Yes, I was one of its inaugural residents... it was an interesting experience, but ultimately somewhat wasted. I sincerely hope they've improved some of the basic problems since then.
Ya, I was a resident in the 2nd term of its existence, and will be again this spring. My first term's stay wasn't very impressive: the way it was run, the scope of the projects (except ours of course :P). They are taking major steps to improve it now though, with a new management.
My major beef was the lack of talent - a similar situation to back when I did game mods: some "alphas" shopping around for cofounders/sidekicks, and not too many sidekicks to go around.
The vast majority of the people I met while I was there were simply were not seasoned enough to tackle anything of considerable scope. Yeah, they were technically coders, but most had little experience outside of their CS courses and maybe a little bit of extra hackery on the side. Someone who was fluent in HTML, CSS, JS, and, say, PHP, was practically non-existent... and the ones who were there were the aforementioned "alphas", who were more interested in shopping for cofounders on their project than joining someone else's. In short, Velocity was 10% seasoned coders looking for partners (and not finding any), and 90% dreamers with no significant talent or experience to contribute to anyone's project. I'm making this sound very harsh, but I was very disappointed in the calibre of people they were able to recruit.
In a startup environment, especially one that's operating purely as a small team of founders, you cannot have "the Java guy", everyone has to wear a large number of hats - and this talent pool simply did not exist in Velocity.
I can't help but think the whole concept a dormitory-as-incubator is somewhat misguided. IMHO it would be much better served for everyone to simply have a streamlined collaboration system where entrepreneurially-minded people can find each other, and to provide basic resources (how 'bout some servers instead of flashy phones?) to help them get there. Think JobMine, but for student projects.
Oh, and one more thing: Waterloo is a town filled with tech startups, yet Velocity's only backers seem to be large corporations. This is unproductive - you don't need talks by big-company VPs about how they admire our spirit and independence... we need talks by startup guys who are in the thick of it themselves.
Totally agree on your first point. Not only is technical talent lacking, it's filled with a lot of dreamers. In the end, very few people have what it takes to put in the hours ontop of their workload. I understand this is tough, esp. for engineers (being in compeng myself), but in the end, if you want it enough, you'll do it.
As far as the big corps vs local startups go, new Velocity management seems to be taking big steps towards fixing it.
Honestly, Velocity as it is right now, is just a convenient place for my existing team to collaborate. I don't really have any expectations of picking up new people since they're 1 in 1000 at Waterloo.
Net net tho, things are improving and I look forward to people playing rockband less and actually doing something useful :P
