talk of TECH
A glimpse at the biggest—and, sometimes, the strangest—news from campus.
Finding the Flashpoint
Van Jensen
On the third floor of an unassuming building in Technology Square is what looks like a half-finished office. The floor is polished concrete. The ceiling is exposed, ducts and wires hanging down. The furniture is a smattering of office chairs and unfinished wood tables covered with laptops and books. The walls are white, except for the numerous places where they’re covered with notes, calculations, quotations and doodles scrawled in black marker.
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his is Flashpoint , Tech’s newest launching pad for startup businesses. From the look of things, it’s kind of a startup itself. The brainchild of Merrick Furst, a distinguished professor in the College of Computing, and Ravi Bellamkonda, the Institute’s associate vice president for research, Flashpoint offers intensive three-month-long programs that foster fledgling companies before launching them into the world. Guiding a visitor through the Flashpoint office last winter, where 17 teams (about half affiliated with Tech) were busy prepping their startups, Furst nodded to the graffiti. “It’s erasable,” he said. “Most of it,” added Elli Kaplan, COO of the program. Flashpoint grants entrepreneurs education and access to mentors and investors; its first session was held last fall. This is nothing new for Georgia Tech—the Advanced Technology Development Center, for one, has been active for 30-plus years— but Flashpoint introduces a few new tweaks. It’s an intensive program, with a huge amount of work crammed into those three months. Several teams said they’d all but moved into the office. The process also requires frequent testing. “It’s not a business until you have revenues that exceed expenses,” Bellamkonda said. “Until then, everything from the nature of the product to the customer base is a hypothesis. This is like in research—we hypothesize about how things work and we test them scientifically. The Flashpoint curriculum urges them to test every hypothesis leading to a positive cash flow. Build a first web
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the BASELINE years the Arbor Day Foundation who applied for 2,400 spots 4 consecutive has named Tech a Tree Campus USA school. 14,700 students in the 2012-13 freshman class.
of deviation per 14 billion years of a nuclear 0.1 seconds clock proposed by a team of Tech physicists.
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