Stanford University, every mention
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Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Stanford University comes up
10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis) · Acquired
- ▶ 6:17 David Rosenthal And posted a bulletin notice on the Stanford campus that there was space available here.
- ▶ 6:23 Ben Gilbert And so Larry and Sergei's first desks when they got kicked out of Stanford's offices were right there.
Trader Joe’s: Hawaiian shirts and counter positioning (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 5:57 David Rosenthal He ends up going to Stanford for his undergrad.
- ▶ 6:07 David Rosenthal Somewhat unusually for the time, he stays on at Stanford for an extra two years, and he gets an MBA at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1954.
- ▶ 6:18 Ben Gilbert You know, there's a lot of famous Stanford alumni.
- ▶ 2:09:47 David Rosenthal So in 1987, as Joe's getting ready to retire, he hires an old friend from Stanford from his GSB days, a guy named John Shields, to come in as president and COO under him for a year and then be the anointed successor to take over.
- ▶ 2:10:17 David Rosenthal So John, new retail, new national expansion and operations, and most importantly, Joe had known him for a long time, going all the way back to Stanford, and trusted him.
Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 24:19 David Rosenthal So in April of 2007, Larry Page hires Sebastian Thrun from Stanford to come to Google and work first part-time and then full-time
- ▶ 24:34 David Rosenthal Sebastian was the head of SAIL at Stanford, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, legendary AI laboratory that was big in the sort of first wave of AI back in the sixties, seventies, when Larry's dad was active in the field,…
- ▶ 25:26 David Rosenthal So SAIL, this group within the CS department at Stanford, not only had some of the most incredible, most accomplished professors and PhD AI researchers in the world, they also had this stream of Stanford undergrads that would come through…
- ▶ 26:08 David Rosenthal Another undergrad who passed through sale while Sebastian was there was a young freshman and sophomore who would later drop out of Stanford to start a company that went through Y Combinator's very first
- ▶ 37:29 David Rosenthal So when Sebastian left Stanford full-time and joined Google full-time, of course somebody else had to take over SAIL.
- ▶ 38:12 David Rosenthal And Jeff Dean is telling Andrew about what he and Franz have done with language models, and what Jeff Hinton is doing in deep learning, and of course Andrew knows all this, and Andrew's talking about what he and Sale are doing at Stanford.
- ▶ 47:48 Ben Gilbert This is Fei-Fei Li's thing from Stanford.
- ▶ 2:48:45 Ben Gilbert Two of them were from Carnegie Mellon, and one was from Stanford, led by a name that all of you will now recognize, Sebastian Thrun.
- ▶ 2:49:16 Ben Gilbert So what was special about this Stanford team?
- ▶ 2:49:49 Ben Gilbert The Stanford team did the exact opposite.
- ▶ 2:51:59 Ben Gilbert So ultimately, both of these bets worked, and the Stanford team won in super dramatic fashion.
Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 33:21 David Rosenthal Starts his career out of Stanford in 2003 as an associate product manager at Google.
- ▶ 3:29:32 David Rosenthal So when I was a business school student at Stanford, Eric was now
- ▶ 3:40:43 David Rosenthal Andrew Ng from Stanford, Kwok Lee, Oriol Vinales, and oh yeah, in addition to all of those people, the authors of the Transformer paper because Google invented the Transformer and published the paper in June of 2017.
Google Part I: Origins of Search. How the Best Business in Human History Happened (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 7:01 David Rosenthal So, even more so, for future Google to come, for the, 1979 to 1980 academic year, when Larry is six and seven years old, his dad does a sabbatical year at Stanford.
- ▶ 7:12 David Rosenthal So the whole family goes out and lives in Palo Alto, and Stanford and early Silicon Valley there makes a big impression on young Larry.
- ▶ 9:41 David Rosenthal Okay, so as we all know, Larry goes to Michigan undergrad, he graduates in 1995, and then he goes off to Stanford to get his PhD in computer science, where he has a fateful meeting with his business partner, friend, soulmate, Sergey Brin.
- ▶ 10:55 David Rosenthal Well, it turns out Anna was a postdoc at Stanford at this time, and she's the one who organized this New Students Weekend.
- ▶ 11:25 David Rosenthal And another famous local Stanford alum picks up the tab for the group.
- ▶ 11:46 David Rosenthal He'd just see Stanford students there and be like, all right, I got you guys.
- ▶ 14:38 David Rosenthal He graduates high school at age 16, goes to the University of Maryland, gets his undergrad degree in both math and computer science in three years, graduates at age 19, and then, of course, gets into Stanford for his PhD.
- ▶ 14:52 David Rosenthal Do you know what he did in the summer before coming to Stanford?
- ▶ 15:51 David Rosenthal Okay, so fall of 1995, Larry arrives at Stanford, Sergey's already there.
- ▶ 17:16 David Rosenthal Just a couple years before, two other PhD students at Stanford had started this thing called Yahoo.
- ▶ 20:13 Ben Gilbert Is try to rank websites based on how authoritative they are, based on how credible they are, and this is something that has been done somewhere before the web, very close to home for all these Stanford folks, academia.
- ▶ 25:21 David Rosenthal We're in 96, kind of the back half of that first academic year of Larry at Stanford.
- ▶ 25:27 David Rosenthal So with Terry's encouraging Larry and Sergey go forth to undertake this ambitious project, they set up a page on the Stanford internet.
- ▶ 26:03 David Rosenthal So they ask one of their friends there at Stanford, a guy named Scott Hassan, to help them.
- ▶ 31:12 David Rosenthal And Larry and Sergey are gonna come, work at Excite that summer, implement Backrub for their search, you know, basically make Excite into Google, and then they're gonna leave and they're gonna go back to Stanford in the fall.
- ▶ 34:01 David Rosenthal We're going to build this thing ourselves here at Stanford.
- ▶ 34:09 David Rosenthal We went back to Stanford to work on it some more.
- ▶ 37:56 David Rosenthal This has started to spread virally first on the Stanford campus, and then to other academic universities and communities out there get wind of what they're doing, and then it starts spreading into Silicon Valley, and it's like bringing the…
- ▶ 38:15 Ben Gilbert So at one point, they actually did bring down the Stanford network.
- ▶ 39:14 Ben Gilbert David, to your point, they bring down the Stanford network because there's so much traffic.
- ▶ 39:46 Ben Gilbert They're really starting to sop up Stanford's network bandwidth.
- ▶ 40:21 David Rosenthal Stanford's about to tip over if it stays as a project anymore.
- ▶ 40:25 Ben Gilbert Stanford has been very kind to say we're gonna keep housing all the infrastructure for this thing, but at some point this needs to be a company so that you can get it off of our network and fund it on your own.
- ▶ 40:35 David Rosenthal And nobody should shed a tear for Stanford here because as part of the tech transfer to spin it out of the university, they end up getting like one percent of the company or something like that.
- ▶ 40:45 David Rosenthal Stanford did very, very well for their largesse here.
- ▶ 40:50 David Rosenthal So Larry and Sergey go to a professor in the CS department at Stanford named Dave Cheridan, and Dave had started an Ethernet company called Granite Systems with Andy Bechtelsheim from Sun, while also staying as a professor at Stanford at…
- ▶ 44:06 David Rosenthal Larry and Sergey rouse themselves out of bed over on the Stanford campus, head on over to downtown Palo Alto at Dave's house, and Andy drives up.
- ▶ 45:09 Ben Gilbert So, Larry and Sergey need to be able to, like, spin up an entity, have that own the intellectual property from Stanford, and set up a bank account for that entity such that they can deposit this check before it expires.
- ▶ 48:27 Ben Gilbert You're no longer a Stanford project.
- ▶ 55:00 David Rosenthal And what was so great about Yahoo, like, yes, it was started by Jerry Yang and David Filo, you know, two other Stanford PhDs, but it wasn't technology driven.
- ▶ 1:00:03 David Rosenthal Before joining, he'd done his PhD at Stanford and he was a professor at UCSB.
- ▶ 1:02:16 David Rosenthal The other part of it, though, is that the technical challenges and the architecture coming out of Stanford was super unique and novel.
- ▶ 1:04:42 David Rosenthal Because you have all these chunks, and they can live anywhere, and Larry and Sergey already had to grab commodity hardware, you know, hard drives and motherboards directly back at Stanford.
- ▶ 1:12:30 David Rosenthal First at Stanford and then with this little angel around they raised.
- ▶ 1:15:27 David Rosenthal And they hire a recent Stanford undergrad named Salar Kamengar, who joins Google as employee number nine.
- ▶ 1:15:36 David Rosenthal And like many Stanford students at the time, he started using the search product while he was an undergrad, was blown away, and he's like, I gotta go work for this company.
- ▶ 1:17:27 David Rosenthal Number one was all the way back at Stanford,
- ▶ 1:17:34 David Rosenthal You could use Google to search internal Stanford intranet stuff, and people did.
- ▶ 1:17:39 David Rosenthal It was like a great experience for Stanford students.
- ▶ 1:28:41 David Rosenthal And so Jeff works with Marissa Mayer, who just joined from Stanford undergrad, and they're like, okay, like, fine, this is going to have to just be text.
- ▶ 3:25:50 David Rosenthal Yahoo had constructed itself as a media company, even though it was started by two electrical engineering PhDs from Stanford.
Epic Systems (MyChart) · Acquired
- ▶ 11:53 David Rosenthal So two of the schools she applied to, Stanford and the University of Wisconsin,
- ▶ 12:37 David Rosenthal If Judy had gone to Stanford instead, we would probably still be telling this story about her, but it would be a very different story.
- ▶ 3:54:50 Ben Gilbert Abed Mir, a Stanford physician and investor who used Epic firsthand before becoming an investor and was inspired to become an Epic shareholder himself.
TSMC · Acquired
- ▶ 10:47 Ben Gilbert I mean, you have all of the post-World War II defense spending that went in, particularly on the West Coast, with the innovations from Stanford, but has Fairchild Semiconductor been started yet?
- ▶ 11:59 David Rosenthal So in one of the interviews he talks about, one of the Stanford ones, he gets a question from the audience about
- ▶ 27:48 David Rosenthal You know, how much does it cost to go to Stanford then?
- ▶ 27:52 David Rosenthal So Morris goes to Stanford, but he's now like a pig in mud.
- ▶ 28:03 David Rosenthal One of the Stanford interviews is with John Hennessy, the president of Stanford at the time.
- ▶ 30:11 David Rosenthal So a couple of years after he gets back from Stanford, he's still rising through the ranks.
- ▶ 33:45 Ben Gilbert And interestingly enough, the reason I always thought that Fairchild was sort of so successful in those days was out of all the defense spending and research that was being done at Stanford, the government as a customer,
Meta (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 41:27 Ben Gilbert Stanford had Club Nexus.
- ▶ 1:04:43 David Rosenthal So, next couple days after Columbia launches, Facebook launches at Stanford, at Yale.
- ▶ 1:14:02 David Rosenthal Sean is living in Palo Alto, and one of his housemate's girlfriends, who's, I believe, a student at Stanford,
- ▶ 1:35:13 Ben Gilbert and I think Stanford was one of the only ones that really stuck with them for this four hundred million dollar fund.
Microsoft Volume II: The Complete History and Strategy of the Ballmer Years (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 27:06 David Rosenthal Had I known this would happen, I would have gone to Stanford.
- ▶ 27:11 Ben Gilbert Which, of course, is apocryphal because he had no means of going to Stanford at the time.
Microsoft Volume I: The Complete History and Strategy of founding through Windows 95 (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:20:54 David Rosenthal Yeah, I think the only thing even close to it is Berkeley in the Bay Area with a lot of the same dynamics, but there's Stanford there too, so it's kind of like a dual university system in the Bay Area.
- ▶ 4:08:16 Ben Gilbert At Stanford.
Nvidia Part III: The Dawn of the AI Era (2022-2023) (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 15:11 David Rosenthal Three specifically, Greg Corrado, Jeff Dean, and Andrew Ng, the famous Stanford professor.
Nike (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 9:43 David Rosenthal This does not seem like the founder and CEO of Nike, you know, even here talking at Stanford, the most warmly receptive audience possible, like, he was very nervous.
- ▶ 11:15 David Rosenthal So, after Phil graduates, he goes to business school right after undergrad to Stanford, to Stanford GSB, hence the connection.
- ▶ 11:35 David Rosenthal So in Phil's final term there at Stanford, he takes what is then the only quote unquote entrepreneurship course at GSB.
- ▶ 26:30 David Rosenthal So, his genius business plan, I don't know how much of this was part of the Stanford paper or not, is he's gonna drive around to track meets
- ▶ 36:20 David Rosenthal He met Knight at Stanford.
- ▶ 36:22 David Rosenthal Jeff was a Stanford undergrad who ran track and met Knight while he was at GSB.
- ▶ 55:07 Ben Gilbert But a kid off the street can walk out of Stanford and raise eight million dollars today.
- ▶ 59:37 David Rosenthal A lot of this is happening around Stanford.
- ▶ 1:45:09 Ben Gilbert I mean, literally, Phil Knight's Stanford paper is about arbitraging cheap labor from imported goods and selling into markets willing to pay higher prices.
Lockheed Martin (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:02:55 David Rosenthal Might ring some bells for people, especially people who went to Stanford.
- ▶ 1:03:12 David Rosenthal Terman was a Stanford professor.
- ▶ 1:03:21 Ben Gilbert And the government allocated millions and millions of dollars of funding to Harvard and MIT and something like 50,000 dollars to Stanford.
- ▶ 1:03:47 David Rosenthal So after the war, Terman comes back to Stanford, because Harvard shut down the lab.
- ▶ 1:03:52 David Rosenthal He comes back to Stanford, and he does three things.
- ▶ 1:04:04 David Rosenthal He recruits them to Stanford.
- ▶ 1:04:10 Ben Gilbert He's like, I want to make this deal as sweet as possible for you because I want to will Stanford into existence as an engineering institution.
- ▶ 1:04:22 David Rosenthal Two, soon after he gets back to Stanford, he becomes the provost of the entire university.
- ▶ 1:04:28 David Rosenthal And as provost, he completely changes the way tech transfer is done at Stanford.
- ▶ 1:04:35 David Rosenthal No other university has as good of a tech transfer policy as Stanford.
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