students in India, and enables students to express, explore, and engage with fellow students on campuses throughout India.
—XBand Technologies, which is developing innovative ways of using smartphones in sporting applications. The company is currently prototyping and testing a consumer electronics device for cyclists that provides nutrition, hydration, and performance monitoring tasks.
The 39 percent dropout rate reminds me of my first wide-eyed day of journalism school, when we were herded into a hallowed auditorium and told to look to our left and right, because one out of every three students wouldn’t make it to graduation the following spring.
“Some people came in with an idea, and they found out that they weren’t really ready, and so they left to develop their idea some more and then return,” Jacobson says. “Some people decided they didn’t want to give up 3.5 percent of their startup to the Founder Institute, and so they opted to go their own way.”
The Institute requires participants to give warrants equivalent to a 3.5 percent stake in any company that is formed by a founder during the program. The warrants give the Institute an option to buy stock at a fair market price, and the price is not set until the company raises its first qualified round of financing. The Institute says it distributes most of the value generated by the warrants back to the program, mentors, and other founders.
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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