Stanford EntrepreneurEntrepreneurship isn’t a career, it’s a way of life

Stanford BASESFiled Under: events, review, websites

Stanford’s Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (BASES) is a great website for general information regarding the entrepreneurial happenings here at Stanford and in the Bay Area.  The goal is to explore issues, facilitate exchange, and provide a forum for students, faculty and professionals in regards to everything entrepreneurship. Overall, the website is lackluster in a couple ways, but the nuggets that a person finds make it well worth exploring. I will admit, though, that I was overall just a tad disappointed with this “glowing” recommendations for the organization.

The Website

Overall, the style is a bit dated and reminds me of websites that aren’t what they’re promoted to be…They say a revision is underway, and I hope it comes soon. The site navigation is a bit difficult, especially since it’s very hard to know all of the information that is encompassed under a single category. For example, the I-Challenge (Innovators’ Challenge) has eight subcategories. Even though it is logical, it is still annoying that I have to first click on the category, then click on any sublink to get where I want to go (and that’s assuming I remember exactly where it was on the site…)

 The Team

This little section of the website is a great way to get started contacting different people in the field. From Stanford faculty members to students who are group/organization vice presidents, you can find out who’s who in this organization. After digging around, I found plenty of ways to contact nearly anyone on the list (professors, students, and professionals) and learn more about the makeup in general. This section is good for those looking to make a solid contact somewhere.

 Membership

A person can sign up for the BASES Digest and/or the BASES job posting list to receive information about upcoming entrepreneurial events and job postings. It’s also worth noting that membership is open to ANYONE. If you’re a college student on another campus, go ahead and learn more about what’s going on in the Bay Area.

 Events & Calendar

Three of the major components of the website relate to the Stanford I-Challenge, E-Challenge, and Social E-Challenge.  There’s a mailing list sign up to receive the most up-to-date information, a FAQ page, an opportunity to view past winner’s entries, and a resources page (these pages exist for each of the three events.) Probably the coolest and most worthwhile portion of this website is the resources page because it includes links to other Stanford groups, Bay Area groups, other entrepreneurship challenges/competitions, national/international entrepreneurship related organizations, Stanford fellowship and research funds, research opportunities, and legal/technical/business plan/etc resources. Of course, most of this information is spread across three pages (with some overlap), but I would still check out the links individually. As for the calendar, I was a bit surprised that the whole month of February has only two events…

 Interact

This section of the website is supposed to connect aspiring entrepreneurs with high tech panels, venture capitalists, and office hours with venture capitalists and professors. While this area seems promising, the details page that is supposed to have all of this information is down.

 Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders

While I’ve mentioned ETL in a couple of posts before this one, it’s still worth noting again. ETL, also known as MS&E 472 to Stanford students, is a speaker series that has one “Entrepreneurial Thought Leader” come in almost every Wednesday to discuss what they do, where they’ve come from, and what entrepreneurship means to them. I took the class last quarter and I’m unofficially taking it again this quarter (I’m enrolled for too many units…) and it is definitely one of the highlights of my Stanford career thus far. What’s great is that each of these talks is turned into a podcast and archived on-site.

 Conclusion

The site has a pretty large goal in mind and while lackluster in some areas, it is definitely helpful in others. I feel that this site’s best use is as a starting point to connect someone to someone else. Even though I am disappointed in some areas, it is mild disappointment, and I’m actually quite excited about the website upgrade that is hopefully coming soon.

Stanford Entrepreneurship NetworkFiled Under: entrepreneurship, review, websites

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.