The Class That Built Apps, and Fortunes
ALL right, class, here's your homework assignment: Devise an app. Get people to use it. Repeat. — That was the task for some Stanford students in the fall of 2007, in what became known here as the “Facebook Class.” — No one expected what happened next.
Context & Ripple Effects
When Facebook opened its platform in mid-2007, the land grab was instant — coverage of the app feeding frenzy and the rush of developers asking why so many wanted in on Facebook applications framed it as a gold rush with no map. Stanford's answer was pedagogical: a fall 2007 course that assigned students to build apps and win users, covered at the time as producing Facebook's application rock stars.
By 2011 the experiment reads less like a class and more like a pipeline — several students parlayed homework into companies and fortunes, justifying the bet investors had placed on the platform theory back in October 2007. A January 2011 Stanford Daily piece on a social network built and shut down at Stanford years before Zuckerberg adds depth: the university's role here is lineage, not accident.
First-order effects
- Students who took the fall 2007 course converted coursework directly into funded companies and personal wealth, validating the assignment-to-startup format while they were still enrolled.
- Facebook gains a self-reinforcing developer story: the platform now demonstrably mints fortunes fast enough to become a university curriculum.
Second-order effects
- Other universities face pressure to replicate the model — Stanford had already opened its iPhone programming class to the public online in 2009, signaling that platform-specific app courses are becoming a standard offering rather than a one-off.
- Early-stage investors gain a new sourcing channel, treating campus app courses as deal flow filters where traction can be observed before graduation.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the boundary between computer science education and venture formation keeps dissolving — universities functioning as industrial infrastructure that supplies both talent and tested products to whatever platform economy is ascendant.
- Platform owners acquire a structural lever over labor supply: whoever controls the dominant app ecosystem effectively sets what a generation of students learns to build.
The trend: App-platform economics are turning elite university courses into startup foundries, with each new platform cycle spawning a fresh generation of class-built companies.