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.
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