How a Tesla Challenger Veered Off Course

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This episode is sponsored by Anthropic, the makers of Claude. KJU co-founded Genspark, an all-in-one AI workspace. He credits his success to collaborating with trusted partners. Hear from him at the break.

**Imani Moise** (0:18)
Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Tuesday, July 7th. I'm Imani Moise for The Wall Street Journal. Who needs a summer internship when you can start your own company? We're looking at how a new generation of student founders is making the most of summer break in the AI era. And at the beginning of the year, a startup called Windrose Technology seemed poised to disrupt the global trucking industry. We're diving into how the company went from raising hundreds of millions of dollars to facing unpaid debts, a federal lawsuit and a missing $285,000 truck.
But first, as AI reshapes the job market, some college students are rethinking how they spend their summers. Instead of jockeying for internships at big name consulting firms or investment banks, they're moving into startup incubators in Silicon Valley to build businesses of their own. The programs have been so successful for some students that they never return to campus.
WSJ's Tina Li spent time with students in these programs and joins me now to tell us what these hacker houses are like from the inside. How do these new programs work? Is there structure or is it just students taking the summer off to work on their computers by themselves?

**Tina Li** (1:36)
The great thing about these programs is that they offer a little bit of structure, it seems. But what these programs provide is a place to stay, about 15 to 50 people living around you who are working on similar things.
And then they will have a few events throughout the week where they can meet executives or investors or go to startup events together. But on the day to day, it seems that there isn't that much structure and they spend their time working or spending time with their own co-founders.

**Imani Moise** (2:01)
So you went to one of these hacker houses called Techtrek. Can you tell us a little bit more about it? How does it work?

**Tina Li** (2:06)
Yeah. So earlier in the school year, Techtrek sent out applications and they received hundreds of them from students at Princeton, Harvard, MIT. And they selected a cohort of about 40 to 50 students. And some of these students had come in with their own ideas. Some other ones just knew that they wanted to be involved in the ecosystem this summer. So Techtrek provided them with mentorship and guidance and among the cohort themselves, they could sort of move around and find new co-founders. And so they all landed in San Francisco a few weeks ago. At the beginning of summer, they set up shop in Presidio. It's a really beautiful campus. They have space to co-work. They live together. They spend most of their days working to develop their products and taking calls from people who are interested in it. And then they might spend their evenings hanging out with each other or playing poker or going to dingers with executives or investors.

**Imani Moise** (2:58)
But some of these students are making serious money, right? Can you talk us through one of the startups that gain traction and how that can change the life of some of these students?

**Tina Li** (3:06)
Another one of these hacker houses, the Yale Hacker House, one student who's a rising junior at Yale turned down job offers from a frontier biotech company and she walked away from her plans to pursue a PhD after she found the Cortex, which is a startup that builds knowledge systems or brains for biolabs. And since then, Cortex has raised $600,000 at $10 million valuation.

**Imani Moise** (3:28)
Wow.

**Tina Li** (3:29)
And they're working on getting their first commercial contracts. And since raising money, the way Ryan has been thinking about it is she thinks it's actually irresponsible to then go back to school and not keep up the momentum of your company.
She says that by fundraising, she's made a promise to investors to make them that money back.

**Imani Moise** (3:45)
It sounds like this is changing the way students are thinking about their summers and future employment, but is it also changing the way they're thinking about their education?

**Tina Li** (3:53)
A lot of the student founders that I talked to found that they were starting to reconsider the opportunity cost of staying in school versus working on their startups full-time. A lot of them spoke about how it felt once they returned back to school, they didn't have as much time for it, and they just felt like they weren't able to move as fast as they would like. Maggie say that since coming to Silicon Valley, they are learning more in a single month, just meeting investors and working on their products and talking to companies, than they have in an entire semester at school. An investor I spoke to who's a partner at Floodgate actually pushes back against students casually dropping out of school. At the dinner that she attended at the Yale Hacker House's backyard, she told the students, most of the time it's not a good idea to drop out unless you have the next unicorn idea. It's very hard to know if you have the idea.