[wowrl]

That's great, for the 15k students that go to Stanford. I always feel left out when I hear that massive celebrities/billionaires/etc visit and/or teach classes at Stanford all the time (e.g. Reid Hoffman, Paul Graham, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Vint Cerf, et al, et al). I'm in my senior year at a decent engineering school on the East Coast and it's huge news when we get one person with even a quarter of the prestige that all of those people have. Stanford just seems like a privileged club that a few thousand students (out of millions that apply) get into - then get access to all of the fame and genius and money they can handle.

[justanman]

Don't worry so much. In addition to the videos of each class being posted online, consider this:

I also spoke with Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator, one of the best-known providers of first-step seed money for tech start-ups. I asked him if any one school stood out in terms of students and graduates whose ideas took off. “Yes,” he responded, and I was sure of the name I’d hear next: Stanford. It’s his alma mater, though he left before he graduated, and it’s famous as a feeder of Silicon Valley success.

But this is what he said: “The University of Waterloo.” It’s a public school in the Canadian province of Ontario, and as of last summer, it was the source of eight proud ventures that Y Combinator had helped along. “To my chagrin,” Altman told me, “Stanford has not had a really great track record.”

http://nyti.ms/1Dez9WQ

[weavie]

I wonder if this is because Stanford students have better access to other sources of funding and thus less of a need to apply for first-step seed money.