Stanford Startup & VC Resources

For non-business & tech students

9 min readSep 13, 2022

Hi there 👋

I’m Angela, a 2nd year Master’s in International Policy student at Stanford.

You often hear that Stanford is the best place to start a company or find a co-founder, but I’ve found that as a non-business, non-engineering grad student, it’s challenging to access these opportunities. Unfortunately, startup & venture capital opportunities are not broadcasted widely outside of several hubs — including the Graduate School of Business and School of Engineering — so it’s easy to miss deadlines to apply or register unless you know what you’re looking for.

All of Stanford’s entrepreneurship resources can be accessed through the Stanford Entrepreneurship Network page, but I found that to be quite overwhelming. So, I pulled together this curated list to help others with similar backgrounds looking to learn more about entrepreneurship & VC.

This list is non-exhaustive and a work in progress. If your favourite club/course/opportunity isn’t on here, DM me on LinkedIn or @avc_angela on Twitter & I’d love to add it to the list!

If you have any questions, reach out too! Happy to answer them, give personal takes on the resources, share more tips, review your apps, etc.

Happy scrolling!

Academic Resources

Learning about startups / VCs

Most of the following courses are guest speaker-based courses where professors invite guests to share their experiences & hammer home course concepts. One benefit of being in the heart of Silicon Valley is that some of the most preeminent founders and VCs frequently guest lecture at Stanford!

Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital: Partnership for Growth — STRAMGT 330 — Winter — this was my absolute favourite class from my first year at Stanford. Claudia Fan Munce and Peter Ziebelman are fantastic professors who bring so much energy and passion to the class. I also had a blast with the company formation & pitching assignment — you get to present a new venture idea to a panel of VCs at the end of the course
Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders’ Seminar — MS&E 472 — Runs every quarter — weekly seminars with some of the most fascinating and successful founders and investors across industries. I took it in the Winter 2022 quarter and learned from people like Payal Kadakia of ClassPass, Josh Giegel of Virgin Hyperloop, and Hans Tung of GGV Capital. You can find all past recordings here
The Spirit of Entrepreneurship — MS&E 178 — Runs every quarter — this is the accompanying discussion session to the ETL seminars. I didn’t take it since we discussed the ETL seminars during our Threshold Venture Fellow sessions, but it sounds like fun
Angel and Venture Capital Financing for Entrepreneurs and Investors — FINANCE 385 — Autumn — this course is taught by Ilya Strebulaev, who is the Director of Stanford’s Venture Capital Initiative, so it’s bound to be a rich intro to VC

There are also a lot of industry-specific VC and startup courses that could be valuable, like:

The Energy Seminar — ENERGY 301 — all quarters
Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Education Technology — EDUC 295 — Spring
Creating & Scaling Ventures in Developing Economies — GSBGEN 514/534 — Spring
Opportunities in PropTech — CEE 246P — Winter

Pro tip: if you want to take GSB courses and are not a GSB student, you will need to connect with the professor and state your case well before the registration period for them to permit you to enrol. Reach out early, because most professors cap their non-GSB enrolment to only a few students per quarter. Even then, it’s a hit or miss situation since non-GSB students can only enrol once the GSB waitlist clears up — so keep your fingers crossed.

Building companies

If you’re interested in the founder route, check out the accelerator-type courses across Stanford’s campus:

Lean Launchpad — ENGR 245 — focused on the Lean Launchpad method and taught by Steve Blank. Very interview heavy, Blank encourages students to get out of the building. Runs in the Winter & Spring quarters.
Startup Garage — STRAMGT 356 & 366 — a two-quarter course, students can choose to take both or either quarter depending on their startup stage and needs. The fall quarter focuses on interviewing customers and designing a solution. The winter quarter focuses on testing the solution and launching the business. Students get a $1,000 experimental grant per team
d.school’s Launchpad — ME 301 — not to be confused with the Lean Launchpad course, this is a proper accelerator program that also happens to be a Stanford course. Students are expected to get to market by the end of the 10-week course. Runs in the Spring quarter.

Enrollment is very competitive — students form teams, submit written applications, and sometimes participate in interviews. Professors typically organize mixers before applications are due, so don’t worry if you don’t have a team/idea. But successful applicants start planning their apps months in advance, attend office hours to seek guidance and network with the professors, and build great teams ahead of time.

Pro tip: look for and connect with students with similar interests as yours on the Team Formation Hub.

During the course, teams work on their startup with support from mentors, professors, and a wider network of industry/startup ecosystem experts. Some students continue working on their idea after the course ends — joining Y Combinator, seeking angel or pre-seed funding, etc.

These courses are a heavy time commitment, so plan your schedule around them.

There are also some industry-specific accelerator courses, like ENERGY 203 Stanford Climate Ventures and MS&E 297 Hacking for Defense that students can apply to. If you’re interested in more industry-specific resources, DM me on LinkedIn or @avc_angela on Twitter and I’ll connect you with friends who are more embedded in those circles 🙂

Other Stanford Resources

There are a lot of other resources available to Stanford students. I’ve certainly missed a few great ones, so please let me know what else I should add via DM on LinkedIn or @avc_angela on Twitter 🙂

Accelerators

If you’re interested in continuing your company after some of the “building” courses listed above, consider one of the following accelerators:

Cardinal Ventures — zero-equity student-run accelerator running two 10-week programs to support student entrepreneurs at the earliest stages, ending with a demo day attended by investors from a16z, Sequoia, etc. I used to be a VP at Cardinal Ventures & strongly suggest student founders apply!! It’s such a great student community
StartX — non-profit startup accelerator affiliated with Stanford that offers office space, workshops, mentorship, etc. Provides a “Student-in-Residence” scholarship (up to $9k) to support student teams who are building while completing their degree. Acceptance rates are around 8%
Pear Accelerator — 14-week bootcamp to help founders find product market fit and raise capital. Accelerator programming covers topics like customer development, go-to-market experimentation, fundraising and demo day prep. Offers teams $500–750k at a $10M cap.

Note: While Pear VC is completely separate from Stanford, it has a great campus presence and its team has ALWAYS been happy to speak with me — you can learn more about their campus offering here. Note that they tend to prefer students to sign up with teams that have both non-technical and technical talent. Also, note that Pear VC also hosts Pear Competition, which offers winning teams a $100,000 uncapped SAFE to launch their startup. Winners also have access to an optional fast-track partner meeting for Pear Accelerator at a $10M valuation, so it’s a good segue into Pear’s other offerings. Applications open each year in January.

While not technically an accelerator, Stanford Venture Studio (SVS) deserves a strong shoutout. SVS is a startup hub run by the Graduate School of Business that is open to students from all schools. It offers weekly events, a founder group, tailored resources for each stage of your startup, a deal box with awesome discounts, a 24/7 coworking space, a super robust mentor database and more. Best of all, admission is non-competitive and the people are fantastic.

Student Groups

Most student groups in the Stanford startup ecosystem are geared toward undergrads or run by the business school, so membership opportunities might be limited. They still sometimes host public events, so sign up for their newsletters and keep an eye out for open opportunities:

ASES — Stanford’s globally focused student entrepreneur society — runs a ton of programs for undergrads, including a pitch contest called VC3
BASES — aims to empower the next generation of Stanford entrepreneurs — their main program is only open to freshmen but they offer some open events like their Startup Career Fair and Global Summit
SENSA — focused on impact-oriented capital and entrepreneurship — they have both consulting & VC teams — the VC team includes training on sourcing and due diligence and places members with partnered VC firms for spring internships

Funding

If you’re looking for the first cheque for your startup, you’re in luck. There is a ton of capital floating around, from Stanford-run programs to external programs that have established a strong campus presence.

Three national student VC programs have an especially solid grip on Stanford students:

Dorm Room Fund — invests in student-run startups incorporated in the US, standard investment is a $40k SAFE
Rough Draft Ventures — invests in student-run startups incorporated in the US, standard investments start at $100k
Contrary Capital — invests $25k in student-run startups via scout cheques, with up to $2M out of their main fund

(Shoutout to Nicole DeTommaso for doing research and making these investments more transparent 🎉)

The capital DRF, RDV, and Contrary offer is more traditional VC-esque. There are also two Stanford-run programs (that I know of) that offer non-dilutive capital to support students to build their startups:

Botha Chan Innovation Fellowship — 8 week program for students to evaluate a venture idea of their own. Students can apply at truly any stage — I applied and was accepted with just an idea — no business model canvas, website, co-founders
Impact Design Immersion Fellowship — 4 to 10 week program for students to test their ideas for impact-oriented startups. Currently limited to GSB students, but so was Botha Chan before they changed their eligibility criteria. It won’t hurt to keep an eye out for updates

These Stanford-run programs have restricted eligibility (i.e. you have to be a returning student, etc.), but eligibility criteria change every year and I received the Botha Chan Innovation Fellowship to work on my startup in Summer 2022 when they opened up applications to all graduate students. Botha Chan was a fantastic experience and I highly encourage you to apply. I learned a lot from my mentor, pod leader and other fellows. The fellowship is also funded by Sequoia’s Senior Steward Roelof Botha, so some students will get a chance to present directly to him!

Pro tip: I learned about the changed eligibility criteria for Botha Chan from the Stanford Venture Studio newsletter, so make sure to sign up & keep an eye out.

Fellowships

Nothing beats hands-on experience in entrepreneurship. You can gain a lot of hands-on founder experience from the “building” courses mentioned above, but if you’re looking for VC experience, the following fellowships might be helpful:

Threshold Venture Fellows — a two-quarter long program for 12 graduate students across all schools. Meets weekly for workshops by the fantastic Heidi Roizen and Aidan Madigan-Curtis, and other guest speakers. I had the pleasure of being a fellow last year and being an incoming TA this year! Threshold was honestly a LIFE CHANGING experience and one of my favourite parts of my Stanford experience. Trust me, you’re doing yourself a favour by applying
Accel Leadership Program — a two-quarter long program for 16 Stanford seniors and graduate students across all schools. Students learn in teams and tackle a case study with a current startup CEO or senior executive. Unlike Threshold, Accel involves a course component — students will need to take MS&E 277A and 277B — so it might not be a great option if you’re already short on credits!

Both programs are run by the School of Engineering and used to be only open to engineering students. They just opened the eligibility criteria to include non-engineering students the year I applied. There are also two other STVP run programs — Mayfield Fellows and PEAK Fellows — that are currently only open to Stanford undergraduates and co-terminal students, but eligibility criteria are always shifting. Also, in the spirit of innovation & continuous improvement, STVP standardized applications for these fellowships and students now just need to submit one common application to be considered for all STVP fellowships.

Also, the three student-run VC programs mentioned above — Dorm Room Fund, Rough Draft Ventures, and Contrary — all recruit investment partners or investment fellows each year. Apps are typically due in mid-September to early October and is process is quite competitive — involving written apps and multiple rounds of interviews.

Finally, Pear VC runs Pear Fellows, which offers students an opportunity to directly collaborate with their investment team on sourcing, due diligence, and hosting events.

Yay! You made it to the end of the resource list 🥳