The co-founder of Slack. A senior executive at Twitter. The head of Google X.
It’s the first day of class, and Thomas Byers is rattling off the names of local luminaries who have studied here at Stanford, been guest lecturers, or done both.
“Oh, Reid Hoffman,” he adds, as he flips through Vanity Fair’s “New Establishment List.” LinkedIn’s co-founder, he tells the 50 undergraduates squeezed into his course on technology entrepreneurship, is teaching a class this quarter.
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The co-founder of Slack. A senior executive at Twitter. The head of Google X.
It’s the first day of class, and Thomas Byers is rattling off the names of local luminaries who have studied here at Stanford, been guest lecturers, or done both.
“Oh, Reid Hoffman,” he adds, as he flips through Vanity Fair’s “New Establishment List.” LinkedIn’s co-founder, he tells the 50 undergraduates squeezed into his course on technology entrepreneurship, is teaching a class this quarter.
Silicon Valley not only surrounds the campus but has become entwined with it. This is just one way in which Stanford University has set itself apart from its peers. Startup U., as it’s often dubbed, welcomes tech giants and venture capitalists to teach and mentor students. Graduate and undergraduate students can choose from dozens of classes, clubs, and contests that focus on innovation, from the technical to the conceptual. Professors move in and out of industry. Thanks to a leave policy that allows professors to take two years away from campus, a quarter of them have started their own firms; others come and go from visiting-researcher posts at places including Google, Facebook, and Pinterest.
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Entrepreneurship — the teaching of risk-taking, the emphasis on problem-solving, the creation of on-campus incubators and so-called maker spaces — is in vogue in higher education. Hundreds of colleges have embraced education programs with the goal of cultivating a generation of innovators. But no one does it like Stanford. Here, usefulness is a point of pride. That, combined with a fast metabolism, wide and deep ties to industry, and an ambitious student body, sets Stanford apart.
How does that change the student experience? The role of a professor? And does Stanford provide a model for the rest of higher education, particularly as, more and more often, colleges are being asked to prove their worth?
Computer science is the top major here. Courses in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program — the engineering school’s entrepreneurship arm, which Mr. Byers helped create two decades ago — fill 3,000 seats a year on a campus with 16,000 students.
About 39,900 active companies, including 5,500 started by students or recent graduates, have Stanford roots, according to a 2012 study by Charles E. Eesley, an assistant professor in the department of management science and engineering, and William F. Miller, a former provost and a professor of computer science emeritus. They also found that one in four tenure-track faculty respondents had founded or incorporated a firm at some point in their careers. Collectively, companies with Stanford connections have created the equivalent of the world’s 10th-largest economy, with $2.7 trillion in revenue. Google, Netflix, Instagram, Yahoo, Tesla, and LinkedIn are all Stanford-connected enterprises born in the past two decades.
For all of its benefits, Stanford seems conflicted about its Startup U. reputation. While proud of its role in fueling Silicon Valley, professors and administrators prefer to talk about success in another way. What they want the lesson from Stanford to be, they say, is that liberal arts and technical education don’t have to work against each other. More than a start-up culture, they say, the university immerses faculty and students in interdisciplinary work and learning through problem-solving. The study by Mr. Eesley and Mr. Miller, in fact, highlights Stanford’s “robust liberal-arts environment” and collaboration across schools and disciplines as keys to its success.
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“It’s really quite frustrating that people conflate entrepreneurship with starting companies and making money,” says Tina Seelig, a faculty director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. “The way it’s taught at Stanford, at least, is not like that.”
Stanford has never been an institution that walled itself off from the rest of the world. A commitment to “usefulness” was part of its foundation, and the university’s role in helping educate and support the creators of Hewlett-Packard and other Silicon Valley success stories is well known. Stanford’s president, John L. Hennessy, an electrical-engineering professor-turned-entrepreneur who is worth millions, nurtured and amplified those connections, which have benefited the university’s bottom line and heightened the belief that tech innovation is both fueling and being fueled by Stanford.
“No university that I’ve seen is nearly as entrepreneurial and nearly as woven into the fabric of the business community as Stanford is,” says Bill Coleman, a partner at Alsop Louie Partners, a venture-capital firm. “I know of at least a dozen or two dozen people like me, people who have been in industry, been successful, and teach part time at Stanford.” Like them, Mr. Coleman is active on a number of levels: as instructor, donor, and mentor to students.
Faculty members describe Stanford as a highly decentralized place where professors can pursue novel ideas without a lot of administrative bureaucracy.
“It really is faculty-led, faculty-generated,” says Byron Reeves, a communications professor who has been a visiting researcher at Microsoft, licensed his research on the way people interact with computers, and co-founded one of the more than 50 industrial-affiliate programs on campus that connect academics and companies on research in fields like artificial intelligence and media.
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On a practical level, professors and students say that working day to day alongside colleagues and classmates who have created businesses has inspired them. They are also able to get practical advice, as well as leads on investors and advisers. That interconnectedness has opened opportunities, particularly around digital technology and within computer science. Mehran Sahami, a former senior research scientist at Google who joined Stanford in 2007 estimates that half of his department has either worked in industry or founded a company.
Jure Leskovec, an assistant professor of computer science whose work focuses on mining and modeling large social networks, embodies the role that many faculty members take. He co-founded a “recommendation engine” that helps web-based businesses determine what consumers might want next. Pinterest acquired the technology, and, as part of the deal, Mr. Leskovec, who started working at Stanford in 2009, took a leave of absence a few months ago and became Pinterest’s first chief scientist. The idea was to help the company figure out what to do with the reams of data it has collected about users.
“I haven’t even been tenured yet,” says Mr. Leskovec, “but when this was happening, I talked to my senior colleagues: ‘Tell me if this is a mistake. I’m happy not to do it, because in the end I’m committed to Stanford.’ They said, ‘No, we think it’s fine.’ "
Stanford offers faculty members a two-year leave for opportunities like this. Whether professors are starting a venture or working for one, the assumption is that they will come back with fresh ideas and an insider’s understanding of how their research could be applied to real-world challenges.
Mr. Leskovec still spends time at Stanford working with students and doing research. But most days he is at Pinterest headquarters, the only academic working with young techies across the company. Asked what his goal is for the next two years, he says, unabashedly, “I want Pinterest to be large and successful.” When he returns to Stanford, Mr. Leskovec says, he will have a better understanding of how companies might use the models he creates with his graduate students.
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Amin Saberi, an associate professor in management science and engineering, calls himself an “accidental entrepreneur.” It’s a notion that comes up in conversation frequently with Stanford faculty members and students: the idea that your interests could lead almost serendipitously to a start-up.
Key Ingredients of Entrepreneurship at Stanford
Networking and collaboration across disciplines and schools. Embodied best by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, programs and courses that cross disciplines are supported by the university. About one-quarter of students pursue interdisciplinary majors.
Close connections to industry. Local leaders play an active role on campus, serving as instructors and mentors to students, and as collaborators with faculty members. Stanford offers professors a two-year leave for opportunities to work in industry.
Classes, centers, and organizations that focus on innovation. Students can choose among dozens of offerings, both academic and applied, that build entrepreneurial skills.
A robust liberal-arts environment. As enrollments in engineering have grown, Stanford has sought to bolster the humanities and social sciences, too, including by creating programs such as CS+X, a joint major in computer science and a humanities field.
Support for commercialization of research and ideas. Established entities, like the Office of Technology Licensing, and newer ones, like StartX, a nonprofit, Stanford-affiliated business accelerator, offer faculty members, students, and alumni help with the technical and developmental sides of entrepreneurship.
Three years ago, Mr. Saberi built a learning platform to help a colleague, Mr. Eesley, offer an entrepreneurship class online, and make it more interactive than existing technologies allowed. After 80,000 students signed up, Mr. Saberi started thinking about turning it into something bigger.
He went through StartX, a nonprofit business accelerator, formed by a Stanford graduate in 2011, that has helped nurture nearly 300 start-ups whose founders are alumni, faculty members, or students. StartX and Mr. Saberi’s Stanford connections helped him begin the process of building a business. After a two-year leave in which he helped build NovoEd, Mr. Saberi is back at Stanford. He remains chairman of the company’s board, but, as required by university policy, he handed off day-to-day operations to others.
“There is a lot of value in working on fundamental theoretical problems,” he says. “At the same time, when looking at more-practical problems, isn’t it better to be working on something that can actually be used? This is a very important part of Stanford culture.”
Students tell similar stories. Dan Johnston, who created a tutoring business while an undergraduate, says his time at Stanford encouraged him to think big. What started out as a one-person venture became a national tutoring service. After he found investors with the help of faculty members, he moved to San Francisco during his senior year to ramp up his company. He got approval from all of his professors to complete his studies online.
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“Most college students would just say, ‘Oh, I love tutoring, but I can’t take on anymore, so that’s it,’ " says Mr. Johnston, whose business was acquired by Chegg Inc., where he now works. “What Stanford taught me was, this is an opportunity.”
Students in the social sciences and humanities, too, are drawn into this approach.
Courtney Buie, who is earning her master’s degree in East Asian studies, points to a course she took on international urbanization at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design using design thinking, a process with which people can test out creative solutions to existing problems. Her team created a cellphone app that allows people to buy and sell used bicycles cheaply, as a form of recycling. The point wasn’t to make something salable, she says, but to teach students how to innovate.
Close connections between academe and industry often raise alarm bells and, by their nature, carry a certain amount of risk. There is the concern that professors might skew their research to please industry patrons, and the worry that the less entrepreneurially focused sides of campus could live in the shadow of the start-up culture.
Working closely with industry on questions of the day can be a double-edged sword, says Wesley M. Cohen, a professor of economics and management at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, who studies entrepreneurship and innovation.
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“Could those questions be a distraction and pull them away from more foundational work?” he asks. “Maybe. But sometimes those questions could raise fairly fundamental issues.” Universities should make clear, he says, that industry interests must be kept apart from academic ones.
Ann M. Arvin, dean of research at Stanford, says the university’s conflict-of-interest policies clearly outline how professors must keep their professional obligations distinct from their personal considerations. Stanford policy also bluntly discourages faculty investments in student start-ups. “The strong presumption,” it states, “is that such involvement would constitute a significant conflict of interest that could not be mitigated or managed and that it would therefore not be permitted.”
Faculty members are allowed the equivalent of one day a week to do outside consulting, which is not uncommon in academe. And the allowance of up to two years’ leave to work elsewhere is more generous than at most other institutions. But faculty members can’t split their time between Stanford and another employer. The industry-affiliate programs, which allow them to explore broad research topics with company representatives, state that financial backers gain a seat at the table but have no control over, and no rights to, professors’ research.
Faculty members say peer evaluation helps discourage potential compromises. “I don’t get evaluated based on the millions of dollars I might help a company make,” says Mr. Leskovec. “I get evaluated on citations.”
Professors and administrators also note that Stanford’s emphasis on innovation extends to the nonprofit world. Stanford graduates have created more than 30,000 nonprofit organizations, according to the entrepreneurship study. The university houses several centers and programs focused on social innovation. And courses like one on using computer science for the social good are popular; for that course, more than 300 students applied for 20 spots.
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Still, conflicts have happened. In 2013, the same year Stanford released the policy on faculty investments in student start-ups, a student venture to create a better form of wireless payments, called Clinkle, gained notice, along with some criticism, for its blurring of academic and business interests. Some students dropped out of Stanford to join the company, which was created by an alumnus while he was still a student. It also attracted faculty investors. Mr. Hennessy, the university’s president, was an adviser to one of the founders and to the company.
Some academics on campus are uncomfortable with aspects of Stanford’s close ties to Silicon Valley. While he praises the entrepreneurial focus, Vivek Wadhwa, a fellow at the university’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance, dislikes how ubiquitous venture capitalists have become on campus. “They corrupt the value system of research,” he says, “and it becomes about money, money, money.”
Debra Satz, senior associate dean for the humanities and arts, says it concerns her that so many administrators and faculty members hold positions on company boards. Mr. Hennessy, for example, is a member of the boards of directors of Google and Cisco Systems.
“You don’t want to have a fortress,” but simply being transparent about such company ties isn’t enough, she says. “When you sit on those very powerful company boards, and those companies are involved in funding things on campus, it does raise perception problems.” Google and Microsoft, for example, have helped finance the law school’s Center for Internet and Society.
Perhaps the most fundamental worry that professors have about Stanford’s image as Startup U. is that it ignores the value of the humanities. Ms. Satz shares that concern, but she notes that the university has moved in recent years to bring more attention to that side of campus.
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In fact, students-turned-entrepreneurs say that the most value they’ve gotten from their education at Stanford has come from interdisciplinary work.
“They kept telling us, don’t worry about these hard skills, we’re turning you into thinkers,” says Trent Hazy, who studied product design and helped start a business shortly after graduation called MindSumo, designed to connect companies and students through project competition. “So across the curriculum, even in engineering and product design, it’s around critical thinking.”
Stanford has spent millions of dollars on an interdisciplinary arts hub, a concert hall, and an arts museum. It created a humanities dorm and increased its recruiting of students interested in those fields — creating, for example, a summer humanities institute for high-school students. It has brought in Silicon Valley leaders to talk about the importance of a humanities education. And it has reworked the curriculum with an eye toward making it more interdisciplinary and providing every undergraduate with a strong grounding in the humanities. There’s a new joint major, called CS+X, in which students study computer science (CS) and a humanities discipline (X).
Because of the renewed attention, the yield of applicants who wanted to study the humanities went from “well below” average to the university average, says Richard Saller, dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences. “It clearly made a difference in getting past the image of Stanford being only about engineering and technology.”
Many students, though, do come to Stanford wanting to become entrepreneurs, and the 2012 study suggests that this is increasingly its draw. Among the students here, faith in innovation can approach a messianic intensity. In Mr. Byers’s technology-entrepreneurship class, more than half of the students said they wanted to stay in Silicon Valley after graduation. He asked why.
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“Everyone here is so passionate and smart,” one student volunteered. “Everyone is trying to change the world.”
Others have mixed feelings about the widespread zeal. Laine Bruzek, a senior majoring in product design, says students often talk about start-ups as a way to signify their ambition and their desire to effect change. But it can seem superficial at times. “You talk to a lot of people who say, ‘I want to start my own company,’ and you say, ‘What about?’ and they say, ‘I don’t know.’ "
Faculty members say that, perhaps counterintuitively, Stanford’s close connections to Silicon Valley can help tamp down a naïve enthusiasm for start-up culture. Rarely do guest lecturers or adjunct professors describe entrepreneurship as easy, says Mr. Byers, the professor in management science and engineering. “They’re scaring the heck out of these students.”
One purpose of his course, Mr. Byers says, is to move students away from imagining that they’ll start the next Google or Instagram and think instead about becoming an innovator at that type of place. Mr. Byers himself is an entrepreneur twice over: His cybersecurity company did well; his later software-development company failed. It’s something he talks about in class.
Ms. Bruzek holds a Mayfield Fellowship, a nine-month program that helps students cultivate the theoretical and practical skills to create technology companies. She says she has developed a more nuanced view of entrepreneurship since coming to Stanford, and she credits her undergraduate program for enabling her to blend her creative side, including an interest in storytelling, with hands-on design work.
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One of the most controversial elements of student entrepreneurship is the idea that undergraduates may be better off dropping out and pursuing their ideas. Students who became entrepreneurs say their professors strongly discouraged them from leaving early.
“Every single professor I’ve encountered said, ‘You’re in class, you’re in school, that’s a priority,’ " says Ernestine Fu, who began working part time at Alsop Louie Partners, the venture-capital firm, during her sophomore year. It landed her on the cover of Forbes magazine, but she was able to juggle her studies and work, earning a scholastic award in the engineering department. She now works at Alsop Louie full time and teaches a course called “Entrepreneurship Through the Lens of Venture Capital.”
Stanford’s history and geography set it apart and give it an identity that other campuses can’t replicate. But parts of its recipe are adaptable and reflect a larger movement in higher education toward interdisciplinary education that emphasizes both technical and problem-solving skills.
In a way, what makes Stanford’s entrepreneurial climate stand out is how the whole has become greater than the sum of its parts. A student-run Venture Capital Club, mock pitch sessions for students who want to try out a business idea, a course on designing inexpensive solutions for problems in developing countries, and dozens of similar efforts create unusual synergy. Asked what surprised him the most in conducting his report on entrepreneurship, Mr. Eesely says it was the breadth of everything going on here. Fred Reinhart, president of the Association of University Technology Managers, calls this phenomenon “one plus one equals four.” Stanford’s wealth and long history of supporting innovation have created a system that few other institutions could match.
Ms. Seelig, of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, recommends that colleges start small, noting that it took Stanford decades to get to the point where it is today. And, she advises, don’t equate entrepreneurship with business development or try to channel all programs through a single center. She encourages faculty members to focus more on cultivating students’ problem-solving skills.
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Krisztina (Z) Holly, an entrepreneur-in-residence with the mayor’s office in Los Angeles, has helped create innovation centers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at the University of Southern California. Stanford is not so different from other highly entrepreneurial universities, she says. What they have in common is strong interdisciplinary work, a commitment to innovation across campus, and porous borders with the outside world.
“You don’t get an amazing university if you push entrepreneurship,” she says. “You get entrepreneurship if you have an amazing university.”
Beth McMurtrie is a senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education, where she focuses on the future of learning and technology’s influence on teaching. In addition to her reported stories, she is a co-author of the weekly Teaching newsletter about what works in and around the classroom. Email her at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com and follow her on LinkedIn.