I go there. I have a good hacker friend who's been approached by other students or ex-students several times to form some sort of startup or to do other little programming projects. So far, they have all been miserable failures. No, not even failures, because they never even really tried. So what if people here are smart? I don't think they are nearly as motivated as most YC.ers think they are--god, just go to any meeting of a student group after the first couple weeks of the quarter, it's a shitload of, "Yeah I would've liked to go but I had a paper and a problem set due..." Same thing with the little projects that just fizzled. Of the wannabe entrepeneurs I've met here, nobody has shown the kind of commitment pg seems to think is necessary. I met them. They're still in school, still trying to balance a startup with getting their degree, still unable to commit themselves and take the plunge.

I think the vast majority of Stanford students, or other elite students anywhere, are admitted because they put their schoolwork first. Sinking lots of time into any extracurricular, including entrepeneurship, is a sacrifice a lot of students aren't used to making and would have trained themselves to not make in high school, and in fact, such a sacrifice could have royally screwed them out of getting in in the first place, and almost certainly would have if they had gone to a very competitive high school.

Seriously, FUCK STANFORD and don't worry about it. Just find a good school that's not too much pressure to get into.