Welcome

Stanford University's spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship has always played an important role in the university's history. Our faculty and students are immersed in entrepreneurship as well as its natural extensions to industry.

Research and teaching at Stanford are synergistic: research intimately intertwines the professor with his or her subject material; teaching sharpens and broadens students' minds as their research approaches. The result of this dynamic is that research funding bears fruit in the lab and its benefits spill over to the classroom. Research drives innovation and empowers education.

The entrepreneur then benefits from a research-driven university through a myriad of ways: direct research, classroom lessons, discussions with faculty, the cross-fertilization of ideas from different disciplines, and even the entrepreneurial spirit of Stanford.

In the last several decades, over 6,000 companies were founded by members of the Stanford University community. That figure includes graduates as well as those who attended but did not earn a degree, as well as companies founded by faculty while at Stanford. (See methodology page for further details).

Companies such as Cisco Systems, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and Yahoo! saw their technical beginnings here and their commercial prosperity in nearby Silicon Valley. Understanding these successes, codifying that knowledge and disseminating it to future generations of entrepreneurs is an opportunity and an obligation that we must seize.

Methodology | Stanford and Industry | Submit Additions or Changes
Database last updated 18 October 2011