Why making good friends in college is important

It is interesting to see the number of college friends who get together to startup. I am not sure if there has been any study from where I can quote a statistic, but I bet that amongst all the startups, those started by college batchmates would be a significant percent. Microsoft, please don't sue me. I mean no offense to the dropouts.

Am just penning down an observation from the 23 startups - 14 incubatees we have at CIIE and 9 startups which have joined us for iAccelerator in 2009 summers. The obvious ones are like SmsGYAN guys and Empower which started as a Bplan submitted by friends during their college days. Ants, on the other hand, started as an engineering lab project which the friends decided to take forward for commercialization. Then there is Bitstat and Gridbots, where friends got together after working for some time. Slevan and Sankar worked for good 8 years in seperate companies before getting together again to start Bitstat! I guess, when you get frustrated with mundane work at jobs, you want to get back to the exciting college life.

I find Hashcube even more interesting. Deepan and Ram knew each other in school! Deepan made some interesting games when he was in college and roped in Ram who, while in different college, stayed in touch. Actually, they had got their first check in mail by their third year in college. So technically, they could have dropped out like a few other more famous counterparts and still be a part of this musing by me.

So..everyone who is still studying or planning to study sometime in life, let the guy sitting besides you in the exam copy your answers. His skills might come in handy when he is your partner.