Startups and Stanford University

TL;DR

This paper examines the entrepreneurial ecosystem at Stanford University, analyzing over 5000 startups founded by alumni and staff to understand their growth, fields, and founder backgrounds, highlighting Stanford's role in innovation.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of Stanford-affiliated startups, detailing their diversity, growth patterns, and founder characteristics, offering insights into Stanford's impact on entrepreneurship.

Findings

Stanford alumni have founded over 5000 companies.

Startups vary across multiple fields and exhibit diverse growth trajectories.

Founders often have strong academic backgrounds and varying time spans between university and company founding.

Abstract

Startups have become in less than 50 years a major component of innovation and economic growth. Silicon Valley has been the place where the startup phenomenon was the most obvious and Stanford University was a major component of that success. Companies such as Google, Yahoo, Sun Microsystems, Cisco, Hewlett Packard had very strong links with Stanford but even these vary famous success stories cannot fully describe the richness and diversity of the Stanford entrepreneurial activity. This report explores the dynamics of more than 5000 companies founded by Stanford University alumni and staff, through their value creation, their field of activities, their growth patterns and more. The report also explores some features of the founders of these companies such as their academic background or the number of years between their Stanford experience and their company creation.