Business classes are not a prerequisite for entrepreneurship, and yes, some of the most storied startup founders were college dropouts. But many others say they benefited from academic courses and experiential learning opportunities that focused on the fundamentals of entrepreneurship.
Joshua Reeves, the soft-spoken CEO of a payroll and benefits startup called Gusto, began one talk on entrepreneurship by saying he attended the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar at Stanford University 14 quarters in a row while majoring in electrical engineering.
Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the founders of Instagram, met as students in an entrepreneurship work/study program that combines classes, mentoring and other immersive experiences. They and other entrepreneurs who went through the nine-month Mayfield Fellows Program, also at Stanford, say it was the most insightful experience they had as students.
Other alumni of the program include startup founders like Kit Rodgers of Cryptography Research, Avid Larizadeh of Bottica and Google Ventures, David Merrill of Sifteo and Bobby Lee of BTCC. Each one of them possesses innate talents and drive, that along with insights they gained as students, propelled them to entrepreneurial success.
Elon Musk may embody the notion of a naturally gifted entrepreneur, but the aforementioned founders are proof that the necessary skills and mindset can be learned. The thought-leaders seminar and fellowship program are both offered through the entrepreneurship center in Stanford’s Department of Management Science & Engineering.
The late Peter Drucker, one of the leading management thinkers of the 20th century, said it best: “The entrepreneurial mystique? It’s not magic, it’s not mysterious, and it has nothing to do with the genes. It’s a discipline. And, like any discipline, it can be learned.”
Yes, some will argue that entrepreneurship is still more art than science, at times requiring improvisation in the face of unique and uncertain situations. But there are obvious characteristics that successful entrepreneurs tend to share. Among them are:
a personal passion to solve a problem
a vision for what’s innovative
the skills to build a product or service, and a business around it
the tenacity to constantly seek feedback, iterate and pivot
the ability to empathize with and inspire those around you.
Emergence of entrepreneurship education
Donald Kuratko, a professor of entrepreneurship at Indiana University, Bloomington, traces the history of the academic field back to 1971, when the University of Southern California first launched a concentration in entrepreneurship for MBA students. By the early 1980s, more than 300 universities offered courses in entrepreneurship and small business, and over the next decade, that number grew to 1,050 schools, Kuratko states in his article, “The Emergence of Entrepreneurship Education: Development, Trends, and Challenges.”
When it was published in 2005, entrepreneurship education had exploded to more than 2,200 courses at over 1,600 schools around the country. Kuratko also counted more than 100 established and funded entrepreneurship centers at the time, noting emerging trends in “experiential learning” such as class projects, startup competitions and field trips exposing students to industry.
“Today, the words used to describe the new innovation regime of the 21st century are: dream, create, explore, invent, pioneer, and imagine!” Kuratko wrote. “Entrepreneurship educators must have the same innovative drive that is expected from entrepreneurship students.”
However, Kuratko notes — as do others — that more progressive universities are offering entrepreneurship courses across a wide range of schools and departments. In particular, “it is critical to expand entrepreneurship education to engineering and science departments where most of these technologies originate,” entrepreneurship professors Tom Byers (Stanford) and Andrew Nelson (University of Oregon) state in the Chicago Handbook of University Technology Transfer and Academic Entrepreneurship.
Byers and Nelson, along with Richard Dorf, an engineering professor at the University of California, Davis, wrote the textbook Technology Ventures: From Idea to Enterprise. And in it, they explain why they focus on the tech sector, and on educating science and engineering students as well as those studying business:
“The technology sector represents a significant portion of the economy of every industrialized nation. In the United States, more than one-third of the gross national product and about half of private-sector spending on capital goods are related to technology. It is clear that national and global economic growth depends on the health and contributions of technology businesses.”
At the university that spawned Silicon Valley, Stanford’s engineering school offers courses, fellowships and other learning opportunities to help students develop the knowledge, skills and behaviors to be entrepreneurial in life. And through Stanford’s involvement with the National Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation – known simply as the Epicenter – students and faculty far beyond the valley have brought entrepreneurship and innovation to their campuses and curriculum.
Funded by a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the Epicenter led initiatives that turned thousands of college students and faculty around the country into inspired advocates for bringing a focus on entrepreneurship and innovation to engineering education — touching about 300 U.S. institutions over the past five years.
The Epicenter’s leaders recently sat down and discussed how far entrepreneurship education has come in the last 20 years, and what the future holds for integrating more of it into engineering curriculum.
Creating innovators, not experts
In one instance, an entire engineering college is devoted to graduating innovators by tearing down the academic silos that have historically kept students narrowly focused on their major. Olin College of Engineering, in Needham, Mass., does this in recognition that the next Steve Jobs won’t be an expert in just one discipline — and that the late CEO of Apple didn’t even major in engineering.
At a recent Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders talk at Stanford, the president of Olin College described how the traditional model of higher learning separates the disciplines and forces like-minded students to stick together. When instead, Richard Miller said, what aspiring innovators need is to be exposed to a diversity of perspectives.
Citing research out of Stanford, Miller explained that innovation happens where three objectives overlap: feasibility, viability and desirability. But at a typical university, most of the students who focus on feasibility (can it be done?) are in the engineering school, while the students concerned with viability (is it financially possible?) are working on MBAs. Meanwhile, the students who care most about desirability (people’s emotions) are usually found in the humanities and social sciences.
“If we’re going to create innovators, we need to do a better job of integrating these in the same head, so that one person can see the whole picture,” said Miller, a leader in the movement to revolutionize and reshape engineering education. “The big message for engineering schools: No amount of doubling down on math and science courses is going to improve the output of innovators.”
The point is that the most important traits in entrepreneurship aren’t necessarily inherited or the result of total luck. While charisma and happenstance certainly play a role, prominent educators agree that people can learn to be entrepreneurs.
Fortunately, there is no shortage of programs, organizations and universities that want to prepare the next generation of innovators – and the need for them has never been greater.
Here’s the idea: Moober — Uber for cows. Trailers would drive around and pick up cattle from family farms, bring them to the slaughterhouse and solve the problem of bottlenecks at the facility.
It was clever, addressed a real problem and had the hip name to boot. And yet, when Stanford graduate student Christine Su shared the idea with the instructor of the course Engineering 245 — Steve Blank, the renowned father of the “Lean LaunchPad” approach — he predicted it wouldn’t work. Then he told Su to see for herself by going out and talking to actual ranchers.
It didn’t take long: The first farmer Su spoke with spent two years lovingly raising and fattening her cows and would not think of cramming them into a trailer with other baffled bovine. It would stress them out and cause the release of hormones and lactic acid that would, ironically, degrade the quality of the meat.
Fortunately, that was only one of many ideas Su pitched, and her team eventually worked on a project that has since developed into a truly unique startup: a mobile app that allows farmers to manage their fields and monitor grazing.
“One of the most invigorating things about Steve’s class is getting proven that you’re wrong,” said Su, who expects to earn a joint master’s degree in business and land use and agriculture at the end of the 2014-15 school year. “As Steve says, every time you’re proven wrong, you’ve just saved your family, your friends and your investors tens of thousands of dollars.”
As any entrepreneur or investor in the tech-startup scene now knows, the Lean LaunchPad methodology boils down to several key components:
proposing a business opportunity in the form of a “hypothesis” about a need in the market
defining the essential building blocks for the proposed business (key partners and resources, customer segments, revenue streams, etc.)
quickly testing the assumptions about the market and customer needs by getting out and talking to lots of people
adjusting the product or service based on all the feedback, and then launching a “minimum viable product.”
From there, continued feedback intake drives product improvement and, if necessary, any changes in the direction of the business — nowadays known as a “pivot.”
Experiential Learning
The methodology is a reversal of the traditional approach to entrepreneurship, which historically meant developing a business plan behind a desk, pitching it to investors, forming a team, building the product and then selling as hard as possible. Blank’s method reduces the high, upfront costs that would normally come with developing and perfecting a product before debuting it to the world.
“The goal isn’t to be an incubator,” said Blank, adding that those kind of resources abound at Stanford. “Take this class if you actually want to change your life as an entrepreneur — because we’re going to teach you a basic set of skills about how to be incredibly efficient with your time and money.”
The course, titled “The Lean LaunchPad: Getting Your Lean Startup Off the Ground,” is offered in Winter Quarter with limited enrollment. Graduate students must apply in teams, typically comprising three to five members, and present the business ideas that will serve as their class project, as well as be interviewed by the course’s instructors.
The course (ENGR 245) is one of many presented by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), the entrepreneurship center in the universityʼs School of Engineering. Housed in the school’s Department of Management Science & Engineering, STVP is a lab for creating and delivering courses, performing research and developing tools and programs to accelerate entrepreneurship education.
Teaching ENGR 245 with Blank is Jeff Epstein, an operating partner at Bessemer Venture Partners and former CFO of Oracle. “What we do in the course is give you a very rich environment of resources,” said Epstein, citing the online lectures, in-class discussions, and mentors and advisors who also make themselves available to students. “Altogether, it gives you a very hands-on laboratory experience that’s as close as you can get to building a real company in a classroom setting.”
A defining aspect of ENGR 245 is its emphasis on getting lots of feedback from actual people: Over the course’s 10 weeks, teams are required to talk to a minimum of 10 individuals per week in person or by phone. For both the business school students and those from engineering who typically make up a team in the class, the constant stream of feedback is both grueling and rewarding.
“If you think about it, most entrepreneurs probably haven’t spoken with 100 customers and partners and suppliers,” Epstein said. “It’s a big investment in time, and there’s a huge payoff by doing it because what you learn each week as you develop your own idea of what your product is and what your company is, you learn more and more about what people want.”
That was definitely the case for Su and her teammate Jennifer Tsau. A digital native, acknowledged “foodie” and advocate for sustainable farming, Su and her team set out to do something in information management for farmers. They would take turns going to farmers’ markets, driving out to Tulare and Fresno, and even cold-calling trade associations for fruit growers, dairy farmers and cattle ranchers.
Over and over again, they got feedback affirming the need for an information-management solution, which led them to develop software that is now at the heart of their startup, Summer Technologies. Their app, currently in private beta mode, allows ranchers to create and save fields by tracing boundaries with their finger on a tablet or smart-phone screen. Farmers can also take geo-tagged photos, record grass heights and save notes before and after grazing.
“Years to come, no matter whether you become an entrepreneur or not, I think in every level of business or technology, user-centric design and empathy are really important,” Su said. “I’m getting a degree in agriculture, and I think I learned the most about agriculture in this course.”
For another entrepreneur who took ENGR 245, his startup also stems from food. As a child back in Berlin, Michael Heinrich spent a lot of time in his grandmother’s organic garden, picking and enjoying ripe raspberries, succulent apples and other fresh fruit. Contrast that with the highly processed snacks that surrounded him when he came to the United States as an adult to work in corporate offices and attend Stanford as a graduate student in management science and engineering.
So when he walked into the Lean LaunchPad course in winter 2014, he set out to build a startup that would produce and supply healthy snacks in the type of settings that he and his teammates found themselves in most – college campuses. But they quickly discovered, by getting out and talking to 10 to 15 people each week, that sales based on a typical university’s pace of purchasing would not sustain a business very well.
They also realized that focusing on college campuses would limit their market. So they pivoted and turned from higher education to targeting high-tech companies. Those epiphanies and many others have paid off, and now, Heinrich’s startup is on the road to sustainable success: “Oh My Green!” (omg!) counts Apple, IDEO and Levi Strauss & Co. among its biggest clients.
“The course has completely changed my trajectory as an entrepreneur,” said Heinrich, whose business is now growing from within the StartX accelerator program. “Steve and the teaching team are just fabulous. They offer a bit of tough love sometimes. But they really invest all of their time because they fundamentally believe and value the students – and they want to see them succeed.”
National Recognition
So powerful and proven is the Lean LaunchPad approach that it has been adopted by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health as a training program called Innovation Corps (I-Corps). According to Blank, government officials in Washington, D.C., see the emphasis on testing a hypothesis and gathering data as a “scientific formula” for innovation that NSF and NIH scientists can apply toward bringing more basic research into the market.
In May, Blank was honored by the NSF at a special ceremony in Washington, where he was given the agency’s Outstanding Leadership Award. Currently, the NSF has put 400 teams of principal investigators through the I-Corps class, and the NIH says it will fuel the commercialization of all life-science research going forward, in the field known as “translational medicine,” Blank said.
“One of the reasons I began teaching this class is, for the decades I spent as an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, there was no theory about entrepreneurship,” said Blank, who worked on eight startups before joining Stanford as a consulting associate professor. “Here at Stanford, we developed the first experiential, hands-on class that matches the latest theories and techniques that we know about how to build a startup — and that’s what Engineering 245 is all about.”
To learn more about the course, click here. Information sessions will be held on Nov. 14 and 19, both from 6 to 8 p.m. Anyone with questions may contact Stephanie Zhan at smzhan@stanford.edu.
STVP Sparks are short-term, extracurricular “pop-up classes” on a variety of topics related to entrepreneurship and innovation. Taught by Stanford adjunct faculty or a member of the local entrepreneurial community, each Spark consists of three night sessions, one night a week for three weeks. This makes Sparks an excellent way to expand your entrepreneurial mindset without adding course units. All members of the Stanford community may enroll in Sparks, but space is highly limited, so register now.
with Anamaria Nino Murcia, Co-Founder and Coach, Foothold Coaching
October 14, 21 and 28 | 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Description:
Entrepreneurship researchers at Harvard have found that nearly two-thirds of high-potential startups fail due to tensions within the founding and executive team. This is a sobering statistic, but there is one critical skill a founding team can develop in order to prevent or navigate these tensions – the ability to communicate effectively.
Whether you are a founder who wants to improve communication on your team or you are more generally interested in learning about how startup teams can communicate better, this Spark will offer a mix of seminar content, case examples from real startups, and skill-building activities. You will learn three startup communication skills over three evenings:
Contracting Conversations — how to facilitate a “contracting” conversation to set expectations on a startup team
Feedback Conversations — how to engage in a feedback conversation to influence startup teammates
Emotional Conversations — how to regulate and express your own emotions more effectively during intense startup moments (pivots, team departures, conflict, fundraising struggles, etc.)
November is Entrepreneurship Month in the United States, and Stanford has a spot-on kickoff to this national designation in Startup Weekend, being held Nov. 1 to 3 in the skybox of the university’s football stadium.
When asked if the athletic venue was a good fit for the 54-hour entrepreneurial marathon, co-organizer Andrew Scheuermann – an associate at the Stanford venture incubator StartX and Ph.D. candidate in materials science and engineering – told The Dish Daily: “Athletics is acknowledging entrepreneurship as the ‘other’ varsity sport at Stanford.”
According to the event organizers, 135 participants will compete, and famed tech entrepreneur, executive and investor Keith Rabois will deliver the keynote address on the first night.
On a Saturday night, a student sits motionless in front of a laptop, except for his fingers frantically tapping out code in the basement of a building at Stanford. A hemisphere away, students who were complete strangers just a few days before gasp in unison as they approach a massive glacier in an inflatable boat.
Though the two images are literally a world apart, both are glimpses into just the kind of deeply immersive experiential-learning activities that have become an increasingly essential part of entrepreneurship education at Stanford.
The first scene is from a two-day event known as Startup Weekend, in which student teams have 52 hours to turn an idea into a startup. The second was a highlight from a five-day ocean adventure in which students from Stanford and South America came together last March on a vessel known as the EntrepreneurSHIP.
[quote_right]“The best learning is experiential.”[/quote_right]“The best learning is experiential,” said Tina Seelig, executive director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), who first floated the idea for the ship. “As the entrepreneurship center at Stanford University’s School of Engineering, our role is to deliver engaging courses and perform scholarly research, as well as create one-of-a-kind learning experiences that enhance entrepreneurial skills.”
This is especially true when teaching entrepreneurship – where rapid prototyping, overcoming obstacles and responding to critical feedback are inevitable. Education needs to include equal parts coursework and exercises outside the classroom that allow students to apply what they’ve learned in real time.
Weekend Warriors
For Startup Weekend, an annual event hosted by several entrepreneurship programs at Stanford, students have from 5 p.m. Friday to 5 p.m. Sunday to form teams, bring a business idea to life and compete for top honors. Most students have never worked with each other before and must subject their projects to the scrutiny of entrepreneurs, investors and other Silicon Valley professionals who volunteer their time.
The event – presented last year by StartX, STVP and the Entrepreneurship Club at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business – is a blur of an experience from the get-go. Students warm up with improvisational exercises and ice breakers, then form teams, set up workspaces, develop pitches, meet with mentors and hone presentations – breaking only for meals.
All the while, they sharpen their interpersonal skills and refine their ideas on deadline. “Experiential learning allows students to be bold, but in a relatively safe environment,” said Angela Hayward, who has managed the Stanford Entrepreneurship Network. “It lets them get used to failure and the iterative process, and lets them get used to working with people they’ve never even met before.”
Startup Weekend returns this autumn and will welcome any Stanford student to apply. Last year, more than 500 students applied for 115 slots, resulting in 16 teams that turned the basement of the Huang Engineering Center into a beehive of activity.
“When you’re used to sitting in class and taking notes, it can be difficult to appreciate the real-world application of entrepreneurship,” Hayward said. “But when you’re in a group, and you’re working on something real, students get the opportunity to apply what they’re learning.”
Entrepreneurial Thinking at Sea
Now, take Startup Weekend and put it on a 64-cabin cruise ship bound for the southern tip of South America, and you begin to get a sense of a one-of-a-kind, experiential-learning adventure offered to students over their 2013 spring break.
About 20 students from Stanford took part in the EntrepreneurSHIP voyage, which brought them together with close to 60 students from Chile for five days of inspiring talks, hands-on activities and, naturally, excursions into the icy waters of Patagonia.
STVP, in collaboration with two of its Global Partners (Universidad del Desarrollo and Pontifica Universidad Católica de Chile) organized the trip. Seelig and other Stanford faculty – from STVP, the d.school and the School of Engineering’s Department of Management Science and Engineering – led exercises in team building, design thinking, prototyping and storytelling.
Educators and experts from Chile discussed social issues confronting their nation: from environmental protection and economic development to challenges in K-12 education. Students were then tasked with having to come up with solutions, overcoming language barriers (and occasional bouts of seasickness).
httpv://youtu.be/EaqImOA8rtk
“The projects that the student teams took on provided them with a framework to challenge themselves,” said Forrest Glick, one of STVP’s associate directors. “Working within teams, developing a point of view, leading a project, pivoting an idea and getting feedback – those are the kinds of entrepreneurial skills we wanted them to learn by doing.”
Close Encounters
Granted, experiential learning has long been recognized as an effective way to supplement and solidify in-class curriculum. And entrepreneurship educators at Stanford emphatically say such activities are downright essential for their students.
Just ask Lauryn Isford, who enters her junior year this fall as co-president of the Stanford Women in Business. She is majoring in management science and engineering in the School of Engineering and got involved in entrepreneurship at Stanford after going on a field trip to Google with her computer-science class.
Being in Google’s offices and seeing all the employees at work was one thing. But ending the day by being able to sit down with co-founder Larry Page for 45 minutes of question and answer impacted her in a way that few lessons can. Then a freshman, Isford asked Page what he wish he had known when he first entered college.
“As a freshman,” Isford recalled Page saying, “he wish he had known that it’s OK to take risks and not to be afraid to fail – because when you take those risks, even if things don’t go perfectly, you learn from those mistakes. And you can move forward with that experience.”
Late last month, a flurry of wild ideas blew through the Palo Alto offices of Citi Ventures, in the form of energetic Stanford students interested in working with financial industry professionals around the future of personal finance.
Putting fun into the personal-finance experience was the aim of a May 30 design challenge led by Stanford faculty Tina Seelig, Leticia Britos Cavagnaro and Rich Cox. The two-hour session gave students the opportunity to work on real-world challenges alongside global executives from Citi Ventures who grapple with them daily.
In true divergent-to-convergent form, the workshop began with the inviting office’s glass panels covered in sticky notes – each bearing a separate idea – and ending with just a handful of concepts that the teams then drilled down on and fleshed out.
Working on teams with the pros, students considered personal finance broadly: from retirement investing and credit card management to fundamental questions such as why we even carry wallets. While some of the ideas proposed were worthy of further exploration, the real goal of the challenge was to let students try out techniques and exercises in creativity taught at Stanford.
“A lot of it was just reinforcing the tools we learned in class,” said student Jeffrey Sweet, who discovered the workshop through an STVP-affiliated Management Science and Engineering course taught at the Stanford d.school titled “Creativity and Innovation.”
Sweet’s team focused on the familiar frustration of having multiple credit cards, each with their own rewards program. One team suggested coming up with a universal card that would allow the owner to distribute charges among various rewards programs online.
For Citi Ventures, the benefit of hosting the design challenge was simply being exposed to the energy and enthusiasm of the students and faculty. As the venture capital arm of the global financial services company, Citi Ventures has taken part in other extracurricular activities and resources for students at Stanford.
As part of an active partnership with STVP, Citi Ventures has participated in a panel discussion on women in entrepreneurship earlier this year during Stanford Entrepreneurship Week, as well as offered free professional mentoring through Coaches on Call.
“We at Citi Ventures were thrilled to be able to collaborate with the Stanford faculty and students in the design challenge, and to support the students in their journey to become great entrepreneurs,” said Debbie Brackeen, Managing Director of Citi Ventures. “The insights and ideas we generated together were awesome.”
Stanford junior Aditya “Adi” Singh had a problem. Struggling to form effective teams to work on projects, and weary of being approached by fellow students mainly searching for a technical “code monkey,” Singh wanted something different.
“There was no platform where students could gather teams effectively,” Singh said. “At social gatherings, people are under such social pressures to put the best foot forward, it can cause people to be misleading, sometimes even verging on lies.”
So Singh and fellow classmate Pukar Hamal began developing farmGeni.us, a platform for connecting members of the Stanford community who have specialized skills.
But after initial development, Singh didn’t know what to do with his budding venture. Enter the entrepreneurship concierge.
The concierge, a new position in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program in Huang Engineering Center, is charged with developing programs and building Silicon Valley relationships that serve Stanford’s entrepreneurship community.
The first person to hold the title is Angela Hayward, who comes to the university from Khosla Ventures.
“Entrepreneurship thrives at Stanford, but entrepreneurship means different things to different people,” says Hayward. “Each student has unique needs, experiences, and appetite for risk, therefore, there’s no such thing as a ‘standard’ entrepreneurship inquiry. Listening and staying connected to students from all over campus is key to the success of this role.”
When Singh reached out for guidance, Hayward met with him to learn about his interests and the new venture. She told Singh about all of the resources available for students on campus and she was able to make connections for Singh with external mentors.
“A large part of what I’m doing is front-line engagement with the wider Silicon Valley community because, even with the extensive resources available at Stanford, there are still times when it’s necessary for students to reach beyond the campus,” says Hayward.
The entrepreneurship concierge, perhaps a one-of-a-kind role in higher education, is supported by Citi Ventures, the corporate venturing arm of Citi.
Debra Brackeen, head of incubation for Citi Ventures, works from the unit’s headquarters in downtown Palo Alto. The group will be providing industry mentors and coaches to students.
Angela Hayward
“Anything we can do to promote the entrepreneurial spirit at Stanford ultimately benefits all of us in the venture community,” says Brackeen. “Citi Ventures works with internal and external partners to develop the highest new growth opportunities that are relevant to Citi customers and businesses. Supporting the next wave of Stanford entrepreneurs through our work with the concierge and the Stanford Technology Ventures Program is a perfect fit for us.”
As well as serving as the entrepreneurship concierge to all Stanford students, Hayward is charged with managing the Stanford Entrepreneurship Network (SEN), a federation of over two dozen, campus entrepreneurship programs and student groups. Hayward’s work in growing this organization is a critical component to expanding the entrepreneurial ecosystem at Stanford.
“Participating in SEN is extremely important to our group,” says Keren Ziv, co-president of the Association of Industry-Minded Stanford Professionals, an organization supporting post-doctoral scholars. “We are slowly changing the current view of postdocs as ‘scientists only.’”
The entrepreneurship network is expanding what it has to offer through a renewed customer orientation to serving students, a focus on increasing cross-disciplinary connections and a deeper engagement with student groups developing their own Silicon Valley resources.
Mary McCann, president of BASES, the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students, says she believes students would be interested in working with Hayward to “see what niches can be filled at Stanford in the entrepreneurship scene.”
“We are currently doing a field test to see what is missing as a entrepreneurship resource at Stanford, and we hope to share this information with Angela so that she and the rest of SEN can help us fill those gaps,” McCann said.
While the work to build network resources continues, student entrepreneur Adi Singh says he is already encouraging fellow students to take advantage of having access to the concierge.
“Every time we meet, Angela’s approach lets us know where we stand,” says Singh. “Just knowing all the options we have is extremely helpful.”
From now through March 7, member organizations of the Stanford Entrepreneurship Network are presenting events as part of Entrepreneurship Week (E-Week) 2012. Members of the Stanford community, as well as the general public, can enjoy lectures, workshops, networking events and conferences, all celebrating entrepreneurship-related activity.
The entrepreneurial spirit runs strong at Stanford, and the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP) is offering a number of opportunities for students and others interested in developing their entrepreneurial mindset.
There are two ETL seminars taking place during E-Week. The lectures are open to the general public, and will take place on Wednesday, February 29 and March 7, respectively. DFJ ETL seminars run from 4:30 – 5:30 pm in NVIDIA Auditorium at Huang Engineering Center. This series is generously sponsored by DFJ.
Johnson
On February 29, Kristina M. Johnson, former undersecretary for Energy at the United States Department of Energy will speak at ETL. At the DOE Johnson focused on bringing greater cohesion to energy and environmental programs at the federal level. Prior to that role, she served as provost at Johns Hopkins University, and as dean of the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University. A Stanford alumna, Johnson will be sharing insights on leadership from her time in the public, higher education and private sectors.
On March 7, E-Week 2012 will wrap-up with a special ETL presentation from a mother and son tandem of entrepreneurs. Join us as Sandra and Andy Kurtzig speak to discuss their own entrepreneurial journeys as founders. Sandra Kurtzig transformed the manufacturing software industry when she founded ASK Computer Systems in 1972. Over the next two decades, she would go on to grow the company into one of the largest software companies in the world. She is now the current CEO and chairman at Kenandy.
Andy Kurtzig founded the expert answer website, JustAnswer, in 2003, and previously served as CEO and co-founder of eBenefits, which was acquired by an Inc. 500 company. As well as being a serial entrepreneur, Kurtzig is an active and successful angel investor and philanthropist.
Stanford students are invited to sign-up for E-Week Coaches-on-Call mentoring sessions to be held at STVP. During these “office hours,” students can gather advice from industry professionals representing different fields and areas of expertise. Please note that availability is limited.
Here are coaches available for E-Week 2012:
Feb. 28 – Mark Reinstra, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
Take part in a design thinking workshop on Friday, March 2, aimed at discovering ways to help the Epicenter achieve its mission to create a nation of entrepreneurial engineers. The Epicenter, the National Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation, is an exciting new initiative dedicated to infusing entrepreneurship and innovation into undergraduate engineering education across the United States. The Epicenter is based at Stanford, and is directed the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.
In this hands-on, fast-paced workshop, participants will apply the design thinking process to tackle the challenge of sparking enthusiasm and engagement from engineering faculty and students to embrace and implement the Epicenter’s mission. Students and faculty of all disciplines, as well as entrepreneurs, engineers and designers are welcome, however, availability is limited for the event and registration is required.
It is raining on the first day of Stanford’s DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar series, and it couldn’t be more fitting for today’s speaker. David Friedberg is the CEO of The Climate Corporation (formerly WeatherBill), a weather insurance company. In fact, David came up with his original idea for WeatherBill on a rainy day in San Francisco.
“Founder isn’t really a role. It’s really not a role that I like.”
On his daily commute through San Francisco, Friedberg noticed that rain regularly closed down a bicycle shop that caters to tourists. Soon after, Friedberg would go on to found The Climate Corporation on the observation that so many businesses are affected by the weather. But David Friedberg hates being called a founder. In fact, he says that when his venture capitalists introduce him as the “founder” of The Climate Corporation, he tells people, “Founder isn’t really a role. It’s really not a role that I like.”
David Friedberg
Friedberg is a person focused on solving problems. He describes this as “revealing truth and fact,” and he doesn’t hang on to the founder title like others do. Instead, he is practical. He takes the executive position bluntly stating that “I’m the CEO of the company today, and I might not be the best CEO tomorrow.” He is blissfully truthful about his no nonsense role in the company.
He has built a multimillion dollar funded company in a short while, pulled everything together, and readily admits he would be ready to remove himself if/when he is no longer the right person for the job. That is a really intimidating statement to hear, especially coming from someone as obviously talented as Friedberg.
Listening to Friedberg, I sheepishly think of my own LinkedIn profile, where the title of “Founder” is plastered in at least one or two places in connection with some of my previous side projects. I am tempted to skirt over to my profile for some quick resume tidying, but then a question comes to mind: What is a founder?
Continuing with his lecture, Friedberg projects two pictures on screen for the audience. One of the pictures is of a “rock star” founder, just having made his exit — an image commonly featured by Fast Company and Forbes. The other picture is of the archetypal “real” founder, sleep deprived, running on caffeine, and near the end of his rope.
Seasoned entrepreneurs, CEOs, professors and founders alike tell us that the “rock star” picture is a fantasy.
The former image is a Silicon Valley dream boy, a ubiquitous legend not only in the Valley, but also in pop culture. It is simultaneously the joke of Silicon Valley, while inadvertently being a false representation of the Valley and the entrepreneurial community at Stanford. Seasoned entrepreneurs, CEOs, professors and founders alike tell us that the “rock star” picture is a fantasy.
The second of David Friedberg’s pictures looks more like a Stanford computer science student scraping away at the last bugs in a systems assignment, or in Friedberg’s case, a startup. In fact the difference between the two might be minuscule. Students straining on Redbull aren’t much different than those founders pulling late nights on Starbucks. This latter image is a dose of reality, and Friedberg has some statistics to further the point.
According to Friedberg, the odds of starting a company and having it be worth $1 billion dollars in 49 months after founding are about 0.0006%. After accounting for average dilution, this is the equivalent of earning a $73,000 annual salary. But you also have a 67% chance of making absolutely nothing at all. The audience laughs at this, but are we convinced?
It seems there are more people in my Stanford class who are going to be “founders” than employees. I have more Silicon Valley business cards with “founder” on them than anything else. And how often do you hear the phrase “YC Founder” from Y-Combinator, Paul Graham’s premier accelerator? Sometimes I wonder how we have anything but single person LLCs in Silicon Valley. Stanford and Silicon Valley rightly lionize the act of taking initiative, but where is the line between taking initiative to solve real problems and taking initiative for initiative’s sake?
A trend of some of the friends/entrepreneurs I look up to most is to label themselves “janitor at Stealth Startup” on their LinkedIn profiles. It’s a humorous, self- deprecating poke at their predicament. Janitors clean up messes. It isn’t a frilly job, but a janitor’s role is indispensable. To put it simply, janitors solve problems.
“I don’t want to say be entrepreneurial,” says David Friedberg. “I want everyone in this room to walk away from this discussion today, reflective about what it is you want out of life and then make a choice that is based on some of the things that I am trying to tell you about today.”
As the lecture ends, the rain gives the crowd a break as they trickle from NVIDIA Auditorium on the Stanford campus. The crisp California evening air brings clarity, and I am reflecting on Friedberg’s advice.
And weighing a career in janitorial work.
The Stanford Technology Ventures Program is ready for another fantastic year of delivering entrepreneurship education to students in the School of Engineering and other entrepreneurially-minded students from across the Stanford campus.
Even if you’re not ready to found a company, there’s no time like the beginning of the academic year to start exploring entrepreneurship. Not sure where to start? We’d suggest registering for the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar, MS&E 472 — the gateway into entrepreneurship.
Below you will find course information for Autumn 2011, along with links to available course websites and instructor bios. For course information covering the entire academic year, you can also view the STVP Courses page.
MS&E 140: Accounting for Managers and Entrepreneurs (3 – 4 units)
Instructor: Vic Stanton
Limited enrollment
MS&E 140 provides an introduction to accounting concepts and the operating characteristics of accounting systems. The principles of financial and cost accounting, design of accounting systems, techniques of analysis, and cost control are explored throughout the quarter, as is the interpretation and use of accounting information for decision making.
This couse is specifically designed for the user of accounting information and not as an introduction to a professional accounting career. Non-majors and minors who are taking elementary accounting are not advised to enroll.
MS&E 178: The Spirit of Entrepreneurship (3 units)
Instructors: Heidi Roizen
This course teaches students to think like a successful entrepreneur by learning how to analyze key parts of various startup business models. The course uses the speakers at the Entrepreneurial Thought Leader seminar (MS&E 472) as the source of the companies to be explored.
Students meet before and after each Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders seminar to prepare and debrief, respectively.
MS&E 180: Organizations: Theory and Management (4 units)
Instructors: Kathleen Eisenhardt
Limited enrollment; Preference to MS&E majors
MS&E 180 offers an examination of classical and contemporary organizational theory. The course will explore the behavior of individuals, groups, and organizations. Students must attend the first class session.
Jeffrey Schox
ME 208: Patent Law and Strategy for Innovators and Entrepreneurs (2 – 3 units)
Instructor: Jeffrey Schox
The course will provide a foundation to understand the patent system, and strategies to build a patent portfolio and avoid patent infringement. Students will learn how to conduct their own patent search and how to file their own provisional patent application on an invention of their choice. Although listed as a ME course, the course is not specific to any discipline or technology.
This course provides an introduction to the basic concepts of strategy used within high-technology firms. MS&E 270 examines decisions and actions that shape the long-term future of these organizations by establishing, sustaining, and enhancing the basis for their competitive advantage.
Topics covered within the course include competitive positioning, resource-based perspectives, “co-opetition” and standards setting, and complexity/evolutionary perspectives.
In this video clip, Professor Eisenhardt discusses opportunity creation.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NEyfDtwlZ4
MS&E 273 Technology Venture Formation (3 – 4 units)
Instructors: Mike Lyons and Audrey MacLean
Limited enrollment; Recommended prerequisite: MS&E 270, 271, or equivalent. View the MS&E 273 course website.
This course forms integrated teams from graduate engineering, computer science and business students to experience the immersive and “no-holds-barred” process of creating a Silicon Valley startup, including presentations to business experts and venture capitalists.
Learn to build venture-scale technology firms where engineers and business personnel can clearly articulate the market opportunities and value proposition of leading-edge technologies to investors. MS&E 273 teams are treated as real startups, as they explore concepts of opportunity assessment, marketing and distribution strategies, R&D and operational planning, legal considerations, and more.
MS&E 472 DFJ – Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar (1 unit)
Instructors: Tom Byers, Tina Seelig and Thomas Kosnik Required web discussion. Course may be repeated for credit.
The DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar is a weekly speaker series that presents innovators from across business, finance, technology, and philanthropy sectors, to share their insights with aspiring entrepreneurs. Through MS&E 472, students have the opportunity to learn real world knowledge from prominent leaders and entrepreneurs.
Oct 26: Scott Summit — Co-Founder & CTO, Bespoke Innovations
Nov 2: Mårten Mickos — CEO, Eucalyptus; Former CEO, MySQL AB
Nov 9: Adam Lowry — Co-Founder & Chief Greenskeeper, Method Products
Nov 16: Dana Mead — Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Nov 30: Jessica Mah — Co-Founder, Architect & CEO, inDinero
Here are video highlights from 2011 DFJ ETL speakers.
Additional STVP-Affiliated Course News
Mayfield Fellows Program: ENGR 140 C Our class of 2011 Mayfield Fellows will be completing this intense, nine-month work/study program designed to develop a theoretical and practical understanding of the techniques for growing technology companies.
The program combines an intense sequence of courses on the management of technology ventures, a paid summer internship at a startup company, and ongoing mentoring and networking activities. Learn more about MFP and see where the 2011 Fellows interned over the summer.
Prof. Byers Teaches in Bing Overseas Study Program
During the fall quarter, MS&E Professor and STVP Co-Director Tom Byers will be teaching entrepreneurship courses in Florence as part of Stanford’s Bing Overseas Study Program.
Interest in “social” entrepreneurship continues to soar. The number of conferences and business plan competitions on social entrepreneurship are growing rapidly, the number of courses offered on university campuses is expanding, and social entrepreneurship is getting a lot of press. So, what differentiates a social entrepreneur from a plain old vanilla entrepreneur? I must say that it isn’t clear to me….
“A company certainly does not have to be a not-for-profit to be socially responsible.”
To loosely quote Carl Schramm, president and CEO of the Kauffman Foundation, “All entrepreneurship is ‘social’ because at a minimum it generates jobs and stimulates the economy.” Given that as a baseline, companies can be socially responsible in an endless number of ways. If a company has family friendly policies, it is socially responsible. If a company recycles used materials and installs solar panels on the roof, it is socially responsible. If a company makes medical products that save lives, it is socially responsible. If a company makes energy efficient cars, it is socially responsible. A company certainly does not have to be a not-for-profit to be socially responsible.
I would argue that people use the term “social” entrepreneurship because they don’t always know what entrepreneurship is. The way we teach it, entrepreneurship is about identifying problems and solving them by leveraging scarce resources. It means creating value, where value can be measured in a wide range of ways. To quote John Doerr, “Entrepreneurs do more than anyone thinks possible with less than anyone thinks possible.” This can happen in any arena.
For many years, I have been an advisor to a large student group at Stanford, called BASES, that runs the campus-wide business plan competition. Several years ago they started a parallel competition for “social” business plans. The number of submissions were small and the prizes were much smaller than for the traditional business plan competition. Over the past few years, the number of submissions for the Social E-Challenge has grown until now there are as many submissions as the E-Challenge.
“I would argue that people use the term “social” entrepreneurship because they don’t always know what entrepreneurship is.”
There has always been healthy debate about whether a plan can be entered in both competitions at the same time. My fantasy is that some day the winner of the Social E-Challenge will also be the winner of the E-Challenge. It will demonstrate that a company that is attractive using traditional metrics can also have a powerful social agenda.
Below is a video clip featuring Guy Kawasaki, one of the most popular speakers on STVP’s Entrepreneurship Corner website. Over the years, Guy has shared his insights on everything from principles of startup success to tips on how to build enduring brands. Here he talks about the importance of having the goal of making meaning for your company as opposed to making money. He argues that if you make meaning, you are more likely to make money; but if your major goal is to make money, then you are unlikely to make either.
Silicon Valley was born in an era of applied experimentation driven by scientists and engineers. It wasn’t pure research, but rather a culture of taking sufficient risks to get products to market through learning, discovery, iteration and execution. This approach would shape Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial ethos: In startups, failure was treated as experience (until you ran out of money).
The combination of Venture Capital and technology entrepreneurship is one of the great business inventions of the last 50 years. It provides private funds for untested and unproven technology and entrepreneurs. While most of these investments fail, the returns for the ones that win are so great they make up for the failures. The cultural tolerance for failure and experimentation, and a financial structure which balanced risk, return and obscene returns, allowed this system flourish in technology clusters in United States, particularly in Silicon Valley.
Yet this system isn’t perfect. From the point of view of scientists and engineers in a university lab, too often entrepreneurship in all its VC-driven glory – income statements, balance sheets, business plans, revenue models, 5-year forecasts, etc. – seems like another planet. There didn’t seem to be much in common between the Scientific Method and starting a company. And this has been a barrier to commercializing the best of our science research.
Until today.
[quote_right]The NSF has announced the Innovation Corps – a program to take the most promising research projects in American university laboratories and turn them into startups.[/quote_right]Today, the National Science Foundation (NSF) – the $6.8-billion U.S. government agency that supports research in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering – is changing the startup landscape for scientists and engineers. The NSF has announced the Innovation Corps – a program to take the most promising research projects in American university laboratories and turn them into startups. It will train them with a process that embraces experimentation, learning, and discovery.
The NSF will fund 100 science and engineering research projects every year. Each team accepted into the program will receive $50,000.
To commercialize these university innovations NSF will be putting the Innovation Corps (I-Corps) teams through a class that teaches scientists and engineers to treat starting a company as another research project that can be solved by an iterative process of hypotheses testing and experimentation. The class will be a version of the Lean LaunchPad class we developed in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, (the entrepreneurship center at Stanford’s School of Engineering).
This is a big deal. Not just for scientists and engineers, not just for every science university in the U.S., but in the way we think about bringing discoveries ripe for innovation out of the university lab. If this program works it will change how we connect basic research to the business world. And it will lead to more startups and job creation.
Introducing the Innovation-Corps The NSF Innovation-Corps program (I-Corps) is designed to help bridge the gap between the many scientists and engineers with innovative research and technologies, but little knowledge of the first steps to take in starting a company.
I-Corps will help scientists take the first steps from the research lab to commercialization.
Over a period of six months, each I-Corps team, guided by experienced mentors (entrepreneurs and VC’s) will build their product and get out of their labs (and comfort zone) to discover who are their potential customers, and how those customers might best use the new technology/invention. They’ll explore the best way to deliver the product to customers, the resources required, as well as competing technologies. They will answer the question, “What value will this innovation add to the marketplace? And they’ll do this using the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack.
At the end of the program each team will understand what it will takes to turn their research into a commercial success. They may decide to license their intellectual property based on their research. Or they may decide to cross the Rubicon and try to get funded as a startup (with strategic partners, investors, or NSF programs for small businesses). At the end of the class there will be a Demo Day when investors get to see the best this country’s researchers have to offer.
What Took You So Long A first reaction to the NSF I-Corps program might be, “You mean we haven’t already been doing this?” But on reflection it’s clear why. The common wisdom was that for scientists and engineers to succeed in the entrepreneurial world you’d have to teach them all about business. But it’s only now that we realize that’s wrong. The insight the NSF had is that we just need to teach scientists and engineers to treat business models as another research project that can be solved with learning, discovery and experimentation.
Join the I-Corps Today at 2pm the National Science Foundation is publishing the application for admission (what they call the “solicitation for proposals”) to the program. See the NSF web page here.
The syllabus for NSF I-Corps version of the Lean LaunchPad class can be seen here.
Along with a great teaching team at Stanford, world-class VC’s who get it, and foundation partners, I’m proud to be a part of it.
This is a potential game changer for science and innovation in the United States.
This is a guest post from serial entrepreneur and STVP adjunct faculty member Steve Blank.
Read his blog for insights on customer development, business models and entrepreneurship.
As core components to economic recovery and stimulation, entrepreneurship and innovation are more than buzzwords at many colleges and universities across the globe. When members of the higher education community convene at the 15th Open Conference in Washington, D.C., from March 24 – 26, 2011, they will focus on the latest strategies and successes for developing learning in these critical areas.
NCIIA, the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance presents Open 2011, and for the first time, STVP’s Roundtable on Entrepreneurship Education (REE) will take place as part of the Open conference. The combination of Open and REE creates the premiere event for faculty and students engaged in entrepreneurship and technology innovation in higher education.
On point with the national discussion around sustaining focus on innovation, Dr. Kristina Johnson, former U.S. Undersecretary of Energy, will present a keynote address on how the innovation landscape can provide a pathway to economic recovery. In another address, Startup America Partnership CEO Scott Case will discuss his organization’s initiatives and how they impact the work of higher education faculty who teach innovation and entrepreneurship.
Open 2011 offers panel discussions and lectures that focus on aspects of developing technology innovation education, in areas such as design, assessment, and the commercialization of student ventures. There will also be numerous workshops that offer attendees tools and techniques that can be used in their own programs and courses.
Enjoy this video showing some of the sights and sounds of Open 2010.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-Mwm2wVrAk
Our REE USA conference is proud to be taking part in Open 2011. As a “conference within a conference,” REE USA offers an engaging mix of events focusing on the future of entrepreneurship education in the US and abroad. REE sessions will explore the student perspective of entrepreneurship education and examine concepts for building entrepreneurship across universities. Here are some highlighted REE USA sessions:
Fantasy Island: Brainstorming the Future of Entrepreneurship Education How will entrepreneurship education change and evolve over the next five or ten years? As the demand for entrepreneurship education continues to grow, how can successful courses and programs scale to reach a larger audience? In this interactive brainstorming session, take part in defining the future of the field.
How Are We Doing? The Student Innovator’s Perspective Colleges and universities expend a large amount of effort building entrepreneurship and innovation into new programs. Have these efforts been successful in supporting students’ ability to develop new ideas and ventures? Hear from a panel of student innovators to learn the resources they find to be most beneficial to their work.
Moving Beyond the Inertia of the Business Plan Researchers do not agree on the relationship between venture success and completed, tome-like business plans, so what role can planning play to create momentum for new ventures? This interactive panel discussion addresses startup planning as an effective exercise in momentum generation.
Global Entrepreneurship Education: Around the World in 90 Minutes Does entrepreneurship education translate across international borders? This workshop and panel examines the similarities and differences of how entrepreneurship education is taught throughout the world. Audience participation will be encouraged as the session explores the unique variables and opportunities that exist in the US, Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
Toward a New Model of University-wide Entrepreneurship What does it take to build and integrate campus-wide entrepreneurship programs? Based on successful university entrepreneurship examples, this workshop examines components of infrastructure and curriculum development, technology commercialization, and community engagement.
