The Secret Stanford Program No One’s Heard About

From Instagram to Gusto to Sourcegraph, MS&E grads are building billion-dollar companies with an engineering-first approach. Stanford MS&E photo

This month, a series of Poets&Quants articles spotlighted growing discontent among MBA students at Stanford Graduate School of Business, raising questions about how well traditional management education is adapting to an AI-driven economy. 

While few doubt the GSB’s capacity to evolve — it has done so time and again — the more quietly transformative story lies just one quad away, inside the Huang Engineering Center.

There, an often-overlooked graduate program is quietly outpacing expectations and reshaping Silicon Valley’s startup pipeline.

A PATHWAY TO ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Management Science & Engineering, or MS&E, is Stanford’s interdisciplinary hub where technical rigor meets real-world application. By blending startup classes, computation, and optimization under one roof, the department has become an incubator for entrepreneurial talent. Despite enrolling only about 230 master’s students annually, the program punches far above its weight in terms of output and influence.

Its admissions rate, now at 7.8%, is nearly as selective as the GSB’s 6.8%, yet its scale is dramatically leaner. And its results speak volumes. MS&E alumni comprise a double-digit share of every StartX cohort, Stanford’s equity-free accelerator whose portfolio companies have collectively raised over $120 billion and produced 20 unicorns. 

In Y Combinator, widely regarded as the world’s most elite startup accelerator, with sub 1% admit rates for recent batches, recent Stanford admit lists skew heavily toward MS&E majors. Meet Dodo (S24), Origami Agents (F24), Excellence Learning (W25). This year’s MS&E graduates have also joined PearX, an elite accelerator of 20, and won the campus wide NFX Fast competition.

FOUNDERS YOU (PROBABLY) DIDN’T KNOW CAME THROUGH MS&E

Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the co-founders of Instagram, both came through MS&E before selling their startup to Facebook for $1 billion — a platform that has since generated over $150 billion in ad revenue. Josh Reeves, a graduate of the Mayfield Fellows program housed within MS&E, went on to build Gusto, a $10 billion payroll and HR platform serving more than 300,000 businesses.

Other standout alumni include Beyang Liu, co-founder of Sourcegraph, whose AI-powered code search tools are used by millions of developers; Eric Frenkiel, who launched SingleStore, a real-time analytics database that has raised over $300 million; and Dan Berkenstock and Julian Mann, the team behind Skybox Imaging, which sold to Google for $500 million and laid the groundwork for commercial satellite imaging.

Lily Sarafan, another MS&E graduate, scaled TheKey into one of the country’s largest in-home care companies and was recently elected Chair of Stanford’s Board of Trustees. The diversity of sectors — from aerospace to eldercare — only underscores the program’s reach.

WHY MS&E WORKS

Widely seen as “Stanford’s technical MBA” and located in the school of engineering, the program has a quasi-monopoly on entrepreneurship courses. At its center is a founder-first curriculum that treats entrepreneurship not as an extracurricular, but as a core intellectual pursuit. Courses such as Lean LaunchPad, Technology Venture Formation (known on campus as MS&E 273), and Hacking for Defense allow students to earn academic credit for building real companies. 

Many of these classes either require or strongly recommend having an MS&E teammate — effectively making the program a gatekeeper to Stanford’s most startup-relevant coursework.

“What you’re seeing is engineers signing up to these MS&E classes, switching to MS&E as a co-term, or just getting to know the MS&E folks personally” said an alum. The real secret is that you don’t need to work on a startup on top of your studies, rather MS&E makes it easy to get credit for working on a startup project, with professors often connected, or acting as angel investors.

Applications for these classes are competitive, and a team several graduate students, including MS&E, co-founded Stanford Founders, a student organization, to help with team formation. Stanford Founders has now grown to the largest on-campus graduate founders association, hosting its own Demo Day and attracting numerous investors.

Other MS&E programs such as Mayfield Fellows, Accel Fellows or Threshold Fellows allow MS&E students to gain first-hand experience in companies and develop close connections to venture.

“When I started my company, it was a no-brainer, I just called my mentor to talk about fundraising and get them into the round” one MS&E alum said.

Students highlight the diverse mix of backgrounds of their peers. About a third of the cohort comes from undergrad, many of them engineers from CS, another good third comes with prior professional experience, and another from other schools. The program’s flexibility means that professionals can also pursue their job full-time, leading to a rich idea landscape.

Critically, MS&E founders benefit from the university’s unique infrastructure. StartX, Stanford’s on-campus accelerator, provides office space, resources, and a powerful alumni network — without taking a single share of equity. Twenty unicorns later, it stands as a launchpad that rivals the best global programs.

The faculty, too, are deeply embedded in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Professors like Tom Byers and Ann Miura-Ko don’t just teach — they invest, mentor, and sit on the boards of student-founded companies. The result is a collapsing of the traditional gap between academic theory and real-world execution. 

Flexibility also plays a central role. Master’s students can apply up to 17 units of free electives from across the School of Engineering toward their degree, enabling them to pursue hands-on projects without sacrificing academic progress. For many, that means launching a company doesn’t have to come at the cost of their studies — it can be the centerpiece of them.

COMPLEMENT, NOT COMPETITOR

To be clear, the success of MS&E doesn’t diminish the role of the GSB. If anything, the two schools are complementary. The GSB cultivates global leaders, strategic thinkers, and a robust alumni network that spans every major industry. MS&E, by contrast, focuses on turning technical expertise into venture-backed execution — often with astonishing speed. Together, they form a dual engine driving Stanford’s continued dominance at the intersection of academia and innovation.

Calls from MBA students for more startup-aligned pedagogy are not misplaced. But in MS&E, Stanford may already have a template for the future of graduate education: one that seamlessly integrates technical depth, entrepreneurial credit, and access to capital into the fabric of the academic experience.

Sovann A. P. Linden is a co-founder of Excellence Learning, a YC-backed startup. He holds a Master of Science degree from Stanford University in MS&E, with research experience at the Stanford School of Medicine. Previously, Sovann has worked in venture capital at Softbank Investment Advisers in London and G Squared in San Francisco. He holds an MMath from Oxford University, which he started at 15. Mateo H. Petel is an AI research scientist with a background in Computational Sciences and Applied Mathematics. He holds a Master of Science degree from Stanford University in MS&E. Mateo has led research projects with Google DeepMind, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the European Space Agency, and academic teams at Harvard and Oxford. A Fulbright scholar and award-winning social entrepreneur, he also advises international institutions — including the United Nations and the European Union — on emerging technology policy.

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