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- What it's like to attend Stanford, where twenty-somethings launch startups worth millions
What it's like to attend Stanford, where twenty-somethings launch startups worth millions
Founded in 1891, Stanford University has built a reputation as a feeder school for Silicon Valley.
Source: Business Insider
Many members of today's tech elite attended classes and built startups in its hallowed halls. Some dropped out to pursue already promising careers.
Source: Silicon Valley Business Journal
In CoHo, a coffee house where I found many students sitting on couches with laptops in hand, portraits of alumni hang on the wall. Intimidating.
Stanford has educated titans of tech including Yahoo's Marissa Mayer; Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin; cofounder of PayPal, Peter Thiel; former Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer; and cofounders of Hewlett-Packard, Bill Hewlett and David Packard.
I met Priyanka Puram Sekhar, a junior who started the school's first cybersecurity club, in the coffee house. She didn't set out to study computer science. "You come to Stanford and it just kinda happens," Priyanka says.
Priyanka arrived at Stanford having been groomed by her parents to pursue a medical degree. During freshman year, an introduction to programming class got her hooked.
She began taking more classes in cybersecurity (this semester, she's the only female in her Bitcoin computing class) and learned that many people shy away from studying it because they think it's too hard.
She cofounded the Applied Cybersecurity group to offer a safe space for exploration.
"IT isn't sexy in the way that creating the next Snapchat is hot at Stanford," Priyanka says. But that doesn't make it any less important.
Stanford stretches 8,180 acres, making it one of the largest college campuses in the world. It could fit 96 Disneyland parks inside.
Source: Stanford
There are more bikes on campus than undergrads. Everyone pedals to get around.
Roughly 13,000 bikes are present on campus daily.
There were only about 6,500 undergraduate students enrolled in fall 2015.
The residence halls sit on the perimeters of campus. Florence Moore Hall, or "FloMo," is one of the most coveted dorms for its proximity to academic buildings and wall-to-wall windows.
Source: Stanford
An outdoor seating area, complete with a stone grill island, provides a relaxing oasis for social gatherings and homework sessions.
Housing costs just under $9,000 for each academic year. No dorm lounge is complete without lumpy furniture leftover from the '70s and an electronic whiteboard.
Source: Stanford
One can follow the trail of Solo cups and crushed Natty Light beer cans to The Row, a strip of fraternities, themed houses, and co-ops. It's home to the best parties, and it's the launchpad of some now-famous startups.
Sigma Nu counted both Kevin Systrom, the cofounder of Instagram, and Lucas Duplan, founder of payment company Clinkle, as members. Clinkle raised $25 million, the largest seed round of financing in Silicon Valley history, when Duplan was just 21.
Up the street is Kappa Sigma, where Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, Snapchat CTO Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown, the friend they ousted who later sued, pledged.
Source: Business Insider
After some campus touring, I was starving. I headed over to a Stanford institution, Thai Cafe, where large portions of pad thai and chicken curry are sold for just $6. Cash only.
A fellow customer warned me that I better know my order by the time I reach the counter. The cashier is a small, frowning woman reminiscent of The Soup Nazi from "Seinfeld."
By the time she placed my cash in the register, my meal had landed on the counter.
A pile of chicken, green onions, and rice noodles was doused in spicy peanut sauce and served on a bed of iceberg lettuce. It tasted like it costs $6, but it at least filled me.
Wandering around campus that afternoon, I saw it was the place to be if you're a wannabe tech guru. In response to demand, the university even outfitted the quad with WiFi routers.
An entrepreneurship center in the School of Engineering hosts a "thought leaders" seminar series. This semester, Astro Teller of Alphabet's X and William Perry, the former US Secretary of Defense, spoke.
Students craft prototypes, from a reinvented waffle iron to a folding desk, at The Product Realization Lab. It offers classes in laser cutting, 3D scanning, woodworking, and more.
Source: The San Francisco Chronicle
Just a short drive away, I visited a startup accelerator called StartX that aims to identify and nurture promising entrepreneurs in the school's network.
A StartX startup called Nurep pioneering the first telesurgery platform that will allow surgeons and medical device representatives to access an operating room through, essentially, a more secure FaceTime.
Sometimes, surgeons will call on an expert for assistance with a complicated procedure, forcing that expert to travel and miss work. Nurep has created an alternative: a secure, HIPAA-compliant medical cart that can be deployed in an operating room to show remote doctors a 360-degree view of the room and a clear visual of the incision site.
Nurep joined StartX this spring through a cofounder who attended Stanford.
Schultz, another cofounder, tells Tech Insider that the team was attracted to StartX for its exceptional and diverse network of mentors.
StartX startups have raised a combined $1.5 billion in funding. Unlike most accelerators, StartX takes zero equity, meaning founders retain ownership of their companies.
In the afternoon, I headed to virtual reality class, where I met Aashna Mago, a junior who is a rising star in Silicon Valley's virtual reality scene.
Shortly after she toured Stanford as a high school senior, Aashna (who was researching molecular biology at Princeton by age 15) attended a symposium where she discovered how virtual reality is being used to help with post traumatic stress disorder in veterans. Realizing how the technology could be used to help people, she set out to study computer science as an undergraduate at Stanford.
"I didn't know what a startup was until I got here," Aashna says, half jokingly.
Her stacked resumé includes an internship with virtual reality expert Mark Bolas at USC's Mixed Reality Lab, a full-time gig launching an in-house production studio at Rothenberg Ventures, and the establishment of Stanford's first virtual reality club, Rabbit Hole VR. This summer, she'll work as a software engineer at Facebook-owned Oculus.
Success didn't come easily. Aashna remembers walking out of virtual reality class at the start of the semester and not feeling particularly smart. She decided it was okay to feel that way.
You're never going to understand everything," Aashna says. "The experience of being super lost, you just have to get really comfortable with it. It doesn't mean I'm stupid.
Stanford's students are among the best and brightest. Such prestige sometimes creates an environment where people feel like they have to hide their weaknesses, according to multiple students I spoke to.
Realizing that it's all right to fail freed Aashna to ask for help, be curious, and try new things. She launched Rabbit Hole VR in that spirit.
During a Rabbit Hole leadership meeting, I watched the group brainstorm names of industry experts to put on an upcoming panel. Members also tried on the Microsoft HoloLens, a helmet that projects "holograms" into your field of view. (It's glitchy, but surreal.)
I also attended a website hacking workshop hosted by the cybersecurity group Priyanka Sekhar started.
One student injected some malicious code into the workshop server, breaking the demo. "This is why we can't have nice things," a member says.
They are, after all, still college students.
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