Stanford GSB Expands Investing Education Into a Center With Broader Curriculum

Ragatz said investing is deeply embedded in the overall curriculum and culture of the GSB. He said 20% of the school's current students come from investing backgrounds and that more than 90% of students take an investing class of some form. He added that the figure is probably 100%, since he said investing is part of the course.

He also said more than 33% of GSB graduates eventually go into investing over time. Ragatz pointed to logos of public and private equity firms and said their founders and managing partners were GSB alumni who had grown major firms and influenced asset management more broadly.

Ragatz also said the GSB has played a major role in the venture community, pointing to firms such as Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, Accel, Benchmark and Andreessen Horowitz, which he described as filled with GSB graduates. He said the school's academic roots include figures such as Bill Sharpe and Myron Scholes.

Ragatz said the investing curriculum has never been only for investors. He said Jack stressed, and the school believes, that even someone who does not want to be Warren Buffett or another type of investor should take it, because it is a very important leadership class.

He said the course deals with judgment in uncertain environments and with allocating scarce capital, which he described as the investor's role but also relevant to any business leader making decisions under uncertainty. He quoted Buffett: "I'm a better investor because I'm a businessman, and a better businessman because I'm an investor."

Ragatz said investing has long been the "redheaded stepchild" of entrepreneurship at the GSB. He said good firms have been founded there, but investing has not had the same precedence, and that when people think of the GSB they think of entrepreneurship. He said he does not want to take anything away from that, and noted that many of the best businesses built from the GSB are investing firms, so the two approaches go together.

He said the initiative will become a center in February 2027 and one of the three big pillars of the GSB, alongside CES and the Leadership Institute. He said the plans include educating the next generation of leaders, making connections, and drawing on alumni mentorship, which he described as especially important in investing, a field he called a seven-year apprenticeship.

Ragatz said the initiative covers asset classes well beyond public and private equity and venture capital. He said the program focuses on the investment craft, such as how to make good investments and take good risk, and also on the business of investing, including how to form firms and how to compensate talent.

He said the initiative is supported by a team in which faculty sponsors lead the program, staff run it day to day, and three investors in residence contribute, with Gao explaining that role later. He reported that the first investor summit last year filled the room and was oversubscribed, and that a summer internship for emerging fund managers had been sponsored.

Ragatz said that the great investors, such as Buffett and Munger, used to visit Jack's class, and that the broader curriculum now calls for expanding that. Partly funded by a gift from TA Associates, the school plans to bring world-class investors to campus about once a month to talk about their craft. Ragatz said the series is modeled on View from the Top, but focused purely on investing, and that GSB alumni practitioners will interview the guests.

Ragatz also said the second summit is scheduled for February, with programming around emerging fund managers and family offices.

Gao said he came to the GSB after working at Goldman Sachs and TPG. He said his decision was more emotional than carefully planned and came down to the people he had met from the school, especially GSB alumni at TPG. He said he wanted to join that cohort of people who have great careers and are also interesting outside of work, and that he expected the experience to broaden the range of outcomes for his career and life.

Asked whether it was worth it, Gao said yes, adding that he could not promise his golf handicap had improved meaningfully. He said he had hesitated before coming and that doing so was silly, though he acknowledged some fear of missing interesting transactions such as AI opportunities. He said the GSB pushed him out of the comfort zone of his typical banking and private equity path.

Gao described the initiative as something like a startup and an experiment. He said the investor-in-residence role is a one-year fellowship that continues the GSB's investing education. The role has two parts: supporting the strategy and programming of the initiative, which will soon become a center, and giving students or recent graduates a platform to stress-test and build their investment theses.

He listed example projects including planning the February investor summit, reorganizing and building a curriculum framework for investing, and launching a research survey on AI's impact on investing. He said he is also pursuing a master's in education, and found working in higher education special. He gave his own thesis as an example, saying he has built strong conviction about the Middle East and the GCC countries, including their economic and social transformation and their growing role as a capital of capital.

Gao said the initiative is excited about two priorities. The first is to study investing the way the GSB studies entrepreneurship. He said the school does not teach entrepreneurship but studies it, and that the initiative wants the same approach for investing, working with faculty, alumni and students to understand what it takes to be an effective investor across strategies, asset classes and market cycles.

The second is to shed more light on the business side of investing. Gao said investing is an intellectually stimulating profession but also one of the most opaque areas of business. He said that even after working on special projects such as launching products and acquiring funds, he was still largely unfamiliar with fundraising and operations when he arrived at the GSB.

Brady said that the GSB does not set out to teach entrepreneurship but broadly studies and observes it, largely through the arc of a startup, including team formation, ideation, execution and scaling. He said that from an investment perspective the entrepreneurial process and the investment process are really the same thing viewed from different sides. He described being able to observe ideation and creation and then fund it as being ambidextrous.

Brady said his firm's founders came from deep operating backgrounds and wanted to back what they saw as a disruptive process in areas such as generative AI. He said a new research class teaches students first-party research to form hypotheses about the future, since an investor is betting on what will be possible. He argued the GSB's advantage is the plurality of offerings and alumni who share their journeys, so students can make original mistakes rather than repeat past ones.

Brady said venture capital as an asset class has changed dramatically. He said that in Q1 of this year, 73% of all venture capital was invested in five companies. He said that when his firm was founded about 17 years ago, it underwrote opportunities it believed could create billion-dollar outcomes, while it now sees exemplars of trillion-dollar outcomes.

He cited Anthropic as an example: about $9 billion in revenue in 2024, more than $30 billion next, $65 billion this year and a target of $100 billion, which he said took about three years to reach, where Salesforce took 30. He said venture has historically competed for software budgets but now competes for labor spend, noting the world spends about a trillion dollars on software and $60 billion on labor, so the opportunity is orders of magnitude larger.

Brady said early-stage venture dollars rose 41% this year while the number of companies fell 25%. He also said about 66% of all venture capital flowed into 10 companies, a figure he attributed to a StepStone conference, and he questioned whether these are the potential outcomes the market is pricing.

Singer said the changes are exciting and problematic because they challenge assumptions about everything. As a very early-stage investor, he said the pace of deals and the amount of cash needed to be meaningful to a firm you invest in have changed, even at earlier stages.

He said he is not sure that a few trillion-dollar companies mean everyone will become one, since the world's economy is only so big. He added that entrepreneurship and great ideas still start small, with a few people, a novel insight and a chance of good product-market fit. He expected the usual sorting of risk and return to reassert itself, saying the graph will snap back to where it is.

Singer said he chose the topic for selfish reasons. After moving into venture, where partnership compensation became more complicated, and sitting on boards of much larger companies, he needed first principles. He looked for the GSB's compensation syllabus and found none. He also said he checked Harvard, Darden, Tuck, Wharton and SOM at Yale and found no class in compensation, which was treated as one unit inside an HR class or similar.

Singer said his first letter to the dean offered to fund the course's development, which he later called one of the more idiotic letters he had written, since the cost was much higher than he had imagined. He said the dean engaged with him over about six months, and the course was eventually agreed on the condition that Singer teach it.

Ragatz compared the GSB's role with programs at Harvard Business School, Wharton and Columbia, which also offer investing programs. He said the people-centricity of the discussion distinguished the GSB's model. He argued that businesses are ultimately collections of people, so getting the incentives right and understanding how people work are lived frontline lessons that the GSB model handles well.

An audience member said his impression is that academic investing focuses on fundamental analysis oriented toward the buy side, while the sell side is more associated with charts and technical analysis, and asked how the GSB handles teaching investing on that side.

Ragatz said Jack's class teaches fundamental, intrinsic value-based investing, in which businesses are worth the future value of their cash flows, and that picking one's game is important. He said the course covers company analysis and includes a module on ownership, covering board service and selling. He argued that selling is also a fundamental decision, since holding a stock is effectively rebuying it at the current price. He said trading-oriented classes teach a different game that he could not speak to.

Gao said many students with investing backgrounds, including in the classes above and below his, initially planned to return to their private equity firms as sponsored. He said that once at the GSB, students' view of the world expands and they begin asking first principles: what is happening, whether the FOMO around AI deals is real, and whether it is a moment in time.

Gao said students were inspired by the many investing firms founded by GSB alumni. He cited Marc Stad, who he said moved from TPG to the GSB and then launched a differentiated firm focused on concentrated bets in growth-stage companies, a strategy that did not really exist before and was neither typical private equity nor VC.

Singer said that people at his firm fall into two camps. One sees an incredibly hot deal, has heard a buzz and wants to find a way in. The other thinks the deal is perfectly priced but would need to decide quickly, so sees no reason to go near it. He said he believes there is currently more of the first than the second camp.

Singer said he expects this to correct at some point, noting that public market indices show the trend creeping back up, while private markets still have enough opportunities for wonderful companies and good returns. He also said limited partners put considerable pressure on firms to be in AI, for both very good reasons and window-dressing reasons that get mixed together.