<p>Larry Page owes Stanford a lot more than Michigan–after all, it was at Stanford where he was supervised by Terry Winograd who helped him create PageRank (and who gave him the supposed “best advice” he ever got by encouraging him to pursue PageRank), and it was because of the professors at Stanford, like Rajeev Motwani and David Cheriton, that he and Sergey Brin got the connections to start Google–Cheriton was the one who got KPCB to listen to their idea! The Google founders know this, which is why they’ve supported Stanford for a while and will probably give huge donations in the future, likely more than to Michigan.</p>
<p>But why focus on them? What about the long list of other billionaires that Stanford’s produced? John Arrillaga has donated hundreds of millions by now, I think. Lorry Lokey almost as much. Vinod Khosla (founder of Sun Microsystems), Charles Schwab (already donated tons), Phil Knight (founder of Nike, already donated tons–the new business school is named after him)… the list goes on. Stanford’s ties to some 3,000 SV companies will probably bring in the most donations in the future, perhaps the reason Stanford’s been the top fundraiser for several years now. Yahoo, Cisco, NVIDIA, LinkedIn, Logitech, etc.</p>