Stanford dy/dx: Preparing Founders for Success

Change the trajectory of your startup by expanding your leadership and business skills through the dy/dx program.

This unique, three-week residential summer program blends immersive, fast-paced leadership, business education, and mentorship from leading faculty, experienced investors, and successful entrepreneurs, to prepare startup leaders for success as you continue on your entrepreneurship journey.

June 25 – July 13, 2023

Key Benefits

The dy/dx program focuses on expanding your leadership and business skills to:

  • Prepare you to be an exceptional leader of a successful and rapidly growing enterprise
  • Improve how you collaborate, strategize, and lead collectively as a leadership team
  • Gain critical skills to make better business decisions during the early and later stages of your venture
  • Discover how others have successfully managed key challenges and avoid common mistakes made by first-time founders

Location and Format

We designed this part-time program to prepare you to lead successful enterprises as your startup continues to grow and scale. You will attend classes and mentoring sessions on campus at the Knight Management Center, with the option of residing locally or in graduate student housing for the duration of the program.

Faculty and Mentors

You will take classes with leading faculty who teach leadership and entrepreneurship at Stanford GSB. You will also have the opportunity to learn from venture capital industry leaders — from general partners to successful founders — in sessions that will expand your knowledge of what makes a venture fundable and how to manage relationships with investors.

Faculty Co-Director
Faculty Co-Director

Participant Profile

We aim to identify the leaders of the most promising, high-growth startups who would benefit from the world-class education and broader community that Stanford GSB offers, including those who have not had the opportunity to get an MBA or access to management programs in the past.

We are curating participants through a select group of venture allies who collaborate with the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies on the vision and operation of the program. These collaborators nominate startup leadership teams to participate in the program who:

  • Come from early growth stage companies. While funding round is only an indicator, companies will likely range from Series A to early Series D
  • Are excited to have two to four of their most senior people on their leadership team, including the CEO, actively participate in the program at the Knight Management Center

Venture Allies

Accel is a global venture capital firm that is the first partner to exceptional teams everywhere, from inception through all phases of private company growth. For nearly 40 years, Accel has helped ambitious entrepreneurs build iconic global businesses.

Index Ventures invests in entrepreneurs with bold dreams who challenge the status quo and build iconic companies. We embrace our founders’ unique paths and always push ourselves to rise above what is expected. With deep expertise and a rich global network, we aim to be the most trusted partner through all stages of their growth, from seed to IPO and beyond.

Innovation Endeavors is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in mission-driven founders, transformational technologies, and emergent ecosystems. The firm’s central investment thesis, the Super Evolution, combines data, leading-edge computation, and advanced engineering to transform a range of industries including healthcare, supply chain, climate, and the physical economy.

Lightspeed has been the first investor and an early backer of some of the most innovative companies in the world, for the past 20 years. In service of bold founders with big ideas, we stand behind our companies with high conviction from Seed to Series F and beyond. Today Lightspeed manages over $29B across seven countries working collaboratively as one to serve extraordinary founders in any geography, stage or sector.

Sequoia Capital helps daring founders build legendary companies from idea to IPO and beyond. We aim to be the first true believers in tomorrow’s most valuable and enduring businesses. We partner with a few outliers each year and go all-in, providing them with the hands-on help required at every stage of the company building journey.

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