SSE Labs Announces Impressive List Of Advisors, Offers Sneak Peek At Latest Startups
“At the creation of the program, we interviewed 220 Stanford founders to gauge what, if anything, was missing from Stanford entrepreneurial community”, SSE Labs co-founder Cameron Teitelman said. “For the most part, students agreed that there was little in the way of direct support, through resources, advisors, and other educational opportunities for entrepreneurs trying to launch their companies”.
So, to address this issue, SSE Labs forged a partnership with Aol to offer startups office space in Palo Alto and began recruiting a group of mentors and advisors who could share their startup experience with the student entrepreneurs. In turn, SSE Labs offered customized education through workshops and office hours on topics ranging from UI/UX design to marketing and employment issues, as well as free web hosting via Amazon, and legal services from the local arm of law firm Dorsey & Whitney.
SSE Labs has also made its office space available to Stanford alumni companies, working out a mutually beneficial deal that meant, instead of paying rent, the alumni would become entrepreneurs-in-residence and in-house mentors to the student startups. Ha said that Labs is already playing home to several Y Combinator graduates as well as Disrupt finalist, Lark.
Similar to its well-known peers Y Combinator and 500 Startups, SSE Labs consists of a three-month-long mentoring program, consisting of three sessions — one in the fall, spring, and summer. At the end of each session, the accelerator holds a demo day, in which companies present their businesses to a group of potential investors. (Labs will be hosting its latest demo day on June 1.) Of course, unlike its fellow accelerators, Labs is a non-profit, educational initiative focused on the university’s entrepreneurially-inclined — and it does not take equity in its startups. Though, of course, if you want to participate, your whole team doesn’t have to be at Stanford; the program simply requires one founder to be enrolled in the university within the last 3 quarters.
Stanford has seen many successful entrepreneurs pass through its doors; thanks in part to its proximity to Silicon Valley and the abundant proximate financial and educational resources, the university has long cultivated an entrepreneurial (and innovative) spirit. As an example of the level of interest in entrepreneurship, Ha tells me that, in the year since Labs’ founding, 300 companies have applied to the program.
With so much student interest in the program, Labs has been able to build an impressive bullpen of advisors, partners, and mentors that would make any young entrepreneur eager to gain entry into the program. In fact, about a month-and-a-half ago, Vinod Khosla, founder of Sun Microsystems and successful venture capitalist (and a Stanford graduate himself), signed onto the program as a sponsor and advisor.
And today, the list of advisors and mentors has been rounded out to include the likes of Greylock Partner and former Mozilla CEO John Lilly, Charles River Ventures Parnter and Twitter early investor, George Zachary, August Capital Partner Howard Hartenbaum, Google Developer Advocate and veteran of Microsoft, AltaVista, and Napster, Don Dodge, and more. You can find the full list here.
“It’s been great to be involved with SSE Labs so far; they’re off to a fantastic start in terms of finding and supporting awesome entrepreneurs associated with Stanford”, John Lilly said. “It’s a great combination of community, mentorship and support, and I’m really excited to see them turn SSE Labs into a long-lasting, high-impact Stanford & Silicon Valley institution”.
SSE Labs has already graduated 24 companies, ranging from cleantech and biotech, to consumer web and enterprise. Of those graduates, at least 6 have raised seed capital, including educational game creator Motion Math, which took part in last year’s summer session. (You can read our coverage Motion Math last month here.) Another 5 Labs startups are in the midst of raising funding, including Game Closure, which we wrote about in February and Qwhispr. What’s more, George Zachary said that he has already invested in 2 SSE Labs startups and is working on closing a third deal. So, the money is flowing into the accelerator, and startups are more than eager to take advantage.
And, for the first time, SSE Labs is giving TechCrunch a sneak peek at its latest batch of startups. Below are 8 of the 10 startups from Labs’ spring program. (The last two aren’t quite ready for public viewing yet.) You can check these companies out live on stage at SSE’s Demo Day in Palo Alto on June 1st, at which point Ha said that the Stanford accelerator will also be announcing some exciting news of its own. So stay tuned.
The Startups:
SongSpring offers users a vast and highly available selection of music that they will be able to stream from the cloud. The service will use a consumption based model, in which users are only charged for what they actually listen to. This ultimately lowers the barrier to entry for users to have access to an extensive and personal music collection without actually purchasing it or paying upkeep.
PredictiveEdgeis a SaaS-based e-commerce pricing solution that drives profits for online retailers by helping them set the right prices for their products. The startup aims to bring Amazon’s pricing capabilities to all online retailers.