Stanford entrepreneurship seminars online

A great boon for online etrepreneurship students like me is the Stanford entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar program. The program consists of weekly lectures held at Stanford as part of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and the Management Science and Engineering (MS and E) graduate program (the seminar series is one of the reasons why I applied to this program) . The lectures are conducted by eminent entrepreneurs and VCs such as Guy Kawasaki, Vinod Khosla, Larry Page etc. The great news is that I recently found the videos of these lectures available online for free! How good is this! It's like attending a real Stanford class on the web without having to get admitted and whats more, you don't even have to pay the tuition! This is a great initiative from a great university that has been the breeding ground for the best startups in the world.

The videos available right now are of the lectures conducted during this year's winter semester only. The archives of the previous year's seminars are sadly taken off the site. Snippets of some of them can be found at the edcorner of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program website.

Brief comments on the seminars completed so far:

1. Tom Byers (Professor and deputy chair of MS and E) introduces the program and the speakers lined up for this year and goes on to discuss entrepreurship as an academic subject. Very informative from a conceptual point of view and a necessary lecture to set the stage for the series of speakers to follow every week.

2. Jeff and Bobby Beaver (Founders of Zazzle) talk about the Zazzle story, Bootstrapping, the Zazzle way and lessons learnt. Its a very well conducted seminar, excellent in its appropraiteness for a university audience (they attended the same lecture series as Stanford students 10 years back!) This is by far the best of the videos - an exciting story, inspirational cast and great pictures on the slides of their garage in which they started up.

3. Janice Fraser (co-Founder and CEO of Adaptive Path) talks about Adaptive Path, a company that does some really exciting work. Adaptive epitomizes what the web has come to be today.
This is a must watch lecture for 2 reasons -1-> its another great startup story and 2-> it gives a lowdown on the opportunities around web 2.0 that companies like Adaptive Path are exploiting. After watching it be sure to visit adaptivepath.com and read the case study on how adaptive made the registration process of this very web portal - Blogger so much more user friendly and got more people like me to start their own blogs!