The DFJ Entrepreneurial Leaders Fellowship is an exciting new offering at Stanford that will provide 12 outstanding masters-level engineering students with an immersive set of experiences designed to prepare them to lead entrepreneurial ventures.
Using living cases with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors, workshops and field trips, the selected students will learn the attitudes and actions needed to bring bold ideas to fruition. The Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), which is the entrepreneurship center at Stanford School of Engineering, runs the program, with generous support from venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ).
“Stanford attracts the best young minds in the world and then equips them to make positive contributions as entrepreneurial leaders. We at DFJ have been fortunate to work with many of those entrepreneurs to help them bring their ventures to life,” said Heidi Roizen, operating partner at DFJ.
Roizen, who has two Stanford degrees, is already a valuable contributor to Stanford. She has been a lecturer in the Department of Management Science & Engineering for the past six years, where she teaches a course titled “The Spirit of Entrepreneurship.” Roizen says, “We see the DFJ Entrepreneurial Leaders Fellowship as an opportunity to provide a deeper entrepreneurial educational experience for masters students before they leave campus.”
Stanford engineering students working on a master’s degree are invited to attend one of two information sessions at STVP. The first session will be on Wednesday, Oct. 15, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. The second will be on Thursday, Oct. 23, from Noon to 1 p.m.
The DFJ Entrepreneurial Leaders Fellowship (DFJ Fellowship) will run through the winter, spring and summer quarters. In winter, students accepted into the program will attend “The Spirit of Entrepreneurship” (MS&E 178), as well as the DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders lecture series. In addition, they will meet each Monday night for a dinner seminar featuring special guests from the Silicon Valley ecosystem.
Also during winter, the students will begin developing their own professional goals, with support from the teaching team, and will be matched with corporate or venture capital mentors. They will also be coached as they find stimulating summer internships that will allow them to use the leadership skills they are developing.
Spring quarter, students will continue to attend the weekly Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders lectures. In addition, pairs of students will lead evening seminars, working with the teaching team and choosing the topic to be explored.
At the end of spring quarter, the students will present their plan for achieving their professional goals. Then in summer, students will work at a startup company of their choice, enhanced with educational and social programming with all of the DFJ Fellows.
Students who go through the Entrepreneurial Leaders program will be encouraged to help their successors the following year. This pay-it-forward model has been a huge component of the Mayfield Fellows Program (MFP), which served as a model in developing the DFJ Fellowship. MFP is a work/study experience, also run by STVP, that has been immensely successful over the past two decades in helping selected undergraduates at Stanford realize their goals as entrepreneurial leaders.
“This new program is designed around the specific needs of School of Engineering masters students, providing them with a collection of experiences that will prepare them to lead entrepreneurial ventures,” said Tina Seelig, STVP’s executive director and a professor of the practice at the school. “Knowing that masters students are at Stanford for only a year or two, the program quickly exposes them to entrepreneurial thought leaders and connects them with internship and job opportunities in technology ventures.”
The DFJ Fellowship also borrows elements of STVP’s Accel Innovation Scholars program, a yearlong experience for Ph.D. students who are interested in exploring entrepreneurial opportunities in their research. Anaïs Saint-Jude, who helped develop the AIS program in her role as manager of student engagement at STVP, says, “We’re excited to collaborate with DFJ to round out STVP’s fellowship programs, where we now offer high-touch entrepreneurship education programming for undergraduates, masters and Ph.D. students.”
The DFJ Fellowship teaching team will work closely with the students throughout their three-quarter experience, from the articulation of their entrepreneurial aspirations at the outset to the hosting of informal gatherings and workshops at the end to discuss the group’s experiences.
To apply, visit the DFJ Entrepreneurial Leaders Fellowship page.
