture Competition. 

 

"At this point, I'm pretty set on working in the startup field," said Pilla, 21. "Everything about being an entrepreneur has been pretty appealing so far — being able to work for yourself, set your own times. The biggest thing that stands out to me is, you can be extremely passionate about what you do and no one else has to motivate you for that. The passion comes from within."

Pilla belongs to an emerging generation of students who have caught the entrepreneurship bug, inspired by startup wunderkinds such as Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and enabled by the proliferation of accessible technology that allows them to build Web applications at low cost. In response, local universities are seeking to provide these students with resources not only to pursue their startup ambitions during school, but to plug into the state's blossoming entrepreneurial community when they enter the workforce.

For Chicago-area startups, the promise of a stronger pipeline of homegrown talent helps reverse a long-standing gripe that Illinois loses too many engineering and computer science graduates to Silicon Valley. The website for U. of I.'s department of computer science quotes Bill Gates as saying "this is the university thatMicrosoft hires the most computer science graduates from of any university in the entire world."

Gates' remarks resonated with Troy Henikoff, co-founder and chief executive of Chicago-based startup accelerator Excelerate Labs. During the past six months, he has spoken with students and officials at the Illinois Institute of Technology, the University of Illinois at Chicago and elsewhere.

"The idea that we have (more than 1,000) great engineers sitting a couple hours' drive away who are not thinking first and foremost that they should be coming to Chicago is a problem, but it's something a bunch of people are working on," Henikoff said.

According to data self-reported by students to Engineering Career Services at U. of I., 62 percent of 2010-2011 graduates accepted jobs in the Midwest after graduation. Illinois captured 48 percent of job acceptances, compared with 12 percent for California.

Despite the high number of graduates who remain in the area, many of U. of I.'s most famous tech alumni launched companies out of Silicon Valley: YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, venture capitalist and Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, and Yelp co-founder and Chief Executive Jeremy Stoppelman.

"The world needs more engineers, and being a land-grant institution, we're encouraging Chicago to have more venture capital and companies to attract students for internships and opportunities to do research," said Ilesanmi Adesida, U. of I.'s engineering dean. "That is what will encourage students to stay in the state."

Entrepreneurship is on the rise in Chicago and Illinois. According to data collected by online community Built In Chicago, 128 digital technology startups launched locally in 2011, a 56 percent increase from 2010. Next month, a 50,000-square-foot space for young companies, called 1871, will open at the Merchandise Mart.