Sovann AP Linden & Mateo H. Petel
Widely seen as “Stanford’s technical MBA” and located in the school of engineering, the program has a quasi-monopoly on entrepreneurship courses. At its center is a founder-first curriculum that treats entrepreneurship not as an extracurricular, but as a core intellectual pursuit. Courses such as Lean LaunchPad, Technology Venture Formation (known on campus as MS&E 273), and Hacking for Defense allow students to earn academic credit for building real companies.
Many of these classes either require or strongly recommend having an MS&E teammate — effectively making the program a gatekeeper to Stanford’s most startup-relevant coursework.
“What you’re seeing is engineers signing up to these MS&E classes, switching to MS&E as a co-term, or just getting to know the MS&E folks personally” said an alum. The real secret is that you don’t need to work on a startup on top of your studies, rather MS&E makes it easy to get credit for working on a startup project, with professors often connected, or acting as angel investors.
Applications for these classes are competitive, and a team several graduate students, including MS&E, co-founded Stanford Founders, a student organization, to help with team formation. Stanford Founders has now grown to the largest on-campus graduate founders association, hosting its own Demo Day and attracting numerous investors.