It occurs to me that I should probably give some space to Project Olympus on this blog. After I spoke last week about the number of CMU software engineering students who leave Pittsburgh (CMU Professor Lenore Blum estimates it’s 95%), I thought a project specifically designed to help keep them was worth noting. The project is known a Project Olympus. The goal, as you can see from the chart above, is to more actively place CMU (and by extension Pittsburgh) at the center of their most talented software engineers’ projects. If you click the picture above it will take you to their about page. They have a list of their probes online and while a disappointing number don’t appear to have gone anywhere, they can claim ReCAPTCHA has a huge success (acquired by Google).
This particular project is funded through the Heinz Endowment. That mode of funding seems interesting, I’ve spoken many times about both the advantages and disadvantages of public funding being put directly in to a startup ecosystem, but this is the first time I’ve run in to private funding through philanthropy. I would think it would have similar advantages and disadvantages with perhaps a little less bureaucracy. I love that this project is focused not just on funding, but on keeping the collaborative research within the university where other startups will be able to leverage it. Anyone else have thoughts on the benefit or effectiveness of this type of program? Know where any of the other former or current PROBEs are?
