Boxer shorts. Gene-mapping software. Children's furniture. Gourmet frozen burritos.
These are just a few of life's everyday essentials brought to you by companies with ties to Stanford. In fact, all of their founders were students here with me in the early 1980s. And that was a typical era at Stanford. Sure, a lot of us go to work for established businesses. But an unusually high number of alumni launch their own companies--and hundreds of others roll the dice by joining start-ups.
Four years ago, a group of young men who shared an interest in computers and a dream of working for themselves gathered for dinner at a Redwood City taco joint. "Let's start a company," one of them suggested. Today, as Tia O'Brien explains in her article, the six founders of Excite Inc. are staggeringly successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Their product, a system for searching the Internet, hit the market in 1994 just as the world wide web was exploding.
The story of Excite underscores a defining element of the Stanford culture. This place is a cauldron of creativity, technical know-how, hard work and business savvy. Let it bubble for a while and you have the perfect recipe for making entrepreneurs. And because Stanford is at the epicenter of Silicon Valley and the venture capital industry, starting a company isn't so alien or daunting for its graduates. Business school consulting professor Irv Grousbeck, co-director of the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, says the opportunity to watch other start-ups grow--and sometimes fail--makes doing it yourself seem less intimidating. "We have a significant advantage over someone in Memphis, Tenn.," he says. "We see the incubation period."
Physicist Wolfgang Panofsky is a different kind of innovator. While he never started his own company, he is in many ways a classic entrepreneur. Through persistence and resourcefulness, Panofsky turned his vision into reality in the early 1960s. His dream: a two-mile-long atom smasher that would unlock the secrets of the basic nature of matter. Panofsky's Monster, as it came to be called, would cost $114 million to build, which was then more than one and a half times the endowment of the University. Even more audacious, it would be built and operated entirely with government funds--but run by Stanford physicists. Panofsky was on hand in 1966 when the first electron beam whizzed down the runway, as Bernie Butcher, '64, describes in his story on the dramatic early years of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
This ethos of innovation dates back to the days when Silicon Valley was still known as the Valley of Heart's Delight. Leland Stanford himself was in many ways the prototypical entrepreneur, making his fortune in the railroad industry and then creating, from scratch, a university founded on the notion of individual initiative instead of rote learning. He would have admired Panofsky and the Excite founders--and the thousands of other like-minded visionaries who emerged from the cauldron and tried to make it on their own.
