In the high-stakes world of Silicon Valley startups, the Bay Area boasts a rivalry that echoes the roar of the “Big Game” between Cal and Stanford. This contest, however, is not fought on a gridiron; it is waged in pitch decks, demo days and venture capital offices. The main event? The clash between two of the most powerful startup accelerators on earth: Stanford’s StartX and Berkeley’s SkyDeck.
But to truly understand this Bay Area rivalry, we need a better framework. We find one in Eric S. Raymond’s 1997 essay, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” In it, he described two opposing models of creation. The “Cathedral” is a closed, top-down model, where a small, exclusive group builds a perfect, polished product in isolation. The “Bazaar” is a chaotic, open-source model, where development is public, merchants organize themselves, and it can get messy.
The “Cathedral” here is Stanford, with its incubator StartX: an independent non-profit that has developed an equity-free community with a remarkable 92% 10-year survival rate for its ventures, focused on teams made up of Stanford students exclusively. The “Bazaar” you find at Berkeley, with Skydeck, an equity-based, public-private partnership open to any founder globally.
Let’s start with Stanford. The “Cathedral” ethos is reflected everywhere. You can see it in its student clubs, like the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (BASES), one of the “most established student-run entrepreneurship organizations in the world.” The institutional spine runs through the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), the d.school for rapid prototyping and creative practice and the Graduate School of Business’s (GSB) Startup Garage for hands-on venture design. Stanford’s a place where a quarter of faculty have participated in startup activity, with the administration allowing them to take leave to join startups.
The campus is adjacent to Sand Hill Road, the Vatican of venture capital. VCs and angel investors are active pilgrims to campus, scouting Stanford events and classes for the next unicorn. You can see it at Stanford Venture Studio’s Demo Day, where the GSB spotlights graduate founders for alumni, investors and fellow students; during the event, the founders present their ventures and make specific “asks” of the audience, such as introductions and mentorship. This sense of abundance is reinforced by Stanford’s tight, interlinked alumni network. Its graduates return again and again to support new founders, passing along opportunities, mentorship and capital in a shared tradition of paying it forward, including via Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs Silicon Valley.
The results are impressive. StartX’s companies by themselves have $120B+ aggregate valuation, with 144 $100M+ companies and counting. 15 years ago, two Stanford professors found that Stanford had generated nearly three trillion dollars in annual world revenue, creating 5.1 million jobs since the 1930s.
Now, in the blue and gold corner stands a different beast: Berkeley’s SkyDeck is the “Bazaar,” powered by a global public mission — a dedicated venture fund invests $200,000 for approximately 7.5% equity for each of its startups, and it returns 50% of its profits back to campus. It’s not a closed community; it’s a bustling marketplace open to the global community — Cal affiliation or not — that results in a brutal 1-2% acceptance rate that filters for the best ideas, whether they’re from Berkeley or Berlin. Despite two-thirds of SkyDeck’s cohort founded outside the U.S., Cal now rivals Stanford in founder counts. And the scale is staggering: 850+ investors at their Demo Day, 900+ advisors and more than $2 billion raised by SkyDeck alumni. Feeding those pipelines are campus engines like the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology (SCET), which teaches Cal’s methods of entrepreneurship.
Unlike the stone-arched campus that sits along Sand Hill Road, the “Bazaar” had to build its own banks. Berkeley entrepreneurs historically had to work harder for funding from South Bay VCs who did not want to brave the trek. While that has changed, the campus has also cleared this hurdle by creating dedicated, alumni-driven funds. The most prominent is “The House Fund,” which focuses on Berkeley startups and has backed over 100 startups and produced 7 unicorns, alongside Berkeley Angel Network that connects Cal founders with alumni investors. Like a bazaar, the Cal startup ecosystem is a marketplace built by its own merchants.
That translates to the DNA of its students. Student clubs, like Entrepreneurs @ Berkeley (E@B), have launched over 60 startups with 6 acceptances to SkyDeck (a 10x improved acceptance rate). It sits in a campus pipeline that includes Free Ventures (student-run, equity-free accelerator) and Haas programs like LAUNCH (also equity free) that pull in undergrads and grads across campus.
So which model “wins”? That question misses the mark. Raymond provides us nearly the perfect lens for the Bay Area’s two-part innovation engine — but we come away with a crucial caveat. Raymond’s original thesis argued that the open “Bazaar” would inevitably out-compete the closed “Cathedral.” The evidence here shows no such thing. Instead, we get two launching pads that are both succeeding powerfully. The Bay Area’s unique genius isn’t that one model is winning; it is having this wonderful coexistence in fierce, symbiotic competition.
If you are an entrepreneurially curious student reading this, the playbook for Saturday is not mysterious. Pick a room. For Stanford: go to a BASES kickoff, sit in on ETL, get feedback at Stanford Venture Studio and apply to StartX when the problem and team are real. For Berkeley: show up at an E@B build night, meet navigators at the Entrepreneurship Hub, talk to SCET about challenge labs and throw your hat in for SkyDeck when you can show demand or a prototype that wants to be a product. On both campuses, talk to alumni early. Ask for one conversation, not a check. Then earn the next one.
The Axe will end up with one campus on Saturday, but the pursuit of ideas belongs to both. In the end, the rivalry is a shared creation too, part of a Bay Area scene the world admires from afar and struggles to replicate.
Utsav Gupta is pursuing a master’s of liberal arts at Stanford. A former patent litigator turned Silicon Valley entrepreneur, he now works on AI and spatial computing.