Masthead,
production,
and the
print edition.

MastheadThe editorial team.

Editor-in-Chief	Sophie Ren Proposed. Stanford, ’25.
Founder Stories Editor	Open First hire. The role that decides whether Issue 01 has soul.
Visual Director	Open Second hire. Owns typography, photography, and the annual print edition end-to-end. Not a freelance role.
Generalist Editor	Open Covers Signals, Insights, Playbooks, Predictions for Issue 01.
Signal Contributors	Network of 15–20 Anonymous. Active founders, seed and Series-A investors, Stanford researchers. One to two signals per issue each.

Recruiting now for Issue 01. Interested?  Get in touch →

Production SystemThe thirteen-week cycle.

Each issue runs on a fixed thirteen-week production calendar. The realistic working timeline:

Weeks 1 — 2	Issue planning, theme lock, story slate. Highest leverage period of the cycle.
Weeks 3 — 6	Reporting, interviews, commissioning. Most labor-intensive. Section Editors carry the load.
Weeks 7 — 9	First drafts, internal edits. The Editor-in-Chief’s deepest work.
Weeks 10 — 11	Digital production, layout, fact-check. Visual Director leads.
Week 12	Final proof. Distribution prep.
Week 13	Issue release. Email edition sent on release day.

Material IdentityTypography and imagery.

Stanford Entrepreneurs is a digital-first publication. The website and the email edition are the primary forms in which most readers will encounter the work. The discipline that once went into paper stock and ink coverage now goes into typography, layout, page weight, image quality, and the experience of reading on a screen.

Typography

• Serif for body and for Founder Stories — the rooms designed for slow reading. Set in EB Garamond.
• Sans-serif for Signals and Systems & Playbooks — the two sections designed for compression and reference. Set in Inter.
• The contrast between serif and sans-serif is itself an editorial signal. Readers learn the difference within one issue.

Imagery

• Every cover: one black-and-white founder portrait, paired with one founder-spoken sentence.
• No product screenshots, no logos, no office shots, anywhere in the publication.
• No stock photography. No AI-generated cover imagery. No gradient backgrounds.
• No Y Combinator orange or any of its descendants.

The Annual Print EditionOnce a year, in December.

Each December, the editorial team selects the strongest pieces from the year’s four digital issues, edits them for the longer form, and publishes a single bound volume.

Print run	200 – 500 copies. Deliberately limited.
Format	Hardcover, designed to live on a shelf for ten years, not for a single read.
Distribution	Not for sale at scale. Copies go to every founder who appeared in the year’s issues, every Signal Contributor, every guest essayist, every advisor, and a small number of high-tier subscribers.
Cover of the annual	The year, rendered minimally. No founder portrait. The annual edition belongs to the year, not to any single subject.

Its function is to ensure that ten years from now, when the founder ecosystem looks back at this era, the record exists in a form that does not depend on a working domain name.

Data PolicyWhat we collect, and what we do not.

A digital-first publication can know things about its readers that a print magazine cannot. This is both an asset and a liability. We err on the side of restraint.

What we collect

• Subscriber identity (name, email, professional role as self-declared at signup).
• Per-article reading signals: open events, time-on-page, scroll depth, completion.
• Explicit reader actions: pieces saved, articles marked, topic subscriptions chosen.
• Aggregate engagement at the section and issue level.

What we do not collect

• Behavioral profiles assembled from third-party trackers.
• Cross-site cookies or fingerprinting.
• Inferred demographics or political profiles.
• Anything we would not be comfortable showing a reader if they asked.

Every reader can view, export, and delete their own data on request. This is policy, not aspiration.

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Stanford, California  ·  Editorial plan, May MMXXVI