Stanford Founders — the University’s first student organization focused on pioneering an interdisciplinary approach to entrepreneurship for graduate students — hosted its inaugural “Demo Day” on Thursday night. Graduate students across all seven of Stanford’s schools came together to pitch their startups to venture capitalists.

Stanford Founders has 1,150 active members from over 100 countries and provides its members a myriad of resources, including tailored events focused on nurturing entrepreneurial skills, co-founder matching, sector-specific mixers and resource-sharing for startup growth.

Demo Day startups ranged from a co-founder matching app to artificial intelligence, applied to medicine, education and finance. 

“Startups are not just for ‘business people’ anymore,” said co-President Hunter Zhang M.S. ’25.

Students across departments came together to form teams and prepared three minute pitches for a panel of investor judges: Keith Bender from Pear, Joanna Litcher from Emerson Collective and James da Costa from a16z. 

“We invest quite heavily in the Stanford ecosystem in particular,” Bender said.

The demos were followed by a networking session during which each team of founders staffed a table, where anyone could stop by and ask questions. 

Stanford Founders President Johnny Chang M.S. ’25 said the organization began with a group of ten graduate student founders sharing resources through WhatsApp. The group grew from an initial ten to 600 members in three months, Chang said, eventually pivoting to in-person events that catered to innovators in finance, AI, energy and sustainability, healthcare, aerospace and defense and more.

Chang said he recognized a pressing need for a cross-department student organization dedicated to graduate student entrepreneurship.

“The GSB has many resources, but there were none really for graduate students across different disciplines,” Chang said. 

One challenge for student entrepreneurs is the ability to find a responsible co-founder, Zhang said. Stanford Founders takes a new approach by hosting matching events that connect talents across different disciplines, rather than confining the scope of entrepreneurship to the Graduate School of Business (GSB), he added. 

The group’s vice president of Healthcare, Chris Bradbury MBA ’26, said talents are lost in the consolidation of entrepreneurial resources in the GSB, making the process of accessing those resources inefficient and in need of overhaul. Stanford Founders is working with a slate of organizations on campus to try to and diversify Stanford’s entrepreneurial ecosystem . 

“Many of the organizations here have the same mission: to help founders go from zero to one,” Chang said. “But right now there isn’t that much collaboration across different organizations.”

Chang added that the most successful startups usually have founders with relevant industry expertise. 

Chang sees a myriad of opportunities to create a connected ecosystem where people who have kickstarted their product at Affiliated Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (ASES) or Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (BASES) can come to Stanford Founders mixers to meet other founders, take advantage of investor (VC) office hours and attend Demo Day. 

Zhang added that Ph.D. students often lack the inspiration to go out and become entrepreneurs, even if their idea is promising.

“If they come to events, they may become inspired after talking to VCs and innovate from zero to one through their Ph.D. research,” Zhang said.

Stanford Founders club plans to host Demo Days quarterly going forward, so that all of Stanford’s best teams can pitch to investors, Chang said. The goal is to expand the organization to include undergraduates and potentially the wider Bay Area community. 

Ultimately, though, Stanford Founders’ goal is to nourish curiosity in all its forms, according to third-year Ph.D. mechanical engineering Ph.D. student Francesco Marchioni M.S. ’25, the group’s VP of Aerospace and Defense. 

“The initial focus is on the journey of building, rather than the finished product,” Marchioni said.