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Mike Abbot, Ex VP of Engineering at Twitter |
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Ashish Soni and Mike Abbot |
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Ashish Soni, Executive Director of Digital Innovation |
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Peter A. Beerel, Faculty Director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Engineering |
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Left to right: Mike Abbot, Viterbi Dean Yannis Yortsos, Akamai co-founder Preetish Nijhawan, Philip Murphy - Viterbi Advancement |
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An attentive crowd |
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Last Wednesday 10/3, Mike Abbot, Ex VP of Engineering at Twitter and now General Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers sat down to a fire-side chat with our very own Ashish Soni, Executive Director of Digital Innovation, and told over 250+ wide-eyed engineering students in the audience that the best way to become an entrepreneur is to just do it. He explained that engineering is at the heart of most successful start-ups and engineers should step up and take lead roles.
This fireside chat was the Kick-Off event of the newly formed Viterbi Student Innovation Institute (VSI2), co-directed by Ashish Soni and Professor Peter A. Beerel, Faculty Director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Engineering. Viterbi Dean Yannis Yortsos (@DeanYortsos) highlighted the importance of this institute whose mission is to provide a host of programs that will inspire the entrepreneurial spirit among our students; provide the foundations of innovation education; nurture the creation of start-up ideas; and provide individualized advice along the way.
VSI2 will leverage the strengths of a number of other innovation and entrepreneurship entities at USC, including the Anennberg Innovation Lab, the Greif Entrepreneurship Center and the Stevens Center for Innovation.
At the inaugural meeting, Peter Beerel also announced the the upcoming Maseeh Entrepreneurship Prize Competition, which is an annual business plan competition dedicated to Viterbi engineering-led efforts. The application deadline this year is Oct 21st, 2012. Towards that end, both Ashish and Peter will be available for weekly start-up office hours where students can get one-on-one advice on how best to move forward with their innovative ideas. More information is available at http://viterbi.usc.edu/innovation.
