Silicon Valley, the term coined by Ralph Vaerst, refers to the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area that houses many of the world’s largest silicon chip manufacturers and innovators.  Well, that was then, when silicon chip manufacturing boomed.  And it is no longer dominated by dot-com companies that once reigned over a decade ago.  Now, Silicon Valley is the home of web services like Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Taskrabbit, and Cloudflare.  And with this transition, the gates of Silicon Valley opened up, granting new opportunity for startups.

“That industry is bringing a lot of talent to Silicon Valley, and a very different type of talent than it was in the early 2000s,” said Fawwaz Habbal, executive dean for education and research at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).  “Our students in general are extremely well-equipped to do a lot of it, both in engineering and on the business side.”

But Silicon Valley is just a part of the whole equation.  Of all the innovations we’ve had the pleasure of enjoying, aren’t you even a bit curious where the geniuses behind our favorite  web services came from?

Standford

Did you know that the co-founders of Instragram, the photosharing app acquired by Facebook for a whopping $1 billion, were from Stanford and that their first investor was an alumni there?  Yeah, Stanford isn’t just a typical business school that teaches students how to handle a business or how to start them.  Stanford helps students turn their business dreams into reality.

The founder of Sierra Ventures, Peter C. Wendell, has been teaching Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital, part time, at Stanford for twenty-one years, and he invites sixteen venture capitalists to visit and work with his students.  Google chairman Eric Schmidt, Intuit co-founder Scott Cook, prominent communications and public-relations executive in Silicon Valley Raymond Nasr are just some of the top dogs that join Wendell’s class.

Evan Spiegel is a senior at Standford who sought the help of Wendell and Nasr for the app he and his fraternity brother created,  Snapchat.  The idea came to him when one of his friends said, “I wish these photos I am sending this girl would disappear.”  Many of us have photos we regret ever taking and even sending to our friends, and we all wished there was a way to make them all vanish.  Well, that’s what Snapchat does – you take a photo, send it to your friends, then after 10 seconds it would just vanish.  Cool, huh?  So Wendell and Nasr helped Spiegel get a meeting with Google’s venture capital arm to make his app come to life.  Now, Spiegel and Google are talking.

Harvard

The Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) prepares students for the real world.  One great example is Zachary Hamed ’14 who took CS 50, SEAS’s introductory computer science course, in the fall of 2010.  For his final project, he developed Aid Aide – a website akin to a tax software designed to help prospective college students navigate the federal applications for financial aid.

Hack Harvard, a student group that collaborates on software, helped Hamed iron out the kinks in his project, which helped him prepare for the Harvard College Innovation (I3) Challenge last spring. Aid Aide won at I3 and Hamed received the $10,000 McKinley Family Grant for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Leadership in a Social Enterprise.
Aside from helping him iron out his project, Hack Harvard connected Hamed with a business mentor,Andrew Rosenthal, a founder of Startup Tribe at Harvard Business School(HBS).

“He’s an email away from a chat over coffee,” says Hamed, who is a computer science concentrator at SEAS. “He’s invaluable for connecting with HBS. He knows exactly who to talk to.”

His relationship with Rosenthal helped Hamed when he discovered that another company was developing a financial aid website in the same niche as his own during the summer. With Rosenthal’s help, Hamed met with the other company’s venture capitalists, considered moving to Silicon Valley to join the company but eventually made a deal to merge the two projects, which allowed him to return to school at Harvard in the fall.

Wharton School

The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School opened a satellite campus in San Francisco to attract more MBA students from the tech industry.  They cater to those who want to go back to school and get an MBA but cannot leave Silicon Valley because of their company.

Wharton offers an MBA degree for nearly $175,000 for 24 months, which includes  tuition, fees, food, lodging and a lot more like study rooms equipped with Skype cameras, high speed internet and Wi-Fi.

These are just some examples of how schools helped students get on their feet.  Not only do schools provide us with the knowledge, they can also be the bridge that connects us to our dreams.  Yeah, there are some people who succeeded without finishing school, but they had the skills and talent, and were fortunate enough to make valuable connections.  That doesn’t happen to everyone.