Daniel Lemire's blog

, 1 min read

Must start a company to be a succesful Stanford professor?

The president of the ACM comments on the culture that prevails at the Stanford CS Department:

“What sets Stanford apart is the startup culture,” said Patterson, the Berkeley professor, adding, “I have this sense that it’s an almost unwritten rule that you have to start a company to be a successful professor at Stanford.”

Wow.

Can you imagine if professors were strongly encouraged to start companies? If the commercial success of their ideas was viewed as something really positive?

Crazy ideas like this could change academia forever.

The problem, of course, is that when they tried to do it, in Canada, people started fake companies just to get the grants and the net result was just a waste of time for everyone involved. By “start a company”, you have to mean more than “incorporate”.