We were in that class of TechStars (ThinkNear). Not featured in the show -- though in retrospect it makes sense given what they were going for. They had a lot of footage they left on the cutting room floor, and I guess we were just too heads down to be very interesting. My cofounder and I also get along quite well, so we had very little drama to bring to the table.
I recommend the TechStars program to anyone, without any reservation whatsoever. It was really awesome for us. We started basically at zero, along with Lee (Veri), and another team not featured (who's now FourSquareAndSevenYearsAgo). We came out much stronger at the end than we could have been without TechStars with an awesome network, some great mentors, and were able to raise a bit over $1.6. Tisch and Cohen are awesome.
Seriously, don't let the show sour you at all on the program. Some companies will have drama early on, and the show really played it up.
Actually, I don't see this as out of line or inconsistent at all. Providing free education classes, particularly the introduction levels, increases awareness, acclimatizes students to learning online, and they learn how to do it. (They being Stanford. They work out hiccups over servers, videos, tests, whatever in the free courses.)
If Stanford then offered the next level of AI class online, but charged $1K? $3K for it, they'd get all their money back. Could turn into a classic Freemium model.
On the upside, this would probably be better for students as a whole, because most of them have no idea what they're really interested in. The ability to take all the intro classes for free and then pay for the ones that are more interesting to them is pretty interesting, from a macro-societal point of view.
So, being someone in the market to hire someone with Data Mining and AI skills, this: " i feel like there's not much it shows beyond commitment and a focused interes" is very valuable. Obviously there are other ways that may be cheaper, but this is not a bad way.
The other things I look for are evidence of raw smarts and a track record of accomplishment, CS fundamentals, and, of course, personality. (Also, prefer someone with a poor understanding of Football so that they don't upset me in the fantasy league.)
Least likely organization to pull this off in the world -- other than my grandmothers knitting group, but they have enough sense not to try doing things they will surely fail at.
http://www.thinknear.com ThinkNear is redefining how local merchants reach and attract customers and advertise on Mobile. We're funded by IA Ventures, Google Ventures, Qualcomm, and more.
We're super early stage, so you'll have the opportunity to do everything and own large chunks of our technology and product.
Right now, we're looking specifically for a mid-level Rails engineer.
I recommend the TechStars program to anyone, without any reservation whatsoever. It was really awesome for us. We started basically at zero, along with Lee (Veri), and another team not featured (who's now FourSquareAndSevenYearsAgo). We came out much stronger at the end than we could have been without TechStars with an awesome network, some great mentors, and were able to raise a bit over $1.6. Tisch and Cohen are awesome.
Seriously, don't let the show sour you at all on the program. Some companies will have drama early on, and the show really played it up.