America’s most selective university is holding its graduation on Saturday, and many of its graduates likely have their pick of lucrative gigs at tech giants like Facebook (FB), Google (GOOG, GOOGL) and Microsoft (MSFT).
But some Stanford graduates may choose a potentially less lucrative and definitely riskier route.
“Startup is the buzz word,” says Benjamin Williams, a rising senior studying computer science at Stanford. “People talk about [starting] companies maybe even too much; it’s the vibe and the culture.”
While Stanford has a long history of producing entrepreneurs, current students Yahoo Finance spoke to suggest they might be more obsessed with startups than ever. Some of that might have to do with timing; Stanford graduates might be less risk-averse since the economy is thriving.
Moreover, millennials in general seem to have startup fever.
A survey of 18- to 34-year-olds from September found that 51% of 1,200 people surveyed knew someone who has launched or worked for a startup. And 78% of those who did know someone who worked or launched a startup considered that person to be a success. Meanwhile, 62% of the total millennials within the survey even considered a startup of their own.
Why startups?
“People talk about doing startups for the sake of doing startups,” says Lawrence Murata, a soon-to-be graduate at the School of Engineering. But Murata believes startups should evolve from the desire to “solve a bigger problem.”
Murata should know since he’s worked on a number of business ventures. For example, Murata and his friends were avid music listeners but didn’t enjoy their music listening experience — so they set out to create onetune.fm, a free music streaming service.
Though this project did not turn into a startup, Murata and friends continue to create projects that have gained attention like CS+Social Good. That project was launched to “connect students to use technology for taking action and collaborating on the world’s most pressing problems,” Murata wrote in a Medium post.
Now, already onto another project focused around communication between vehicles, Murata says his mission is to “create technology that will help reduce the number of driving-related deaths from 1.3 million deaths per a year to zero.”
Post-graduation, Murata intends to stay in Silicon Valley to work with a venture capital firm in order to accelerate this current project. He adds, “Being here helps because of your proximity to startups, to investors, and the tech innovation that is happening here.”
Stanford’s proud entrepreneurial history
Stanford students’ desire to join or create a startup of their own reflects a willingness to take a major risk. Unlike larger, more established companies, startups are more likely to fail, which could leave these graduates unemployed very early in their careers. While working at Google and Facebook may seem intriguing with incredible perks, the opportunities to strike it rich at these tech-leading companies are limited.