The 9 Most Successful Stanford Startups

Located in the heart of Silicon Valley, Stanford University is considered one of the best American universities, and at the same time, the most expensive. For example, one year of undergraduate studies costs a student $ 50-70 thousand, and a two-year MBA program at Stanford costs $ 200,000.



Instagram: Michael Krieger (first from left), Kevin Systrom (third from left)

However, this does not deter those who want to get a higher education in an institution where the highest percentage of teachers in the world (6 students – 1 teacher) and 16 of them are Nobel laureates, and another 4 are Pulitzer Prize winners. Read here lectures come Bill Gates and the former head of Hewlett Paccard Carly Fiorina, an honorary professor at Stanford University was Steve Jobs, who lived nearby in Palo Alto, who himself never received a higher education.

In addition, thanks in large part to its proximity to California’s major technology companies (both territorially and through its graduates), Stanford University has become a kind of talent incubator for Silicon Valley. Here studied Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, the founders of Google Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, who founded Cisco Systems, the president of Yahoo! Marissa Mayer and PayPal founder Peter Thiel.

The valley itself is built on land owned by Stanford. In the '50s, the university, which today earns more than a billion dollars a year, was in financial difficulty, although it had vast unused land that it could not sell under the will of its founder Leland Stanford. Then the university management found Solomon’s solution, deciding to lease the land for long-term lease to high-tech companies. The first in the Stanford technology park was Varian Associates. Soon her example was followed by Eastman Kodak, General Electric, Lockheed, Hewlett-Packard and many others.

In her article, Business Insider author Madeline Stone highlighted some of the most successful startups that the world owes to Stanford over the past two decades.

Instagram. The creators of the famous photo service Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger met through a network of Stanford alumni

After graduating from college in 2006 with a degree in Science and Technology Management, Kevin Systrom began developing a location-based photo sharing app. When he realized he needed a co-founder, he turned to the alumni network and found Brazilian-born Mike Krieger, who graduated two years after Systrom.

“When they say that college is not worth the money you have to pay for it, I definitely disagree,” Systrom once told Forbes. “Study experience and knowledge that may seem unnecessary at the moment will eventually prove useful again and again.” In April 2012, Systrom and Krieger sold Instagram to Facebook for $1 billion.

Trulia. Co-founders of the popular real estate service Pete Flint and Sami Inkinen met during classes at the Graduate School of Business

As is often the case, the idea was born as the fruit of his own quest. Flint and Inkinen decided to start Trulia when they found it difficult to rent in Palo Alto. The US-leading online real estate aggregator was developed over two semesters in Stanford’s Startup Garage class.
The following Monday after graduation, Flint and Inkinen had a series of meetings with potential investors. As of June 2014, Trulia has 54 million monthly users. In July, Trulia was bought by Zillow for $3.5 billion.

StubHub. The idea of an online event ticket market was presented at a business plan competition at Stanford.

Eric Baker and Jeff Floor met at Stanford Business School. It turned out that both had experience selling tickets online. Floor and Baker applied for a business plan called Needaticket.com for a business plan competition. After the plan reached the final, they withdrew it from the competition, and in 2000 Floor left his studies to devote himself entirely to the project. The site StubHub, which was developed by them in the computer classrooms of Stanford, after some time became one of the major players in the market of ticket sales for sports and entertainment events. In 2007, the company was bought by eBay for $300 million.

Loopt. The popular geosocial service was founded by three Stanford sophomores.

Sam Altman, Nick Sivo and Elok Deshpandi have come up with a vision for the future of Loopt for their second year together. Soon after the app was developed, all three dropped out of college. In 2012, Loopt was acquired by Green Dot Corporation for $43.4 million, and Altman is now known as the president of Y Combinator, the most promising technology incubator. This year, he returned to Stanford as head of the How to Start a Startup class, taught by Paul Graham (Viaweb), Peter Thiel (PayPal), Mark Andreessen (Netscape), Ron Conway (angel investor, early-stage Google and many others) and the CEO of Yahoo! Marissa Mayer.

Bonobos. Bryan Spahl and Andy Dunn have created their own online store for men’s pants at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Legend has it that Spahl sewed the first Bonobos trousers, which became a prototype, in the house in which the co-founders lived on the university campus. Sleep later became a stylist for the Trunk Club, while Dunn remained CEO of Bonobos, which raised $55 million in a recent funding round.

Snapchat. Co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy lived in the same Kappa Sigma cottage.

“We weren’t cool,” Murphy told Forbes, “but we worked to be.” Today, Snapchat has more than 100 million registered users and is close to completing a $20 million funding round at a $10 billion valuation.

Lytro. Ren Ng developed Lytro camera technology while writing his PhD at Stanford.

Ng received a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree at Stanford University and defended his doctoral degree, which was based on the technology of the light field, then successfully used in the creation of the Lytro camera. During the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Department of Computer Science, Ng met the founder of K9 Ventures and the same graduate Manu Kumar, as a result of which Lytro received a powerful impetus for development.

Pulse. The creators of the service had just entered the computer design department when the first iPad was released. Seeing his presence as a space for activity, they set to work.

Ankit Gupta and Akshay Kotari began developing their news aggregator the day Apple introduced its tablet computer to the world, and a few months later at WWDC, Steve Jobs noted Pulse as one of the best apps for the iPad. In April 2013, LinkedIn acquired Pulse for $90 million.

Coursera. The largest online education platform was founded by two Stanford professors.

Duffy Koller and Andrew Ng have long been colleagues at Stanford's Department of Computer Science. The idea for Coursera grew out of the hugely popular computer-learning class in which Ng taught in 2011. 104,000 people enrolled online, more than 46,000 completed at least one homework assignment, and 13,000 of them received a course certificate. Today, Coursera offers more than 600 free courses to its users and has seven million registered students. Ng recently became Baidu’s lead researcher, Koller remains Coursera’s president to this day. The platform continues to operate successfully and attract millions of investments.

For many reasons, Stanford University dominates the top U.S. higher education institutions in the number of successful entrepreneurial careers that its graduates and students have made. This conclusion three years ago came the research firm CB Insights, comparing on this indicator six high schools — Stanford, Harvard, the University of California at Berkeley, New York University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of technology. The investment activity is significantly higher at Stanford.

And it’s not just a good geographical location in the middle of Silicon Valley and high density of business angels per square meter. Stanford’s campus is a fitting place to start a successful new company, with top-notch engineering and business programs, a vast alumni base known for its Harvard-level corporate adhesion, and its own business accelerators (StartX spends $1.2 million annually investing in startups where at least one of the founders is a Stanford student).

In Russia, there is no analogue of such an educational institution, with all due respect to leading domestic universities. Startups are essentially brewing their juice in a much less comfortable environment. Our collective investment platform VCStart, to the best of its capabilities, helps IT startups to obtain funding and, as a result, make a qualitative step in their development. Register your projects, find investors, create and develop. Welcome!

Source: habrahabr.ru/company/vcstart/blog/239113/

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