Jan
10
Stanford Entrepreneurship Network
January 10, 2008 |
With a primary goal of uniting all of the Stanford resources related to entrepreneurship, the Stanford Entrepreneurship Network, in my mind, has done a very good job at beginning this process. The site is easy to navigate, and provides information about entrepreneurship groups, events, resources, and a unique program called Coaches-on-Call. There is a blog created by Christina Harvett, but it hasn’t been updated within the past month. An overview of my thoughts are as follows:
Entrepreneurship Groups
A detailed list is provided on the site, with a short synopsis, link, and email address for each program’s head coordinator. There are groups for biodesign, the Graduate School of Business (GSB), venture capital, internationally focused entrepreneurship, and some “general purpose” groups. Nothing too exciting, but the best list I’ve seen so far.
Events
Not much information is here. One resource is a redirect to the BASES calendar and another to the events page of Stanford’s main website. A couple other haphazard links exist. I would like to see a more inclusive, compiled list of all events of all the groups talked about, but such a list is nowhere to be found.
Competitions
As of the day I checked, there are only five competitions listed here. One is an international competition called Uuni with Stanford students as contacts, another is a GSB business plan competition, a third is the social e-challenge, fourth is the cleantech venture challenge, and the last competition is the Gumball Challenge. Also, this area of the site fails to include the Innovation Tournament of E-Week 2008, even though it’s mentioned in the events page. I’m going to check out all of these resources, and Uuni looks especially interesting. For more information regarding the Gumball Challenge, please refer to my About page or their website.
Resources
This list of resources is impressive and any aspiring entrepreneur, especially those who are Stanford students, should check it out. From high tech to doing business in China, starting a business at college or doing business with Stanford, it’s all here. I would like to iterate, though, that the list is by no means complete. Rather, it is one of the more impressive aspects of the site.
Coaches-on-Call
By far, this dimension of the website is THE coolest. The goal of this program called Coaches-on-Call is to provide a professional mentoring program for current Stanford students. “Coaches”, or professionals in the field, come in for two hours and conduct 30 minute appointments with students and give advice regarding business plans, best practices, and other things. Checking out the mentors, most have a high tech background, and many of them are near the top of their field. A couple are serial entrepreneurs, and some are venture capitalists. All students have to do to schedule one of these appointments is to email a short bio to the administrator, Ms. Harvett. Be warned though, the largest caveat is that students cannot ask for a job or funding.
Conclusion and Suggestions
Overall, the website provides a great starting point for any entrepreneur. There are many things missing, but since it looks like a relatively new site, I will wait (somewhat) patiently for developments to occur. One thing that needs to be done asap is a better events calendar that has more information from all of the groups and campus-wide activities. A cool little feature to add on top of this is an export button to add events to iCal or other calendars (much like the Stanford news page does.) Another major suggestion is to add a simple mechanism for allowing students to sign up, edit, and discuss entrepreneurial developments and information. If it is going to act as a hub for entrepreneurial information, why not provide the infrastructure and allow students/outsiders to add resources/groups/events/competitions? If these two things would be implemented, the site would increase it’s value 10-fold.
Comments
1 Comment so far
Hi Travis,
I like your blog and added it to the SEN site.
I think your comments are very valid and we will defintely work on adding more features to the site.