Tech Stars Look Different From a College Student's Seat

Kelly Sutton, our Dispatches from the Next Generation contributor, recently popped into a couple of different tech events -- and concluded he need not feel on the outside just because he comes from Loyola Marymount and not Stanford.

Kelly's post:

The week for me was a roller-coaster of fun that would make any aspiring geek rock star jealous. I spent a day in San Jose at Adobe's intern open house. I wrote this on a plane coming back from the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference in Miami. While mulling over the two very different events, I came to an epiphany, albeit small.

Adobe flew nearly 200 students from around the country to San Jose for its event. Fellow students from the most prestigious universities who knew more about the ins and outs of everything silicon stood in hour-long lines to pitch themselves to the Photoshop team. The few pitches I eavesdropped on were -- quite honestly -- pathetic. The students knew more about network theory than they did networking.

FOWA on the other hand, showed off something different. Rock stars having graduated only a few years ago from less-than-notable universities were there, showing the world exactly how big they are. They all knew each other and they knew how to party. From my conversations, I could tell that everyone knew their stuff but didn't necessarily know much about (or perhaps talk about) the hardcore aspect of computer science. The titans of Web 2.0 belong to a super-clique of sociable, nice programmers and evangelists. They were in Miami to hang out just as much as they were to present.

The comparison of these two events have planted a seed of doubt in my mind. I thought that the smartest people (in the academic sense) float to the top in the sciences. Looking at Silicon Valley tells you otherwise. Sure you have the Stanford and Harvard grads making large companies, but then you have the Kevin Rose's (UNLV) and Leah Culver's (University of Minnesota). They may not know how to keep Red-Black trees properly formed, but they continue to push software into the public sphere.

Any kid that manages to land on the front page of BusinessWeek or Newsweek is bound to turn some heads. Looks like I may need to reevaluate my priorities. Before I do that, I'm going to head to a kegger.