Notes to the incoming GSB and MSx class from someone about to leave
If you are arriving at Stanford hoping to build something, you will probably be tempted to start with the visible resources.
Which entrepreneurship classes should I take? Which clubs should I join? Which professors are useful? Which accelerators matter? Which investors should I meet? Which alumni will reply?
I asked many of those questions myself. But after a year here, I think the better first question is: how will you use this place to become less alone with an idea?
For me, the idea gradually became clearer as I found the thread connecting my past and future: I helped build digital knowledge at scale at Zhihu, and now I want to build AI-native knowledge systems for real-world industries, starting with commercial real estate. Stanford did not hand me that sentence. It gave me enough conversations, friction, and feedback to make the sentence feel true.
The lessons below did not arrive all at once. Some mattered before and during the first few weeks, when starting still felt psychologically unnatural. Others became useful in fall quarter, as access expanded and questions needed structure; the later ones mattered more in winter and spring, when exploration turned into collaborators, feedback, underwriting, and execution.
Make starting feel normal
The first thing Stanford changes is not your idea. It changes what starting feels like.
Chronologically, this is a first-month lesson: before the idea is clear, you need starting to feel psychologically possible.
Many people arrive here with strong resumes and real operating experience, but starting a company can still feel psychologically unnatural. The idea is unfinished. The market is unclear. The whole thing can feel slightly embarrassing before it feels impressive.
Stanford helps because it surrounds you with founders who began that way too. Not only the famous names everyone already knows, but recent alumni still figuring out sales, classmates testing niche markets, guest speakers who almost ran out of money, and people who built good companies that never became famous.
That is the advantage of being here. You are close enough to both sides of the story: the polished success, but also the false starts, sacrifices, pivots, co-founder tensions, hard customer lessons, and moments when quitting would have been rational. Fresh stories matter because they have not become mythology yet.
Listen for those details. Go to the founder talks. Read the cases. Talk to recent alumni. Ask classmates what they are actually struggling with. Notice the smaller companies too, not only the iconic outcomes.
The point is not to worship founders or copy their paths. The point is to make starting feel mentally available. Entrepreneurship is a sequence of choices made under uncertainty, with real people paying real costs.
Before you can build with conviction, you often need to believe that humble beginnings are normal, and that struggle is not proof you are doing it wrong.
Your Stanford email is not the magic
One of the simplest tools you have is your Stanford email address.
This becomes a fall-quarter lesson, when access suddenly expands and you have to learn the difference between meeting people and asking useful questions.
It helps. People do respond differently when a student reaches out with a thoughtful question. But the email address itself is not the asset. The real asset is the seriousness of the ask.
A vague note still feels vague, even from Stanford.
Bad version:
I would love to pick your brain about multifamily real estate.
Better version:
I am trying to understand why qualified renters disappear after property tours. You have operated across several markets. Could I ask you where the leasing workflow usually breaks between tour and application?
The second version gives the other person something to respond to. It shows you have done enough work to deserve a real conversation. It also makes the exchange less transactional, because you are not just asking for time. You are inviting them into a specific question.
The first practical habit I would recommend is simple: write better questions. Not longer emails, not more polished emails. Better questions make other people more willing to be useful.
Stanford gives you access to alumni, classmates, faculty, founders, investors, operators, office hours, speaker events, treks, and group chats. The danger is that access can feel like progress. You can attend every talk and learn very little, meet investors and avoid customers, collect introductions and still keep the hardest assumption untouched.
But do not overcorrect into rushing. Some people arrive with a question already formed. Others need a quarter just to notice what they are actually curious about. That is fine. Pace is personal.
Structure the (idea) search
One classmate pointed me to 390 independent study as an underused Stanford tool. I now understand why. Its real power shows up when you pair it with a framework like Research Driven Inspiration.
This mattered more after the first wave of conversations, when scattered curiosity needed a container.
Early ideation can be messy in a bad way. You collect interesting problems, talk to smart people, read a few market reports, get excited by a technology shift, and slowly convince yourself that a company is forming. Sometimes that is real. Often it is intellectual motion.
390 gives the search process a container. RDI gives it a method.
Together, they can turn “I am exploring an idea” into a disciplined search: What has changed in this market? What pain is now sharper than before? Who feels it most acutely? What existing workaround tells me the pain is real? What would need to be true for this to become a company?
That is a much better starting point than: Should I build this startup? The first version makes you study the world. The second version makes you defend your idea.
A 390 can make outreach feel more legitimate because you are studying a question with a faculty sponsor and a research frame. RDI can keep that study from becoming random by pushing you to look for changes, tensions, behaviors, and non-obvious openings.
The paper is not the main value. The value is that the ideation process becomes less dependent on whether the founder is already in love with the answer.
Build your course stack
People will ask which entrepreneurship classes are best. The honest answer is: it depends.
The course stack starts as an early planning problem, but it should keep changing as your idea moves from curiosity to validation to execution.
My current view is to build a small course stack around four needs.
Validation classes like Startup Garage and LaunchPad force the idea into the market through deadlines, customer conversations, prototypes, and team accountability. Framework classes like E&VC, Angel and Venture Capital Financing for Entrepreneurs and Investors, and Formation of New Ventures help you understand how founders, investors, markets, and company-building choices fit together.
Domain classes help you leave generic business language. If your idea touches healthcare, climate, defense, education, infrastructure, real estate, regulation, or artificial intelligence infrastructure, learn from people who know the messy details. Execution classes like Managing Growing Enterprises, Building & Managing Sales Organizations, People Operations, Product Management, and Leading from the Boardroom prepare you to sell, hire, manage, govern, operate, and build repeatability.
Build your stack.
Where do you meet your co-founder?
People often want a clean answer: a class, a club, a matching event, a trip, a Slack channel, a dinner.
This question usually becomes more real in winter, once your interests have enough shape for other people to react to them.
The better answer is that you meet a co-founder by making your signals visible, then creating small chances to work together. Admissions cannot tell you who will be a good co-founder. You still need to see how someone thinks, works, listens, disagrees, follows through, and handles uncertainty.
The hard part is that not everyone’s signals are obvious. Some people are still exploring. Some lack confidence. Some do not yet feel safe saying, “I want to build.”
So send signals first. Talk about what you are exploring. Share the question you are working on. Ask someone to do something small together: test a customer problem, write a short memo, interview five users, build a prototype, or prepare for a pitch competition.
MVP can also mean minimum viable partnership.
Start small, then check what happened. Was the energy real? Did the person follow through? Could you disagree cleanly? Did the work get sharper? Did trust increase?
Touchy Feely is useful here. Do not presume what the other person wants. Do not cross the net. Make bids. Be transparent about your interest and uncertainty. Do check-ins. Build the relationship, not just the transaction.
Daniela Amodei put this memorably in a View From The Top talk at the GSB: instead of starting a company together first, go on vacation together. Share a room. See whether more time together gives you energy or makes you need another vacation to recover.
A co-founder is not just someone who likes your idea. The idea may change. The market may change. The person matters more.
Know where to get feedback, and how
Stanford has many feedback surfaces. The hard part is knowing which feedback you need.
This matters most in winter and spring, once you have something specific enough to be wrong about.
Ask operators and customers about workflow, urgency, budget, and behavior. Ask founders and recent alumni about sequencing, hiring, sales, and what broke in practice. Ask investors about market size, fundability, category, and financing risk. Ask faculty for patterns and weak assumptions. Ask classmates whether the story is clear to a smart outsider.
Use accelerators, demo days, and pitch competitions for forced structure. A deadline makes the team decide what it believes; an application makes you write down the customer, problem, wedge, evidence, and next milestone. Early ideas can float around as conversations for too long.
Do not ask everyone, “What do you think of my idea?” It usually produces politeness. Ask narrower questions: Who would feel this pain first? What would make this hard to sell? Where does this workflow actually break today? Which assumption would you test before building anything else? If this fails, what was probably fake?
Use Venture Studio early, before the deck is too polished. Use classmates often, but do not confuse enthusiasm with evidence. Use investors carefully. Use operators whenever possible, because they know where the clean story meets messy reality.
Learn how VCs underwrite, then underwrite yourself
This lesson becomes sharper later in the year, when an idea starts to sound fundable and you need to separate market excitement from founder judgment.
Angel and Venture Capital Financing for Entrepreneurs and Investors is valuable not only because it explains dilution, valuation, fund incentives, and fundraising process. The course lets you sit with real investment memos for companies like YouTube, Zoom, and Twitch, and learn how investors actually underwrite a company.
That is the real lesson: learn how investors underwrite so you can underwrite yourself.
A good investor is asking: why this market, why now, why this wedge, why this team, why this sequence, and what evidence would make the opportunity matter? Those are founder questions too.
Brian Jacobs’s lecture on fundraising made fundraising feel less like a performance and more like a process: sequencing, evidence, momentum, and knowing what risk you are asking investors to take.
The point is not to overfit every idea into the venture path. The point is to borrow the discipline. Where is the real risk? What do you know? What evidence would change your mind? What kind of company does this want to become?
Learn from investors, but do not perform for them too early. Use their lens to sharpen your judgment, not to replace your own.
The other lesson is that easy capital is not always a gift. In Formation of New Ventures, a case sharpened this for me: free money might be someone else's money. If a market looks easy to fund, it may also be easy for other smart teams to enter. That is why fundraising has to be connected to defensibility, not treated as independent validation.
Leave the GSB bubble
One of Stanford’s biggest entrepreneurship resources is across the street.
This should happen throughout the year, but it becomes urgent once your idea touches a real domain with technical, regulatory, or workflow complexity.
Find the engineer who says the technical plan is trivial or impossible. Find the clinician who says the workflow does not work that way. Find the climate researcher who says the carbon math is wrong. Find the law student who sees the regulatory trap. Find the operator who laughs at the sales motion.
Those conversations can be annoying in exactly the way an idea needs.
Real markets are not clean. They have legacy systems, hidden incentives, tired users, procurement rules, compliance constraints, politics, and habits that do not appear in a deck.
The broader university is valuable because it makes the idea rougher. Usually, that means it is becoming more real.
A final note to the incoming class
You will have more options at Stanford than you can use. That abundance can be exciting, but it can also make you feel behind. Someone will always seem more certain, connected, or prepared.
Start with a question you actually care about. Let it be imperfect. Let it change. Some weeks will feel productive. Some will feel scattered. That is normal.
The year goes fast, but it is long enough to change how you work.
Stanford will not hand you a company. It gives you something more useful and fragile: a temporary environment where people are unusually willing to help you think.
Use it seriously. Use it generously. And do not wait until you feel fully ready.
Acknowledgment
I am grateful to the GSB/MSx ’26 classmates who shared their reflections with me: JT Arenas, Alessandro Balzi, Shekhar Bhende, Martin Cultru, Monta Ito, Clara Leow, Dan Nelms, Fernando Torres Navarrete, Talia Krakauer Rubin, Sho Wakasa, Wilson Wong, and Da Zhang.
Their notes shaped different parts of this essay: learning from startup ecosystem protagonists, getting mentally ready to start, using 390 and project-based courses, building confidence through cold outreach and domain communities, taking imperfect action, learning from enduring companies, and turning venture finance exposure into founder judgment.
I am also grateful to Taiga Sawamura, Santiago Wang, and Bill Zhang for reviewing early drafts and greatly enhancing this work.
Special thanks to Clara Leow and Steven Yan for walking this journey with me and helping me understand it more clearly.
This is not a comprehensive guide to Stanford entrepreneurship. It is a graduating student’s attempt to pass forward what I wish I had understood earlier.