To apply to Spades, you need to do two things. First, tell us who you are and what you do. Second, recommend a peer you think would be a good fit for the group so we can continue to find exceptional talent at Stanford.

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About you

Your name

Your Stanford email

Must end in @stanford.edu.

What is your area of expertise or passion?

It can be nontechnical, like social media, business, or the arts.

0 / 1,000

What makes you the best in your Stanford class in that area?

Give concrete examples: completed projects, job offers, companies you've founded (and what they do or did), competition awards, and so on.

0 / 6,000

Choose a question

Puzzles show us how you think. Pick the problem below that best fits your interests and solve it however you like. We encourage creative, out-of-the-box thinking. An interesting approach matters more than the correct answer.

A disposable medical device must work exactly 1,000 times and then stop forever, so no one can reuse it and spread infection. It can’t be reset, tricked, or repaired, and it has no electronics. Describe four ways to make something that dies on schedule. For each one, explain how accurate it is: does it die at exactly 1,000 uses, or somewhere between 900 and 1,100?On a space station, liquids don’t pour. They float in blobs and stick to whatever they touch. An astronaut wants to get hot coffee from a large tank into a cup and drink it without any droplets escaping into the air. Describe four ways to move the liquid without gravity. Then design the cup itself, since a normal open cup won’t work.Pick an everyday compound, such as salt, sugar, soap, glass, or aspirin. Describe the most creative way you can think of to synthesize it.If humans are to become an interplanetary species, what propulsion system, and what supporting architecture, will most likely get us there? Explain your reasoning in depth.Theranos claimed it could run reliable tests on tiny blood samples, but those samples were too small to produce high-fidelity data. Give four reasons their design could never have worked.You invent something that gets better the more people use it, like a messaging app, a marketplace, or a payment network. Each new user makes it more valuable, so growth feeds growth. But the same force runs in reverse: if users start leaving, it becomes less valuable for everyone still there, more people leave, and it can collapse far faster than it grew. Explain why the climb up and the slide down aren’t symmetric. Then design a business that captures the “better with more users” effect without the death spiral, and name the exact point where your safeguard would fail.Some things become less appealing once you put a price on them. Pay people to donate blood, and fewer show up than when you ask them to give for free. Fine parents for picking their kids up late from daycare, and more of them arrive late, not fewer. Explain the real mechanism: what does the price do to a person’s reasoning that flips the result? Then design a system that gets people to do something genuinely costly and unpleasant for the public good, where introducing money would backfire. Show where your money-free design starts to break down at scale.

Your answer

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Refer a candidate

Their name

Their Stanford email

Must end in @stanford.edu.

What do they do?

0 / 2,000