Stanford University's gorgeous campus is in Palo Alto, California, which is about an hour south of San Francisco. It's on what Bay Area folks call "the Peninsula."
The road leading to the university is called Palm Drive.
And there's a mall nearby, almost on the campus itself, called the Stanford Shopping Center.
Stanford's campus is beautiful. It's also where several tech startups were born. Or where the people who created them met.
Possibly the most famous people to have come out of Stanford are Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They met in the 1990s when they were getting doctorates in computer science. The Gates Computer Science Building, which was named after Bill Gates, is home to the CS department.
Ren Ng, the founder and executive chairman of Lytro, earned a bachelor's degree in mathematical and computational science in 2001, a master's in computer science in 2002, and a doctorate in computer science in 2006 — all from Stanford University. Lytro is developing consumer light-field cameras based on research he did while at Stanford.
Here's the Knight Management Center, which is home to the Graduate School of Business. Several startups got their start here. Brian Spaly and Andy Dunn, who both founded men's clothing site Bonobos, graduated from the GSB in 2007.
OKCupid founder Sam Yagan, who's now the CEO of Match.com, also got his degree from the Graduate School of Business in 2005.
This is Toyon Hall, the sophomore residence hall. Loopt, a location-based app, was founded by Sam Altman, Nick Sivo, and Alok Deshpande, who met in their sophomore year. Loopt was bought by Green Dot Ventures for $43 million.
Instagram cofounder Kevin Systrom graduated from Stanford in 2006. He was in the Sigma Nu fraternity. Lucas Duplan was also a member of Sigma Nu. He started payment company Clinkle and raised $25 million. And Rainer Castillo, who founded men's shorts line Chubbies, was also in this fraternity.
Here's the Kappa Sigma fraternity, which Snapchat cofounders Evan Spiegel and Snapchat CTO Bobby Murphy belonged to.
Kimball Hall is an Arts Theme residence hall on the east side of campus. It's also where Reggie Brown and Evan Spiegel once lived and where Brown first shared his billion-dollar idea, Snapchat, with Spiegel. Brown was ousted from the company and is now suing Spiegel, Murphy, and all of their investors.
People use bikes to get across the huge campus, including to some of the off-campus apartments. Trulia founders Pete Flint and Sami Inkinen met in the Graduate School of Business. They were frustrated by the lack of resources online to help them find apartments in the Silicon Valley. So they built Trulia to help ease the frustration of finding an apartment online.
This is Stanford Stadium, where Stanford's Cardinal football team plays. A great way to get football tickets is through StubHub, which is kind of like an online ticket marketplace. And StubHub's founders, Eric Baker and Jeff Fluhr, met at the Graduate School of Business.
This is the Physics and Astrophysics building. Tesla's Elon Musk went to Stanford to get a doctorate in energy physics, but dropped out after two days to start his first company, Zip2 Corp.
And since this is a university tour, after all, here's the main quad, in the heart of Stanford's campus.
Up in the hills behind Stanford University, you'll find this company ...
