also agreed that education is a laudable goal, and entrepreneurship isn’t always for everyone (altho sometimes it may take them a startup or two to figure that out ;)

best of luck with your class!

regards,

- dave mcclure

(ps – re: making money on Facebook, i agree it’s worth looking into more seriously & not a given. that said, it seems at least a few of the student teams from our fall 07 class have figured something out — 4 of them formed LLCs to collect the ad revenue they were making, and they are looking seriously at upgrading their projects into true startups. and at least one has received a term sheet for a seed investment.)

Yes, I am aware that you also tried teach your students to create engaging apps (which to me means keeping the eyeballs you manage to collect). Again, my apologies for not making this clear in my earlier response.

Since I probably did a lousy job expressing myself, perhaps I can try again. The fact of the matter is that eyeballs is not a major concern for me. Neither is this business of doing startups, or making money.

What I REALLY want my students to do is to get off their behinds and do something they think is cool (meaningful) and have fun learning. I am a firm believer that learning must be fun.

The are many paths to success in life — and that belief is core to CS3216. Students are allowed to decide for themselves what they believe is “cool” and do it. All they have to do is to persuade us at the end of the semester to agree with them! If they should decide that catching a million eyeballs is THE “cool” thing and set out to do that, that’s fine with me. Good for them. I wish them luck. :-)

Given the current climate, it is my opinion that it is neither fair nor desirable to grade the students on the popularity of their apps. Technically my students are extremely capable. Some of them are definitely capable of reproducing some of the million-eyeball apps in a week or two — but it will be hard for such apps to gain traction given the fatigue and general decline in novelty. It’s not even clear to me that there’s any good way to monetize Facebook apps even if they are popular. Ads? Will people click?

Given some of the stuff that we’ve been doing for CS3216, some people might think that CS3216 is a “entrepreneurship promotion” class, i.e. that our intention is to get students to do startups. Again, that’s not true (at least not entirely).

At the highest level, my goal is education — to teach the students something. I don’t think it really matters exactly what they learn, only that they learn something and hopefully, HOW to learn. :-) What they learn will also depend on where they are coming from — and in CS3216 they come from many different places. In addition to your programmer types, we have Science majors, business majors, and even an MBA!

Back to the topic of entreprenuership, it is my view that not everyone should become an entreprenuer. It takes a certain type. What I try to do in CS3216 is to provide information and exposure to the students, so that they understand what it takes to be entrepreneurs and to do startups and how to look at some issues from a business perspective.

Hopefully, some of the students will be encouraged by what they see and go on to startups in Singapore, or perhaps even in the Valley. Others might be turned off from the business world and decide to seek their fortunes elsewhere. That’s fine.

There are many routes to success — and I hope that my students will each pursue their individual dreams, and not the dreams that others (or God forbid, the Government) think they should dream. :-)

perhaps a little too quick ;)

actually, the course emphasized building apps and measured them in 2 ways: both distribution *AND* user engagement. while the students’ success in distribution in a few cases was much reported on (5-6 apps had >1M users), the other metric was less noted in the press than in the class.

in addition to those 2 objectives, the class also emphasized using metrics as the primary way to guide startup decision-making in product & marketing areas. this was probably the primary thrust of the class, and was missed by most folks who weren’t involved.

along with the focus on metrics, we also brought in outside speakers from large companies, local startups, and venture / angel investors to describe their role(s) in the startup ecosystem.

anyway, don’t mean to be too defensive here but to suggest that the primary goal for our class was to build apps focused solely on acquiring users would be grossly inaccurate.

while it was certainly a result, it was not the only notable result and definitely not the solitary initial goal.

regards,

- dave mcclure