Description: Entrepreneurship is a way of looking at things that is opportunity-focused and creative. The goal should be about creating value for customers and investors, gaining independence in your career, taking bold risks, and solving challenges with novel solutions. To be an entrepreneur, you need to develop the ability to innovate—to improve the old and invent the new. You need passion—doing what you love. Above all, you need persistence: getting up every day and moving forward with no one telling you what to do or why to do it. The course will cover core concepts involved in identifying project ideas, composing business plans, and formulating teams to pursue a project. The students will be selecting their projects from current grand challenges and ideas with entrepreneurship potential from a wide range of commercial and government sources. During class, we will be performing an assessment of the business and market fit of new ideas. The course will engage the students in project team building and leadership. As part of the project pitch, the students will learn how to perform discovery and substantiation of the initial target customer.
The course material will be posted and administered in VT Canvas.
Dr. Angelos Stavrou is a Virginia Tech Innovation Campus founding Professor and the Entrepreneurship activities lead. He is also a member of the Bradley Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech. Dr. Stavrou is a serial entrepreneur, and the founder of Quokka, Kryptowire Labs, Aether Argus, and Impedyme Inc. Quokka is a VC-baked Mobile Security company with a more than 200M valuation. In addition, Dr. Stavrou has served as a principal investigator on research awards from NSF, DARPA, IARPA, DHS, AFOSR, ARO, ARL, and ONR. He has written more than 130 peer-reviewed conference and journal articles. Stavrou received his M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering, M.Phil., and Ph.D. (with distinction) in Computer Science all from Columbia University. Stavrou is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Security & Privacy, and IEEE Internet Computing magazine and a co-chair of the IEEE Blockchain initiative. He is a senior member of the ACM, USENIX, and IEEE. In 2013, he received the IEEE Reliability Society Engineer of the Year award. His team was awarded the DHS Cyber Security Division's "Significant Government Impact Award" in 2017 and the "Bang for the Buck Award" in 2019.
Columbia University, Fu Foundation School of Engineering & Applied Science, New York, NY.
Ph.D. in Computer Science (with Distinction) (August 2007).
Thesis: "An Overlay Architecture for End-to-End Service Availability".
Advisor: Angelos D. Keromytis.
Columbia University, Fu Foundation School of Engineering & Applied Science, New York, NY.
M.Phil. in Computer Science (January 2007)
Columbia University, Fu Foundation School of Engineering & Applied Science, New York, NY.
M.Sc. Degree in Electrical Engineering with concentration in Multimedia Networking (Peer to Peer Networks). (December 2002)
National University of Athens, Athens, Greece /Carleton University ON, Canada.
M.Sc. Degree in Algorithms, Computability and Logic. (June 2001)
Master's Thesis: "A new distributed algorithm for routing in satellite constellation networks".
Advisor: Prof. E. Kranakis.
University of Patras, Physics Department, Patras, Greece.
B.Sc (Honors) in Physics, (July 1997).
Thesis: "Stream Ciphers theory and practical application".