After a decade of VC influence at Stanford, what’s next?

Stanford is now an investment and real estate firm that runs a school on the side as a tax break. Some years back, in the 1990s (?) the university created the Stanford Management Company to manage the endowment. That was originally located out on Sand Hill Road, near the VCs. SMC started investing in startups. Like Google, Cisco, etc. This was a new thing at the time. Classically, universities only invested in passive investments.

Over time, the Stanford Management Company produced very good returns, and acquired more influence over the university. It's become far more than an investment office.

Leland Sr. would have loved how it came out.

This was a snippet of a whole report. Here is the full report https://stanford.app.box.com/v/Stanford-Tech-History-Project

This is highly misleading on a key proof: Microsoft was never venture backed in the common meaning. They did accept VC investment from David F. Marquardt to get him as an advisor while they restructured to go public. His firm owned 6% and was never a major investor. Microsoft was profitable pretty much from the start and didn’t need the money.

Why can't Standford open another campus in, say, Austin?

My guess is more VC influence

> Venture capitalists are a primary source of vigor [1] for the entrepreneurial ecosystem of Silicon Valley, and venture capital as an asset class largely punches above its weight.

Maybe I'm a bit cynical, but this is the first sentence in a post written by an investor about an investor. So, ya know, I'm a bit skeptical.

The cited paper does very little to make me feel any better. For one, it's not a history paper - you know... the closest bit of academia to the "study of what happened." It's an economics paper that uses some sort of system model to argue for what links / nodes are valuable in the "silicon valley network."

Yeah, nah. Systems like these rely on far to many assumptions-from-no-where to make compelling arguments about how the real world works. One can massage these models to output pretty much any result one wants (tweak the constants a bit in favor of the venture capitalists, if you so desire).

I'll also note I stopped reading the post there. The rest of it might be inspired, but I couldn't make it through that first sentence.

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0308514090278682...

?

At the end of the article, the author seem to have listed every diversity criteria, except the diversity of thought. With Democrat to Republican ratio of professors in the leading US Universities being 11.5 to 1 [1], there is a growing danger that Stanford will go the way other universities have gone: lowering academic standards, admitting students based in their identity affiliations (and of course rich parents who could skirt the system), lowering faculty standards in technical departments, etc... The Stanford startups will move towards social engineering, disguised as impact investing. Move towards normalizing the discrimination against Asian and Indian male students and entrepreneurs.

[1] https://econjwatch.org/articles/faculty-voter-registration-i...