In today's world of highly technical graduate education, students find it difficult to obtain exposure to international agriculture due to the extreme constraints on their time.
These were Stanford students, particularly technical graduate students, who have been nerding out on solving real problems for years in their labs and dorm rooms, and who are now in the middle of commercializing their hard work.
So any slippage in quality shows up immediately".India produces 441,000 technical graduates, nearly 2.3m other graduates and more than 300,000 postgraduates every year.
Even if China and India really are surging ahead in the number of technical graduates (and research by Vivek Wadhwa of Harvard University casts doubt on the quality of many of those degrees), innovation is not a zero-sum game.
All this is strange considering the employment opportunities; the rate for technical graduates is 90%, compared to the famous 5% of actors who are in employment at any one time.
In "The Venturesome Economy", a provocative new book, he explains why he thinks this gloomy thesis misunderstands innovation in several fundamental ways.First, he argues that the obsession with the number of doctorates and technical graduates is misplaced because the "high-level" inventions and ideas such boffins come up with travel easily across national borders.
However, the potential for upgrading the quality of the average Indian technical graduates remains to be harnessed.
Avocarrot joined the London-based company builder, which targets technical graduates to help them become entrepreneurs, before it started investing in the startups it puts through its program.
In the previous tech booms, a steady stream of top-notch technical graduates from other countries helped fill the recruiting needs of startups flush with VC money.
The so-called "talent-first" investor, which puts technical graduates through a six-month program where they form teams and in turn found startups, has closed a new £40 million fund to co-invest in graduating companies.
That's why Lu Zhang and Homan Yuen, two Stanford technical graduates, are raising a big fund based on their extensive technical experience to find companies that have that strong technology backbone that will become the next big startup.
