In 2009, just after his junior year, Cameron Teitelman decided to do something about a problem he noticed on campus: a school with so many entrepreneurs had no structured setting for them to connect and work through common problems. “Since they do not have faculty appointments and are not paid by Stanford, our conflict of interest policies do not apply to adjunct faculty, visiting faculty, visiting scholars or visiting lecturers - unless they have another type of appointment through which they are paid by Stanford,” university spokesman E.J. Shortly after the Clinkle exodus, the university added a section to its conflict-of-interest policy, which requires any faculty member involved in a student’s academic program to get permission from administrators before investing with that student. “It’s a relationship that’s been built up over years so when they’re ready to do this venture or get funding, this discussion will happen.” Sahami said he has invested in fewer than five of his former students’ ventures. “My expectation for the students and Lucas Duplan, who was the CEO, was that they would graduate,” Sahami said. The company folded about two years later. In early 2013, more than a dozen students in the computer science department dropped out to work with Clinkle founder Lucas Duplan. Sahami has invested in several of his students’ companies, including a mobile payments startup called Clinkle Corp. co-founder, visit one of his computer science classes for Q&A sessions. The proceeds Cheriton has received from selling his Alphabet stock make up the bulk of his $4.3 billion fortune, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a ranking of the world’s 500 wealthiest people.Īlso in the department is Mehran Sahami, who still teaches at Stanford and famously had Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook Inc. David Cheriton, for example, was an early Google investor. Other computer science professors have taken a more direct approach to profiting from their students’ ideas. “If a student sees their fellow student getting really rich it’s hard to say to them, ‘Yes, but philosophy is important, too.”’ “The negative side effects are cultural," he said. “But I’m comfortable.” Winograd recognizes that there’s a downside to the cozy relationship between academia and industry. The company, now called Alphabet Inc., went public in 2004 and is valued at $797 billion. Winograd never invested in his student’s startup, but he was invited to work at Google during a 2002 sabbatical and was largely paid in pre-IPO stock. Getting crazy rich wasn’t part of the plan, but as fate would have it, he was an adviser on Larry Page’s graduate research project involving web search. When the former computer science professor first went to work at Stanford in 1973, his intentions were academic, too. Terry Winograd looks like an academic, with bushy white hair and a moustache to rival Einstein’s. Some companies are born in the classroom. One notable alumnus, billionaire Peter Thiel, encourages it so much that he set up a fellowship offering young entrepreneurs $100,000 to put college on hold.ĭropping out is still the exception rather than the rule at Stanford, but taking a year off to work on a startup is so prevalent that there’s a term for it: “stopping out.” It’s also common for students to take a light course load - only two classes or so - to spend more time on their startups, Breslow said. Take Snap Inc.’s Evan Spiegel, who dropped out of undergrad, or Tesla Inc.’s Elon Musk, who lasted less than a week in his Ph.D. Today, Bolt is worth about $250 million, according to Adam Augusiak-Boro, a senior associate at EquityZen, a marketplace for trading employee shares of privately held companies.īreslow isn’t the only successful Stanford dropout. He spent the rest of the school year squatting on campus, secretly living in the spare dorm room and getting meals with the help of a dining hall cook he had befriended. “I just became much more passionate about that than my classes,” said Breslow, 24. That’s because no one was supposed to be living there.īreslow was a sophomore computer science student when he dropped out earlier that year to work on Bolt, his payment startup. If you walked into Ryan Breslow’s Stanford dorm room in the spring of 2014, you’d be forgiven for thinking no one lived there - no pictures on the walls, no clothes in the closet, no comforter on the bed.
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