It is less than a quarter of an hour’s drive down Route 101 from the village-like campus of Stanford University to Mountain View, the Silicon Valley home of Udacity.
This was the journey Sebastian Thrun, the online education company’s chief executive and co-founder, made in 2012 when he cleared his desk at the computer science department to focus on a way of teaching business skills differently.
His new life as a tech entrepreneur is about as different to his tenured faculty post as Udacity’s modern headquarters, in an office block next door to the sprawling car park of a Target hypermarket, is from the Spanish colonial architecture of Stanford.