By Kim Girard

Stanford University

(Poets&Quants) -- T.J. Duane began the Startup Garage course at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business last September planning to build a closed online network for lawyers.

About eight weeks into the 24-week class, he and his team ditched that idea.

"We pivoted ... and decided to instead build a community tool," he says, during a recent break on campus from working on his company. His team's startup will help graduate students find each other based on their skills and academic backgrounds.

In Startup Garage, failure is encouraged. That cycle of trying, failing, and trying again helps prepare students to pitch bullet proof ideas to angel investors, says Startup Garage instructor Stefanos Zenios, who is also a professor of operations, information, and technology at Stanford.

"Startup Garage focuses on the seed-stage of funding -- getting to the point where you can stand up in front of investors and ask them for $250,000 or half a million or maybe a million," Zenios says.

About 95% of Stanford's Graduate School of Business's 809 students opt to take at least one entrepreneurship class -- whether it's Startup Garage, Product Launch, or Formation of New Ventures. At the Stanford Venture Studio, students who apply to be residents are using the space to design and build companies. Others are taking advantage of services like pitch session practice, mentor matching, or peer-to-peer coaching.

While theelective courses are at the core of Stanford's approach to entrepreneurship, anotherobvious edge the school has over others is its location in Silicon Valley. It's also just miles from the biggest venture capital firms in Menlo Park, Calif. Since its foundingin 1996, the Stanford'sCenter for Entrepreneurial Studies (CES)hastaken advantage of that proximity, hiring from Silicon Valley and creating partnerships with its leaders.

Stanford's ties toSilicon Valley "rubs off quicker and more deeply at the school," says Russell Siegelman, an angel investor and former partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, who teaches Startup Garage and other courses.

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Inside Stanford B-school's startup culture