 Okay, we're back here live. This is Silicon Angle, Wikibon's exclusive coverage of Stanford Excel's symposium, the 17th annual symposium This is the Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract a signal from the noise This is our fourth season with the Cube, breaking into back into Silicon Valley and... Scholar program, you know. Head honcho, I don't know what your official title is, but you're big. Scholar program, you know. Entrepreneurship, Stanford Technology, Adventure Program, Scholar program. The Mayfield Fellows, we've got to know each other through Tina's C-League and the Mayfield Fellows, we had our last startup. You're involved with all the big VCs. You're at Stanford University. You're here at the event, so welcome to the Cube. Yeah, it's a pleasure. And tell us one, what's happening right here, why are you here? I know you're super busy and really thankful for your time. Tell us what's happening. So, I just had the pleasure of being co-moderator of a panel on big data with Ping Lee. But he was kind enough to give me a little airtime in announcing a program that we are getting underway this week. As we speak, it's called the Excel Innovation Scholars. It is a education program at Stanford University that is focused on our PhD students in engineering. You may not know this because it always shocks me, but Stanford gives 250 diplomas every June for a PhD in engineering, you know, computer science to civil environmental engineering to, you know, material science. 250 PhDs. 200, I mean, just think about this, 250 diplomas. So, the number of total number of students are much more, but it takes five or six years to get a PhD. So, that's a big chunk of the university. There's a funnel of thousands of people in there. Yeah, it's a big chunk. And so, the 250 students are likely to go into industry, it turns out. Some of them go to academic life and they've been trained as scholars and that's great, but a lot of them go into industry, if not initially, eventually. Or they have something to do with a startup, eventually, and related to their technology. So, why not learn about entrepreneurial leadership, technology commercialization, the way Silicon Valley works, you know, intellectual property, why not learn that stuff while you're a student getting your PhD and rather than just, you know, guessing at it? So, I know Audrey McLean has been involved in this cross-discipline things with some entrepreneurship and other programs. Stanford's not new to interdisciplinary training. No. So, how does this relate to all that stuff? Yeah, so my real job is, I get to hang out with people, like Audrey McLean, you mentioned Argentina Sea League and Steve Blank and the whole lean startup. So, we already offer 40 courses a year. This is out of the engineering school on entrepreneurship and innovation. With mentoring. We already do that. Most of them, though, like for example, Audrey's class on opportunity evaluation, is targeted at master students. Sometimes a PhD student will take it, but they're really pretty busy just getting their PhD. We're also the home to the Mayfield Fellows program, which, you know, has gotten a lot of notoriety over the last 20 years for undergraduates. So, we have these 40 courses. This is the first time that we have something that's specific for a PhD student and an engineer to talk to, so they can learn about innovation, leadership and entrepreneurship. And Stanford is known for obviously a lot of commercial successes. There's always the rival between Cal and the big game, Berkeley versus Stanford. You know, and it's pretty much common knowledge that Berkeley pumps out more academics and more people recycle back into teaching than Stanford and vice versa. That seems to be the reputation. Not sure what the update is there, but a lot of PhD students from Stanford go out and start companies. Yeah, or advise companies. Is your program a primer for that? Is it more of, is it like discipline skills? Are they getting hands-on? Yeah, I would say, yes. It's more than lifelong learning. It'll be one year long, starting the summer, about an afternoon a week, set of case studies, lectures, workshops, field trips. And, you know, whether it, it's not, it's not a founder's school. It just means that- They're going to wear the data. Yeah, and they also have an appreciation for what it will take, whether it's their technology or some technology they became, you know, apprised of or learned of when they were here. How will that actually diffuse itself or enter into society? And anytime that can be accelerated, it's better. And it's, I actually hope it's a program that, like the Mayfield Fellows program, which is a work study program on entrepreneurship for undergrads, now it is modeled at other universities around the country. What we hope to see with Excel innovation scholars, we like, we hope to see that modeled by other PhD programs around the country. How does it work? Do they get paid? Is it like some people from Excel fund the classrooms? How does it all work? Well, Excel gives us both a lot of support in terms of not just finance, financial support to run it and staff it, but also advice on, on what the curriculum ought to be. So they are, they are just our supporters, but this is put and put together by a great set of academics, including Tina Selig's involved, Kate Rosenbooth's involved, and Jeffrey Schachs is an IP of lawyers involved. So there's, that's going to be put together as a series of, you know, workshops and sessions that will roll up to a nice program. So let me ask you now, that's good to get that out of the way. What does Tom Byers excited about right now? The market's changing, entrepreneurship's changing. Stanford has had the most amazing success with its online education program, even going back to the days when we first got to know each other almost in 2005 with the podcasting. You guys were first with an iTunes channel. Yeah, you corner it, it's going well. Yeah. Yeah, now with the success of the open source. Yeah, what are we working on? Trinity, what are you excited about? Is that scare you? Are you excited by that? Well, no, I'm particularly excited. We've never been more excited. So this is a nice pilot program we're doing for PhD students and I think it'll be hugely significant. The other major project we're working on is a grant from the National Science Foundation, $10 million from the Obama administration to help all engineering undergraduate schools in America teach innovation. Wouldn't that be nice? There are 350 of them. You mentioned Berkeley. I'm a Berkeley grad, love Berkeley. Here we are at Stanford. Why is it that a kid has to go to Berkeley or Stanford to learn about engineering and innovation as an undergrad? Why can't they go anywhere? And again, there are 350 of those around the country and the country really believes that it wants to be that, the nation that's all about innovation, it's going to start with undergraduate engineers. So we have a $10 million grant to go help infuse that kind of lessons and learnings into all 350 engineering schools. So we're excited about it. It's called Epicenter. I invite people to have a look at that. While SiliconANGLE TV has had great success, we've reached over 8 million people in our, with our open source content. Well, we could use your help on this thing. We'd love to work with Stanford. Stanford is a great institution and I want to get an update from you because I've gotten to know Tina Selig as well as yourself and your mission to open source, speaking of open source, open source Silicon Valley. You mentioned the engineering... Especially the engineering students and science students. The entrepreneur. How's that going? I know Tina's been traveling the world. You guys have been doing a lot of it through the Kauffman Foundation and a variety of other institutions. How is the open source or the syndication of Silicon Valley's formula working? Well, it's the only way, right? I mean, it's just, as I mentioned earlier, it makes no sense to me that you have to go to a certain number of schools to not only get a great training in a particular domain, computer science or electrical engineering or chemical engineering or bioengineering, whatever. And then to be there, and then you have to somehow be compromised and say, well, I might get a little bit of general education, but I'm not going to learn anything formally about innovation, entrepreneurship, creativity, all that sort of stuff. So, you know, faculty moves slowly and we love our peers around the country. But what the sea change, the big change now is that we can now help those faculty provide them with modules. I'm talking about online modules and so on. Or the students themselves, like Tina's class right now has tens of thousands of students taking it directly, her creativity class, the same one she teaches here as we speak right now at 11 o'clock, we are now able to reach them with these MOOCs. So it's a, it's a bit, you know, we're here at a big data conference. It's a big change. You're throwing confetti of knowledge out in the world, not just physical presence. But high quality knowledge. And because I really am obsessed about those 500,000, and I know you're worldwide, but let's just pick the United States for a minute. 500,000 kids in the United States are getting a master, I mean a bachelor's degree in computer science or engineering. We want them to be more innovative in entrepreneurship. No matter what they do, whether they found something or joined something or something. It isn't absolutely. And so there's a, there's a chance to do that now, like never before. Well, I know you do a lot of work at Stanford and all that stuff, but I want to ask you more of a personal question because you've been an industry, you've interfaced with venture capitalists, you've entrepreneurs that you've worked with have been successful. I have to ask you, because you're on a great, you're in a great position. You get to see the old world and the new world. You see the future before other people. I have to ask you, because Stanford is pioneering this open source business model, it probably scares a lot of people. So the naysayers will say, why should we open source all these classrooms? We won't get people to enroll in our, in our institution. Why will someone come to Stanford if they can get the content for free? Oh, I have to, I didn't know those are, those are, and that's a whole half-hour discussion right now. I don't, Stanford's applications have never been higher and more. I heard record year this year. Yeah. And again, again. And the peers too, the MITs and in our case, and Jeremy's appears like Georgia Tech and MIT and Illinois and so forth. And they're all, I don't think that's going to change because there's no replacement of being, it will never be the same as residential education. But it, but it can augment it. We can not only make the experience for the students here better with flipping the classrooms in the appropriate ways, but also we can share and rising tide will raise all the votes. And it's also like signal origination. Like, you know, we say it's looking at because we give our content away for free, same thing. We feel that if you spread content and knowledge, high quality knowledge, signal from the noise, it always comes back. Right. To the origination. If it's Stanford, Stanford, right? So you also believe that, right? Yeah, but it is fascinating to watch how the business models of these places, and I'm just one professor here and teaches entrepreneurship. So, you know, this is a, you know, living case to watch how the universities and then also the state schools, how they're going to deal with it. So it's fun to watch it all. And that's why it's important for me to note the highlight. You guys at Stanford have pioneered the most amazing thing, hundreds of thousands of people outside of Stanford, connected into that cerebral cortex. We just believe everybody can learn about entrepreneurship and benefit from it. Well, say hi to Tina Sealy for us. You guys do a great job, the Stanford Technology Venture Program. Thank you, John. You have the Mayfield Fellows, great stuff. We're here, Exclusive Silicon Angles, the Cube. This is where we extract the signal from the noise. We go out to all the events. We're also simultaneously live in San Francisco right now at the Amazon Web Services Summit for developers. We're here at Stanford, Tom Byers from Stanford University. We'll write back with our next guest after the short break.