Q&A with Matt Rutherford, associate professor of computer science, Ritchie School of Engineering and Computer Science
Matt Rutherford is the director of the Unmanned Systems Research Institute, which is a research lab in the engineering school that studies unmanned aircraft, ground robots, autopilot systems and various systems in this field.
He began working at the University of Denver in 2008. At DU, he teaches and advises computer science and electrical and computer engineering students in various projects. He was a faculty fellow with Project X-ITE from its launch, and served as faculty director for a year. He received his master’s and PhD in computer science from the University of Colorado Boulder. Before DU, he started a software consulting company, in 1999, around the time of the first Dot-Com Bubble, and later a software-as-a-service company. Much of his non-academic career has revolved around hands-on projects in the field of software.
The E@DU staff sat down with Rutherford to talk about student and faculty entrepreneurship, and his own experience starting a company.
Q: What is the role of entrepreneurship in a university setting?
A: For students, it’s well-established that there is a “traditional” career path—you receive a university education, you go to work at a medium or large business and follow the career path within those businesses. By being exposed to entrepreneurship as a student, it might open your eyes to those more unconventional paths, like a smaller, more dynamic company. It’s a great way to see what fits your personality and work style.
One of the things we did with Project X-ITE was assemble teams to work with local entrepreneurs to solve a problem. Over the course of that, there were a lot of students who thought it was amazing. They loved working with a businessperson who is passionate, is heavily involved in this business, and has a clear vision in mind. And of course, there are some students who thought it was interesting, but it wasn’t a good fit—it felt unstructured, or it just wasn’t for them. I think of both outcomes as very positive for a student, because you learn something about yourself and what kind of career might be good for you.
It’s a great, low-risk way to learn those things early on in your career. So exposing students to these ideas early on, when they are in a good low-risk position, will help them identify what’s best for their careers.
Q: What makes the DU community entrepreneurial?
A: For students, it’s great to give students the space to think about their careers as they are just starting out, before they mature and get older. But I think a lot of faculty are quite entrepreneurial in how they approach their scholarly research. You identify a problem… you look for funding… you take initial steps toward solving that problem, and that may be successful or, at least, informative.
A lot of those things that are characteristic for an entrepreneur or a small business are not too different from how a lot of faculty approach their scholarship. In a university context, especially outside of the Daniels College, faculty are not typically motivated by profit, which is something a lot of people associate with entrepreneurship. For me, I associate small, dynamic teams doing creative problem-solving as something that embodies the entrepreneurial mindset. I think a lot of faculty use those mindsets without even realizing it’s entrepreneurship in action.
Q: How did entrepreneurship drive you before your time as a professor?
A: My first job after undergrad was at a smaller business with about 50-100 people. I worked as a software developer. It was small enough that there was an opportunity to do a lot of different things. Whatever job needed doing, you could ask your supervisor if you could give it a shot. They were usually very receptive to that.
As I was thinking about going to grad school, I sort of thought to myself, “That wasn’t so hard. We had customers with a particular problem and we had to figure out how to help them.” There was lots that needed doing, and we just did it. I was talking to a good friend of mine and we realized, we could probably do this ourselves.
That might have been a bit naïve. It was fun, but it was a lot of work.
The hard part wasn’t just the technical stuff, but it was finding customers and presenting ourselves as people who knew what we were doing since we were quite inexperienced at the time.
What appealed to me that it was all on us, our very small team. The success or failure of a particular project was our responsibility. There was nobody else to blame if things went wrong, but if things went right, then that would be our accomplishment. I really liked that challenge, of being on the hook for both good and bad and using that to motivate me to work hard. I didn’t really know what I was getting into, but once I was in it, it was something that really appealed to me.