Sorry to be all negative about this. I am guessing this would be another IIT/IIM circle jerk. Everyone else will be filtered out. I will change my mindset when I see the proof. Till then, cynical.
There was an IIM guy at the last proto.in in Bangalore who gave one of the most hilarious presentations ever that included lots of digs at the incestuous nature of the IIM incubator (not sure if this is the same one). I thought that guy was being very forthright. It's not just IIT/IIMs. There is a cascade of snobbery that starts from HBS/Stanford educated Indians and goes right down to the local college educated ones.
More obvious rebuttal: IIT is merely a mark that you were smart at a certain age. When investing in startups you don't want to disregard what they did since or, god forbid, exclude older people entirely.
Focussing on IITians at any age is like leaving stale comments scattered in a codebase and being misled by them.
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The less obvious rebuttal: Getting into the IITs marks one as smart, but not making it doesn't necessarily mark one as inferior.
In my experience those who rank 1-50 are in a stratospheric league of their own. But choosing between ranks 1500+ and the best of other indian colleges (who often didn't pass the IIT tests) is a crap shoot. There's just too many deserving students for the IITs to accomodate.
(Full disclosure: I prepared for the IITs for two years, didn't make it. It was a long time ago, but perhaps I still bear the scars.)
I think you need to enhance your comprehension capabilities. Ohh wait wait, I see you are not from IIT, sorry please don't bother then! I said, what is wrong with "IIT circle"? If other universities don't have enough talented alumni to support each other, then what's wrong with IITs? Please stop blaming IITs for your own failures in life, IITs have nothing to do with that. If you are not competent enough, learn to admit.
Hmmm, I guess they dont teach English at the IITs ??
And akkartik is right, if the IITian's rank wasnt 800 or higher then they really arent much different from students from other good engineering schools.
And to my knowledge this is how most Indians rate guys from IITs.
Dude, pointing out grammatical mistakes won't make your words echo louder. Rather it will expose your very sensible thought process about the topic.
Your statement shows your ignorance about IITs and students. Please note, I din't say all IITians are "GOD", and can do any damn thing. Still, most(yeah even with rank > 4000) are better than top students from rest engineering colleges.
PS: I satisfy your rank < 800 requirement, and I am not bragging about that :P
They are the top brains of India as judged by an entrance examination. The correlation of those test scores to entrepreneurial capabilities is unknown.
As an aside, I know of no other school(s) in the world, a majority of whose students choose to append their school names with their email addresses and nicknames on websites. NickIIT* or NickIIM* is legion. One of the reasons people describe it with phrases like "circle jerk".
Actually most IIT-ians are amazingly persistent in a way that, I think, overshadows their "genius". It takes a heckuva lot of studying to get through that test. Years and years of studying. To be able to do that you have to be amazingly persistent.
That kind of dogged persistence helps when doing a startup.
The IIT-ian you need to watch out for is the one that keeps reminding you that he's from IIT. This kind of guy has usually not done anything else with his life.
Sridhar Vembu of Zoho went to IIT-Madras. He aint doing too bad!
So IIT helps but you certainly dont have to be an IIT-ian to succeed. Some day I hope to prove that :P ...
The only negative "opinion" that I have about IIT-ians (from the ones that I have met) is that they are very good at solving clearly defined problems but they have a hard time defining the problem itself. Ie they have a hard time figuring what the problem is in the first place. If you can give them the problem, clearly defined, they will solve it for you.
You should look up Sridhar Vembu's posts on anti-credentialism. In fact he prefers hiring kids out of highschool and teaching them programming rather than hiring engineers (let alone engineers from the IIT).
I love the IITs. Of the 5 enlightened professors I met in India, 3 were at an IIT. I had some of my best times at events at IITs. But using those as a filter is stupid and as you point out, in the case of those who brag about having gone to an IIT, its invariably counterproductive in my experience.
Seriously if theres one credential which you ever do respect its IIT (pre-2000) graduated. At one point of time they were either very very bright or very very hardworking. Of course this might have changed in the years after graduating from IIT.
(Note: After 2000, they rebranded a lot of the state level colleges to "IIT" status.)
There's a huge difference between respecting credentials and filtering based on them. The former is not binary. I am simply arguing that an IIT degree is neither necessary nor sufficient to be a successful entrepreneur.
Now you sound sensible, unlike your previous comment. Good for you. You have been to Gatech, so for sure you know how profs each year plan to catch new IITians to work in their groups. But your personal ego has forced you not admit this.
I cannot help you with this.
Indeed this is your prejudice. Just search for top researchers in USA in field of CS. You will find almost all the Indians that appear in that list are IITians. I hope that will clear your misconception, "they have a hard time defining the problem itself".
