Q&A with the Technology Entrepreneur Center’s Jed Taylor

As a youth, Jed Taylor (’03 M.S., computer science, ’05 MBA) first encountered entrepreneurship showing and selling sheep at the county fair. Born and raised on a family farm in a small town in Northern Utah, Taylor was taught to work hard and be self-sufficient. His journey to the Technology Entrepreneur Center at The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is filled with determination, hard work, serendipity and opportunities available through land-grant institutions.

Were there lessons from the farm that are applicable to what you do today?

We were entrepreneurial and sold stuff as kids. I was in 4-H, and we raised sheep as lambs, trained them all summer and then sold them at the fair.  Part of the process was to go out and find the buyers to attend the auction and purchase our sheep.  

When I got married, I paid for the wedding ring with money saved every summer from raising sheep. I think those things were always part of who we were.

How did you go from 4-H and living on the farm to choosing computer science as your field of study for your undergraduate education?

I enrolled in the general engineering program at Utah State University, and after my first year of school I took two years off to serve as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in French-speaking Canada. In one of my last areas just outside of Montreal, there was an IT administrator, at a school district in the Kahnawake community of the Mohawk Nation who I held in high regard.  He had a passion for computers.   

When I came back to school, it was time to declare a major. I liked computers, and I admired my friend in Canada. It was that simple. I switched my major from general engineering to computer science and minored in accounting, French and math. 

After earning my bachelor’s degree, I went to work in Salt Lake City as a software developer for a startup company founded by early Oracle employees. This was the height of the dot-com era. After a short period of time, I had a strong impression to return to graduate school.  

When it came time to apply to schools we picked up a copy of U.S. News & World Report and looked for top-ranked computer science programs. The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign was ranked number three, and I was immediately interested since my wife was from central Illinois.  

I remember the thrill the morning I received the email that said, “Congratulations, you have been accepted to the University of Illinois,” I was so excited to be admitted to a top-ranked program!

We packed up and moved to Urbana on Thanksgiving Day 2001.

What drove you to pursue the MBA in addition to the master's in computer science?

Summer of 2002, I was getting ready for the fall semester to start, and I had a teaching assistantship lined up for CS105. Just before the semester started, I looked at the TA assignments, and my name's not on the list. I'm panicking, because that's my TA and my funding; it’s everything!

I learned I was receiving the Siebel Scholar Fellowship from the department. 

At the annual Siebel Scholars conference, I met several fellow Siebel Scholars with M.B.A.s and realized that many had undergraduate engineering degrees. I thought, “Why can't I get an M.B.A.? If I'm at University of Illinois, I'm smart enough to do this.”

I credit computer science for everything — for connecting me with the business school and then changing my trajectory. I interned at Honeywell Aerospace and then took a job there after graduation. 

Meanwhile, I kept in touch with my computer science advisor, Professor YY Zhou. In 2007, YY reached out and asked if I was interested in coming back and helping to run her startup Pattern Insight launched out of the Systems Research Group in the computer science department. I helped other University of Illinois startups launch, including Runtime Verification (a computer science startup out of Grigore Rosu’s lab).

After my stint at Pattern Insight and EnterpriseWorks, where I was an Entrepreneur in Residence, I ended up at the Technology Entrepreneur Center (TEC).

 

Let’s talk about the combination of technology and entrepreneurship. You had the tech background; you had the MBA. Did the Technology Entrepreneur Center feel like an excellent fit? 

It absolutely did because I loved programming when I was a software developer. I like business. I like numbers. I also like working with people. 

I didn't want to sit at a computer and program by myself. I loved business school, and I love the business side of the technology industry. When I started working at Pattern Insight, I loved working with customers, interacting with people and sales.  Pattern Insight taught me the importance of a great team.

When I saw the opportunity at TEC, I knew it was a perfect fit. Like Pattern Insight, TEC had a great team in place.  

Describe what you do in your role as assistant dean for innovation and entrepreneurship and executive director of TEC.

At the TEC, our goal is to provide every Grainger Engineering student an entrepreneurial experience. We empower our innovative entrepreneurs (students and faculty members) to launch more ventures out of the university through programs, courses and access to external resources including investors, industry experts and mentors.  

My focus has been bolstering our connections with the National Science Foundation to increase the pipeline of startups out of our labs and leading our successful campus effort to become the first NSF I-Corps Site in the country. The program has had tremendous impact on our campus in the past 13 years with more than 400 teams who subsequently raised over $200 million in funding. I am now one of the co-directors of the Great Lakes I-Corps Hub.

What is the biggest challenge that you face?

Excellence at scale. We have close to 19,000 students in Grainger Engineering alone, and it creates a unique set of challenges and opportunities. Our goal is to educate all our engineering students and provide them an entrepreneurial experience while they are in school while concurrently accelerating the top teams.  

We are a top five public university for producing funded startup founders, according to Pitchbook. Our challenge is to raise that ranking to number one. We have the right assets in place; our challenge is to align them and make it happen.

What part of your job brings you the most joy?

Like many who work at the university, I’m energized by working with students. I love seeing when our former students leave campus and have success with their startups.  

I will give you a couple of examples.

Menlo Ventures hosted us last year during our annual Silicon Valley student workshop, and one of their portfolio startup founder speakers was Devin Bhushan (’14, B.S., Computer Science) who, a few years before, participated in our Cozad New Venture Challenge.  

We recently reconnected with Gautam Ajjarapu (’22, B.S. Statistics and Computer Science) and Vishnu Chakroborty (’22, B.S., Computer Science). They raised $20 million from a top tier venture capitalist for a startup they launched as students. We are hosting them on campus for this year’s Founders Week.  

Another exciting part of my job is working with TEC’s high impact team. The team is incredibly dedicated to the TEC mission, supporting students and offering meaningful programs. 

You put a lot of time, energy and talent into your role and TEC.  Why is this work so important to you?

My role at TEC is the best job on campus. The more we do, the larger impact we have, and we're able to get more students involved. And honestly, it's fun. Most of the time it doesn't feel like work.

We’re having impact growing our Midwest ecosystem by creating jobs and improving people's lives in this region. 

Now, that being said, we've have a lot of work to do to get to where we want to be. That keeps me going.

You’ve been with TEC for 14 years. how has the ecosystem changed and how has your role changed as you try and move students from ideas to concept to an actual startup? 

Eighteen years ago, when we were launching Pattern Insight, I remember a team member saying that it felt like swimming against the current. Now, some people would say there still are challenges; but I don't hear many people saying you feel like you're swimming against the current. I think there's been a culture change.

On the Illinois campus, we still have a lot of work to do; but there are many more resources available to a student and faculty looking to participate in the entrepreneur ecosystem. Just look at our Cozad New Venture Challenge. When it launched 25 years ago it was funded by a gift from Peter and Kim Fox. There were a handful of students, 10 teams that participated. This past year, we had over 200 teams that participated, more than 600 students, and we gave away $650,000. The number of students participating this year is incredible. 

We have strong partners in the Gies College of Business. We have the business incubator, Enterprise Works; a cohort of alumni investors, Illini Angels, which is part of the university-based venture firm Illinois Ventures; and the Office of Technology Management, which moves university research innovations into public use. We have close collaborations with ecosystem partners. TEC, Illinois Ventures and EnterpriseWorks are all celebrating our 25^th anniversary this year. There are a lot of positives happening now that that didn't exist 15 to 20 years ago.

Let’s talk more about how TEC supports faculty.

We have our NSF-funded I-Corps program targeted towards graduate students and faculty — someone who has an idea they've been developing inside a lab, and they're trying to figure out what to do with this research. Or they've developed this widget; but they haven’t thought about who is going to use it and how to fund it. That's what our programs do. We've been running the I-Corps program for 13 years.

Hundreds of teams on our campus participate in our program, and those teams have gone on to raise well over $200 million in funding. It’s a very influential program on our campus, and it's one of our pillar programs in our innovation entrepreneurship ecosystem.

We also hold webinars, collaborate with Enterprise Works, and help teams validate their ideas and connect them with resources.

This is an exciting time for TEC. We just launched the inaugural Grainger Engineering Tech Startup Challenge in Chicago. We have record numbers of teams participating in Cozad. If you look five years down the line, what does the future hold?

Our goal is for every Grainger Engineering student to have an entrepreneurial experience through a course or one of our programs. 

We’re excited about our Innovation Living-Learning Community, which is really focused on first-year experiences to bring more students into our innovation ecosystem. We started with 50 students. We now have 360 students living there. It’s been a great partnership with University Housing. 

We want to grow our technology commercialization programs as well. We want to help more students launch ventures and have successful startup outcomes. And we want to connect students to Chicago. We're committed to helping our students see Chicago as a destination for building those world-changing businesses.

What does it mean for a student at Illinois to have or to build an entrepreneurial mindset?

If you look at most of our celebrated innovators and entrepreneurs, most of them launched their startups after working for a few years after graduation. I think that’s important to remember. 

When we teach about entrepreneurship here, it's also about developing the mindset. You need the skills that you develop as an entrepreneur to be successful wherever you go. You need to be able to identify opportunities, to secure resources, to communicate effectively. And those are skills that will serve you well if you're launching your venture or if you're at John Deere or Caterpillar or Google. 

Regardless of where you're going to end up, those are the skills you want. You need to be able to adapt, identify market opportunities or gaps, figure out which opportunity you want to take. And you need to pitch. What's the value proposition? Who’s the stakeholder? These are critical skills, regardless of where you go.

Last question: regardless the course of study, what advice do you have for Illinois students to be successful?

Get involved! Do something, get moving, get forward momentum and you'll figure it out. I always tell students here, if you get into the University of Illinois, if you get into Grainger Engineering, clearly, you're smart enough.

I encourage students to leverage the resources available here. The Grainger College of Engineering and the University of Illinois have made this incredible commitment to support you and provide resources for you. I am here to work for you. 

If you're not sure what to do, just come to socialize, sit in the background, watch. Then maybe next time you'll decide to get up and pitch your idea. Come, participate, get involved and meet others. You could meet your future co-founder.

We have one of, if not the top, innovation entrepreneurship ecosystems on a university campus for students. Take advantage of it.