StartX accelerator taps into Stanford
Supported by grants, nonprofit StartX gives startups practical help to get their businesses off the ground Over the years, Stanford University has educated more than its share of tech entrepreneurs, including Yahoo's Jerry Yang and David Filo and Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page. [...] tech founders looking to get their starts have been turning to a new resource, StartX, an accelerator tapping into the Stanford community. Just down the street from the campus, the three-month program nurtures emerging entrepreneurs, partnering them with mentors and offering them free office space, financial aid, and legal and tech services. StartX is part of a boom in tech accelerators and incubators such as Y Combinator and TechStars, where startups spend an intense few months learning the ropes and getting their businesses up and running. StartX is targeted at the Stanford population, requiring at least one of its founders to be a Stanford student, professor or recent graduate. Supported by $1.65 million in grants from the Kauffman Foundation, Cisco, Intuit and others, it's already produced 125 startups - and counting. Last week, its ninth class of startups took the stage before an audience of Silicon Valley investors and media. In an interview, 24-year-old founder Cameron Teitelman talked about how he came to launch StartX and how it distinguishes itself from the growing crowd of tech incubators. Stanford was great for an incubation experience in the sense that you get to meet your team members, you get to build technical skills, you get to be inspired. [...] when people got down to the actual building of the company, the resources were too inefficient to help them in a more practical and guided sense. (If) I need to figure out how to hire this person and create their employment contract next week, I can't sit through a three-month employment law school class. [...] having a group of peers going through the same thing is really helpful to keep you positively motivated. The third part of the peer community is peer education, everything from fundraising to how do I set up QuickBooks (accounting). The culture of people sharing information and the collective intelligence you can create around that is incredibly powerful.