For the last several months, I have been planning to start a business when I finish my M.S. I have an idea, and in my spare time, I have been reading everything I could get my hands on and applying it as best I could (on paper). I am at the point where as soon as I finish my thesis, I am going to work full time on my company. The problem... finishing the thesis.

For the last two weeks, I have worked harder than I have the last two years on this document, and every time I open the file, I find something that I'm not happy with, and spend a couple of days finding more references or doing an extra experiment to make something a little stronger.

At the same time, I've been reading a lot of Eric Ries and Steve Blank, and even got the Virginia Tech library to order a copy of The Four Steps to the Epiphany so I could stop having to return it and reorder it from inter-library loan. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, check these guys out now.)

Today, it occurred to me: for the last two weeks, I have just been adding "features" to my thesis, without having any idea what the minimum viable thesis really is! My customers are the three faculty members on my committee, and there is some level for each of them for which they will say, "ok, this is good enough, you've earned it!" But I have no idea what that is.

Today, I'm going to stop adding features, and put the thing out there. It is likely that it will get torn apart by a couple members of my committee, and it is more than likely that I will "fail" and have a ton of revisions to make. Until that happens, I'm in the dark, trying to please a group of people for whom I only have assumptions about what they want and what they are willing to accept.

I'll publish a couple of papers on my work later on in the year, and refine everything for those, but for now, the minimum viable thesis is the only thing standing between me and starting a business.

Over the six or so years I've been a student at Virginia Tech, there have been a number of student entrepreneurship societies that have come and gone, but last night, something happened here that I haven't seen before. The newest student group, Entrepreneurship Society @ Virginia Tech got together with some local start-up guys (Ken Maready and Bob Summers) and held an elevator pitch competition, with $500 cash for the winner. I couldn't stay the whole time to see who won, but there were at least a few several sharp kids with some pretty good ideas.

Hopefully this kind of activity is a new trend here. This kind of partnership would not have been possible five years ago, but with VT KnowledgeWorks and the Virignia Tech Corporate Research Center very actively promoting entrepreneurship, there are plenty of resources for start-ups here in town.

My long-term hope is to see the establishment of some kind of center for entrepreneurship at Virginia Tech which will actively bind the start-up and student communities. (Here is an Entrepreneur Magazine article on some schools and towns that have done a great job of this.) This would not have been possible five years ago, but everything we would need is here today.

It is an exciting time to be in the start-up community in Blacksburg. Lets keep this momentum going.