Celebrating Startups at the Technical Edge
“Amazed at @elonmusk‘s ability to make some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs feel like 1st graders at #D11.” –Michael Lazerow
“It’s probably because @elonmusk don’t follow the heard pouring his energy into the next lame picture sharing app 99% of VC’s chase.” –David Catalovski
The startup world is ablaze yesterday and today with a celebration of Elon Musk and his embodiment of doing substantive startups. The reports on Twitter are that Elon gave a riveting speech at D11. Here are examples: Mark Suster (who writes about startup-related topics) had a great article, Michael Miller (who often writes about parallel chips and mobile computing in our space) covered Elon’s talk too, and the tweet above was awesome yesterday. Check out the video below for an awesome satire on if Nikola Tesla had to raise money in today’s VC climate.
While I love all kinds of startups, this post is to share my special fondness for startups at the technical edge. These are startups pushing the science and engineering envelope on the things mankind can do.
In Atlanta, promoting these kinds of startups is something that ATDC (and Venture Lab) is uniquely equipped to do. In my mind, ATDC’s mission should never lose sight of that important role it plays in fostering substantive startups at the technical edge.
At AccelerEyes, pushing at the envelope of parallel computing and computer processing is a huge rewarding element of what we do and a major cultural reason why people love working here. It results in our customers pushing at the edges of many important science and engineering disciplines. Today, I’m spending time at KLA-Tencor in Austin, TX learning about how our software will be part of pushing process engineering through the enormous hurdles of getting to smaller transistors.
Sometimes it is extra challenging to be a startup at the edge of science and engineering. Those that bridge hard scientific and engineering advancements with successful startup methodologies are heroes in my biased book!
What startups do you see at the edge of science and engineering?