How Stanford University Built Its Own $2.7 Trillion Unicorn
Do you know that Stanford University can point to over 5,000 companies who have their roots on the Stanford campus? These include faves like Nike, Google, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, LinkedIn, Oracle, Intel, HP, Charles Schwab, Tesla, even the Special Olympics.
“Entrepreneurship is in the air, it’s in the water, it’s everywhere,” nods Stanford professor Chuck Eesley, associate professor of Management Science and Engineering, part of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. “At Stanford, the way you show you’re really smart and hip, is to say you’re building a company.”
Eesley knows. His E145: Technology Entrepreneurship course is core to Stanford University’s startup method. No course prerequisites are required, which means that students from any major can gather and hypothesize how to build something that can predictively change the world.
But what makes the Stanford method special is not just the courses they offer in entrepreneurship, the instructors, the founders who come to speak or tested practices with positive outcomes. It is much more prismatic, and it is a methodology that has been building for over 100 years.
Origin story. Stanford abandoned conventional Eastern values when the University was founded by railroad tycoon Leland Stanford in 1885 (you’ve seen…
