Most students who study CS in college plan to go into industry in one manner or another. Unfortunately most college CS programs are still designed with the assumption that all undergraduate CS majors want to pursue a PhD. I've addressed this periodically here and that's not the focus for today.

Of those who want to enter industry, it seems a fair number are interested in the startup ecosystem - they want to either be part of a startup - a small agile effort that they hope can change the world or even start their own company. Some eventually also want to turn towards venture capital.

Now, if college does a less then ideal job preparing CS majors specifically for industry, they do less ideal job preparing them to launch a startup. Before going further, I don't want to be unfair - a number of institutions are making efforts to modernize their undergraduate CS programs and a number of them are doing great jobs - offering courses in software engineering, teaching the "hidden curriculum" and integrating modern software engineering sensibilities like unit testing into core CS classes but change in academia is slow.

On the startup side, things are even further behind. There are a number of boutique masters programs in "tech entrepreneurship" that have popped up but financial aid can be sparse so many are, like code schools, workforce programs for the rich. For many of the programs I know of, I'm not sold on the quality. Some are good, many are meh.

In undergrad, if you're a CS major you're not really going to learn about startups and the startup ecosystem. I supposed if you're a business major you might, but then you won't develop the tech skills.

Since retiring, I've started to work more closely with the Stuyvesant Alumni Association and I've always had a tight bond with my former students and I wanted to do something to start to address this problem.

Last night was the first step. It was only a single small firs step, but it's something.

In partnership with Stuy's Alumni Association, we put on an event. First I reached out to my grads and asked for both founders and funders. People who've started a company and successfully raised money for it and people who've selected promising startups and provided said funds.

Since it's the holiday season, a number of my New York VCs couldn't make it as they had other holiday events to attend but we had a solid dozen volunteers available and I'm sure I could have gotten more if I had worked at it.

Then we had the attendees. I thought the event would mostly appeal to younger Stuy grads. Those in college and a bit beyond but there was a pretty wide spread of ages and even a number of current Stuy students.

We split them up at tables, gave the funders and founders some loose guidelines to follow - key points to address and let the founders and funders lead small group conversations. We also had open mixing and networking before and after the small table discussions.

While I'm still collecting feedback, overall I think the event went really well. People got to learn about the startup journey, some specifics from specific stories, got advice from knowledgable people who've both been there and done that and walked away with some new connections.

It wasn't perfect. It would be better if we had more balance between founders and funders - we had 2/3 or 3/4 founders and a 50/50 mix would have been better. Reshuffling the tables would also have been a good idea but, overall a success.

One thing that I really love about the StuyCS community is that we can do these events on almost any tech topic and really, many other topics as well. Last year I wanted to pull together an AI panel and instantly had far too many volunteers for panelists. This time, founder and funders and again no problem.

Now the next step is to refine this event and figure out follow ups as well as other future events.