Stanford Business

MAY 2006


Dean's Column

A Decade of Teaching Entrepreneurship


Photo by Stuart Brinn

This month the Business School’s Center for Entrepreneurial Studies (CES) celebrates its 10th anniversary. Back in 1996, I was a banker serving on our Advisory Council. I remember both the anticipation and the controversy surrounding the notion of an academic center that would somehow study and teach what it takes to start a business and keep it going. Could entrepreneurship really be “taught”? Was it a research discipline with theories that could be tested and measured for empirical validation?

Ten years on, I can report the skeptics were wrong. With the vision of its founding directors, academic Charles Holloway and entrepreneur Irving Grousbeck, the Center has proved to be a rich resource for students and faculty—as well as for alumni. Today, Center programs include everything from research on the evolution of human resource management in startups to entrepreneurial summer internships to the Founders’ Forum, a networking group for alumni entrepreneurs.

The Center has been the genesis of three key courses: the popular Evaluating Entrepreneurial Opportunities (known by its course number, “356”), Building and Managing Professional Sales Organizations, and Managing Growing Enterprises, a course that is valuable for those going into companies both small and large. These added to seminal courses such as Formation of New Ventures and Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital that were already under way. Today, the Center provides the underpinning for 16 classes involving entrepreneurship and has generated 150 case studies. The panels, seminars, and relationship-building facilitated by executive director Linda Wells, MBA ’93, create a critical mass of energy that supports student, alumni, and faculty ambitions in this field.

MBA ’05 graduates Pete Flint and Sami Inkinen, for example, launched Trulia Inc., a search engine they call “Google for real estate.” The website allows home buyers and sellers to search real estate listings. Inkinen, who was co-president of the student Entrepreneurship Club at the School, says there are three things he got out of the Center: First were networks and relationships. “In 356, you get a mentor from a large venture capital firm,” says Inkinen. “We had someone from Benchmark Capital and Trinity Ventures. That was very helpful for us in refining the business model.”

Second were knowledge and skills. He remembers Grousbeck’s Managing Growing Enterprises provided practical knowledge about how to hire, fire, recruit a board of directors, and do early fundraising. Other courses, led by faculty grounded in research, taught him about setting corporate culture. “The quality of the teaching relies on the research,” he says.

Third, the Center provided inspiration. Going to the library and reading a book about how Bill Gates started Microsoft is just not the same as sitting down and having dinner and in-depth discussion with a mentor who started a search fund.

“When I was at the GSB,” says Palo Alto venture capitalist Greg Waldorf, MBA ’94, “entrepreneurial studies was just a handful of individual faculty members and courses. The CES is an incredible organizing entity where a lot of the entrepreneurial interests that students have come together. Some of the effort is in the class and some is from outside,” says Waldorf, who invested in Trulia. One thing he has noticed is that a number of students who enroll in Evaluating Entrepreneurial Opportunities ultimately decide that starting a company is not for them. It tells us they’ve learned something important—about themselves and about management.

We have found entrepreneurial studies to be of value to all students, not just those pursuing startups. “Teaching about entrepreneurial companies is the perfect venue for teaching about general management,” Holloway says. “They are small companies, so you can see right through them like an X-ray. You can see how engineering has to work with marketing. How finance has to work with operations. And see how sales and marketing relate to one another. If you tried to do that with a large company like General Motors, you wouldn’t understand as well as when you see a small company struggling to get started.”

Going forward, the Center will have another role to play as the Business School engages in graduate education across campus. Next month, faculty member Garth Saloner, now also a director of the Center, will design and lead a new four-week pilot program—the Summer Institute for Entrepreneurship—exposing engineers, chemists, and other grad students to an intensive first-time education in management and leadership. If there are any skeptics left out there, I am confident they will come to see the value of entrepreneurial studies.

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