While Stanford is a famously entrepreneurial environment, where business plans are hatched in dorm rooms, the rap on U.W. computer science students is that they tend to be more risk-averse, reflexively gravitating toward bigger companies for employment.

Mr. Etzioni, though, pushes students to jump into the start-up world. In May, he moderated a panel at the university on the subject with Mr. Bisciglia; Glenn Kelman, C.E.O. of the Web real estate company Redfin; and others. About 60 students peppered the executives with questions about start-up life.

“He’s done a great job of creating successful start-ups and of bringing along others,” said Brad Silverberg, a former Microsoft executive who is now a venture capitalist at Ignition Partners in Bellevue, Wash.

In an interview in his office on campus, Mr. Etzioni conceded that the U.W. brand “is definitely weaker” than that of Stanford in computer science, but he says the department has become increasingly competitive. “The students are so much stronger than they were five or 10 years ago,” he said.

In May, Seth Cooper, a Washington professor who earned his Ph.D. from the department last year, won the Association for Computing Machinery doctoral dissertation award, one of the field’s most prestigious prizes. His dissertation described how video games could be used to solve complex scientific problems. He was a co-creator of one game, Foldit, that harnessed the efforts of tens of thousands of players to solve the structure of a protein useful in the fight against H.I.V.

Sidhant Gupta, a Ph.D. student in computer science, is working on low-cost sensing technologies that can help people monitor their energy use. Mr. Gupta, who received his master’s degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology, said U.W. is a collegial environment where experts in different computer science disciplines are encouraged to collaborate.