Incubator overload, Wolverson
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In the late 1990s, Blank, the Berkeley lecturer, stepped in with research suggesting that the process of cultivating and investing in start-ups could be made easier. His 2005 book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, mapped out a set of rules for successful start-ups. Eric Ries, who studied under Blank and is now an entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard Business School, expanded on the notion, describing a template for standardizing the production of these ventures in his 2011 book, The Lean Startup.
Unlike venture capitalists that bet millions of dollars on a smaller number of more established start-ups, incubators and accelerators invest significantly less in very young start-ups. Often, in exchange for an equity stake in the business, these seed investors supply scrappy ventures with intensive advice, technical support, introductions to bigger investors and connections to a community of other start-ups. For-profit accelerators like Silicon Valley's Y Combinator, launched by start-up guru Paul Graham in 2005, and TechStars, based in Boulder, Colo., and co-founded by serial entrepreneur David Cohen, have become inspirations for people like Deters who want to crank out start-ups en masse.
But Deters and others developing the start-up-school concept face some competition: traditional universities that see this kind of training as critical in attracting students with an entrepreneurial bent. For example, Harvard and George Washington universities now operate offices of entrepreneurship. Among other things, they host business-plan competitions and offer mentoring services.
The idea of practical training appeals to people like Raphael Weiner. The Denver-based mechanical-engineering graduate first contemplated starting his own company four years ago, when he landed his first job out of college at a social-media-gaming start-up called ScoreLoop. As one of the company's first 10 employees, he helped it grow to 50 people in two years and had his hand in everything from marketing to technical support to traveling the world to pitch new clients.
Before long, he found himself addicted to reading entrepreneurial-success stories on TechCrunch, Hacker News and VentureBeat and watched with envy as colleagues and clients made millions of dollars launching applications for the iPhone and Android. When BlackBerry bought ScoreLoop in 2011, the job got boring fast, he says. "The narrower range of responsibilities didn't excite me."
He thought about leaving to start a company immediately but realized he wasn't ready to be his own boss. Instead, he enrolled in Galvanize's gSchool to be a start-up groupie and acquire the skills needed to join the club. Even better, he says, the $20,000 six-month crash course in computer programming comes with a guarantee: a $60,000-a-year job at a start-up on graduation. (Deters says he knows so many companies begging for programmers that he didn't think twice about promising job placement.) For Weiner, that made the gSchool proposition "a no-brainer."