Technology course lures entrepreneur teachers

The University of Sydney is helping final year students to seek venture capital rather than graduate careers

Southern Cross Venture Partners managing director Bill Bartee has teamed up with the chief executive of Freelancer.com, Matt Barrie, to offer a technology venture capital course similar to those offered at United States universities such as California’s Stanford University.

Forty final year and postgraduate computer science and electrical engineering students at the University of Sydney will have the opportunity to take the class, which will involve organising themselves into a start-up company, writing a business plan and pitching their ideas to venture capitalists and angel investors.

Barrie, who completed a masters in electrical engineering at Stanford during the dotcom boom, says US universities, and Stanford in particular, are generally better than Australian institutions at preparing students to start their own companies, and that many students drop out to seek venture capital rather than finish their degrees.

“Courses in Stanford often deal with cutting- edge technology, they’re looking at technology which hasn’t been launched yet,” Barrie says. “Students graduate with knowledge ahead of what’s happening in business, whereas the Australian syllabus is usually looking backwards. At the end of the course, the students will have to pitch their ideas to venture capitalists who will evaluate the work they’ve done based on industry standards. In a couple of years, I fully expect that the course will result in launching a few new Australian tech companies.”

Barrie and Bartee have secured participation from software company Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes and Ric Richardson, founder of digital device fingerprint company Uniloc, which has been embroiled in a patent dispute with software giant Microsoft. Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs are still being sought to help with the syllabus and the final evaluation of the course.

BRW

Comments (0)