Public Entrepreneur

A public entrepreneur uses public funds (e.g. research grants) to create a start-up inside his lab preferably with a University mailing address (come on, even virtual start-ups can have some non-university address). Whereas a normal entrepreneur usually risks to end up with a pittance for working a couple of years on a start-up the public entrepreneur's worst outcome is that he is made fun of at my web site.

A recent example reached me by e-mail today announcing that SciVee (some myspace for researchers) won the third place (aka $10,000) in UCSD's Entrepreneur competition (second place were some MBA's). But let's focus on SciVee: At the bottom of the web site you will find the NSF logo which indicates that they might be working of a grant from the NSF. Next to it you see two other logos of public institutions. The mailing address (notice the mail code) is at UCSD and the people running it are tenured professors with some staff. Though this is wild speculation I am pretty sure they are also leeching of bandwith and servers from the University computing center (otherwise they would be hosting their videos on youtube:-) and/or are paying their staff from that grant.

I can understand the need for the NSF to fund a myspace for research and setting it up at some research institution. But I wopuld have preferred if it would have been a research project and instead of founders there should have been principal investigators. Assuming this is the case for SciVee calling it a start-up would be a big stretch. Keeping that assumption I am particularly disappointed about this competition handing out $10K to an already funded project -- and I will honor it with a new title the "Public Enterpreneur".