[hberg]

There are major cultural differences between these schools that the article doesn't touch upon. Having presented business/product ideas to classmates & colleagues at both schools, here's a gross simplification of responses I've experienced:

Me: I have an idea for "foo"

MIT reply: "Here's a list of 10 reasons why that won't work"

Stanford reply: "That's neat, and here's 10 reasons you should work on it"

One might see the Stanford response as unrealistic or patronizing, but one of these creates a culture of positive ideation (and hustle-culture startups) while the other leads to a lot of discouraged entrepreneurs.

[jltsiren]

The average thing I (as someone in the academia) hear about MIT is their press office exaggerating the importance of some research finding. The average thing I hear about Stanford is a controversy in mainstream news. To an outsider, MIT culture seems to be more about conventional nerds. Stanford culture seems to attract more than its fair share of political weirdos.

[galdosdi]

Me: I will write software to help salesman plan their route when they travel.

MIT: the travelling salesman problem is NP-complete so your idea is impossible

Stanford: you should build an MVP that just randomly sorts the destinations and see if that's good enough first, then pivot to what customers really want