Incorporating a great idea

Bill Gates was a sophomore at Harvard University when he founded Microsoft Corp. He combined studying with running a company for a little while, then dropped out his junior year to concentrate on Microsoft full time. He became the richest man in the world.

David Filo and Jerry Yang were Ph.D. candidates in electrical engineering at Stanford University in the spring of 1994 when they started keeping track of their favorite Web pages in an index. That index came to be known as Yahoo Inc. - which also made its founders very, very rich.

The desire to make a lot of money still motivates students to start their own companies. But they're also interested in pursuing their dreams and making their mark on the world. And, of course, they embrace the challenge of starting something from scratch.

Today they're less likely to start software companies or Web sites for retail customers, however. Most of the attention now is on e-commerce between businesses and on developing the infrastructure of the ever-expanding Internet.

Carol Brennan, a business development consultant and president of West Springfield, Mass.-based Split Rock Capital, agrees with that assessment. But not all entrepreneurial-minded students are ready to start businesses in that sector, she says.

"I don't think that college students gravitate towards B2B," she says."They haven't worked in industry yet. They probably know the consumer world better just from their own experience."

A few years ago, students were expected to go out and work for a few years first to get business experience. Today, students with bright ideas face the very real possibility that someone else will grab their brass ring if they don't move fast. This means that a graduate's first information technology job may not be in an IT department - he might well be the IT department.

This was certainly the case for recent University of Massachusetts graduate Paul Silva, co-founder of Amherst, Mass.-based Zform LLC. He has been interested in designing games since he was 6. But early attempts to break into video-game design were fruitless - until he found himself in a computer science class with Tim Keenan, a blind student.

"I was helping him through this class, and, in so doing, I started becoming a little more aware of some of the interesting challenges in working with someone with little or no eyesight," Silva says. In particular, Keenan showed Silva some of his video games.

"I was appalled," Silva says. "They were made by hobbyists." And Keenan couldn't play any of the new