That's great, for the 15k students that go to Stanford. I always feel left out when I hear that massive celebrities/billionaires/etc visit and/or teach classes at Stanford all the time (e.g. Reid Hoffman, Paul Graham, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Vint Cerf, et al, et al). I'm in my senior year at a decent engineering school on the East Coast and it's huge news when we get one person with even a quarter of the prestige that all of those people have. Stanford just seems like a privileged club that a few thousand students (out of millions that apply) get into - then get access to all of the fame and genius and money they can handle.
Don't worry so much. In addition to the videos of each class being posted online, consider this:
I also spoke with Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator, one of the best-known providers of first-step seed money for tech start-ups. I asked him if any one school stood out in terms of students and graduates whose ideas took off. “Yes,” he responded, and I was sure of the name I’d hear next: Stanford. It’s his alma mater, though he left before he graduated, and it’s famous as a feeder of Silicon Valley success.
But this is what he said: “The University of Waterloo.” It’s a public school in the Canadian province of Ontario, and as of last summer, it was the source of eight proud ventures that Y Combinator had helped along. “To my chagrin,” Altman told me, “Stanford has not had a really great track record.”
I wonder if this is because Stanford students have better access to other sources of funding and thus less of a need to apply for first-step seed money.
