[cesarpereira]

This is exactly what I've done over the past several years with great results. I stayed in constant contact with my old college professor (we play a sport at the same club) at a school none of you have ever heard of in the Chicago suburbs. The top CS student(s) at small schools can have extremely high potential.

When you combine this with investing time in candidates via a good internship or apprenticeship program the results can be spectacular. When you are outside SV it doesn't take much to make your internship program stand out by letting your interns do full stack development on actual applications that ship.

You need to invest the time on training/mentoring/pairing to make it work though.