28 Tech Stars Who Graduated From Stanford University

Stanford University has bred some of the most influential tech entrepreneurs since the beginning of Silicon Valley.

Whether it’s due to the top-notch engineering and business programs, extensive alumni network, or university-affiliated accelerator programs, many of the industry’s most important figures have earned degrees here, starting with Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in the mid-30s and continuing on to today’s startup founders. 

We’ve rounded up some of the most notable Stanford alums in tech. 

HP cofounders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard met at football tryouts.

Hewlett and Packard, considered by many to be the founding fathers of Silicon Valley, were Stanford students. 

The pair first met in the early 1930s while attending radio engineering classes taught by professor Fred Terman, who would later be essential to the founding of HP.

They both tried out for Stanford’s football team, though only Packard would make it. 

Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin dropped out of their Ph.D. program.

Perhaps the most well-known founders to come out of Stanford, students Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google while working towards their Ph.D’s in computer science. 

The pair first met in 1995. Page, a recent graduate of the University of Michigan, was considering attending Stanford; Brin was assigned to show him around.

The following year, they began work on a search engine they called BackRub, which operated on Stanford servers for more than a year before it began to take up too much bandwidth. 

Sun Microsystems cofounders Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, and Andy Bechtolsheim named their company after the university’s network.

Khosla, McNealy, and Bechtolsheim were Stanford grad students when they founded software company Sun Microsystems in 1982.

The company’s name is an acronym for Stanford University Network, the campus’ computer system. 

Bill Joy, who was a Ph.D. student at Berkeley at the time, is also considered an original founder of Sun.

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28 Tech Stars Who Graduated From Stanford University