In 2013, Sam Yam teamed up with his former Stanford roommate Jack Conte to create Patreon, a platform that connects content creators with members who provide recurring revenue. As co-founder and CTO, Yam built Patreon into a service that has funded more than one hundred thousand creatives, channelling more than one billion dollars to musicians, podcasters, and artists of all kinds. He describes the intense grind of scaling Patreon and looks at three central challenges that face most entrepreneur...
Jan 22, 2020•46 min•Season 15Ep. 9
Look back to one of our favorite talks from the ETL archives. Dave Evans, co-founder of the popular Life Design Lab at Stanford University, discusses the key concepts and exercises that guide students in their quest to figure out what they want to do in life. He underscores the importance of accepting who you are and connecting that to what you believe and do, while attacking dysfunctional notions like the one that dares you to be the “best version of yourself.” Can’t we have more than one? ----...
Jan 01, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Season 15Ep. 8
Concerned with the ways that AI and machine learning often display biases against already marginalized groups, Laura Gomez created Atipica, a platform that uses those same tools to remove rather than exacerbate bias in the hiring process. Gomez is also a founding member of Project Include, a non-profit that aims to accelerate diversity and inclusion in the tech industry, and a member of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, as well as Code.org’s Diversity Council. She describes the ...
Dec 04, 2019•43 min•Season 15Ep. 8
Look back to one of our favorite talks from the ETL archives. Entrepreneur Leila Janah describes how her social enterprise Samasource allows people in Africa and elsewhere to lift themselves out of poverty through dignified, fair-wage digital work like photo tagging for companies in Silicon Valley. She celebrates the entrepreneurial spirit in those who survive on next to nothing and explains how giving work is more effective than charity.
Nov 26, 2019•55 min•Season 15Ep. 7
Backstage Capital founder and managing partner Arlan Hamilton built a venture capital fund from the ground up, while homeless. Her fund is dedicated to minimizing funding disparities in tech by investing in high-potential founders who are people of color, women, and/or LGBT. Hamilton herself identifies as all three. Started in 2015, Backstage has invested nearly $7 million into 120 startups led by underestimated founders. In this talk, Hamilton describes how and why she created her unique fund, ...
Nov 20, 2019•48 min•Season 15Ep. 7
In 2013, Aileen Lee coined the term “unicorn” to refer to the growing field of startups with $1 billion valuations. At the time, she was a year into her role as a founder and managing partner of Cowboy Ventures, and her team was preparing a now-influential internal report examining how (and how often) companies with these massive valuations tend to emerge. Her summary of the report, published by TechCrunch, uncovered many insightful datapoints, but also revealed that only 2 of the 39 unicorns th...
Nov 13, 2019•43 min•Season 15Ep. 6
While earning his MBA at the University of Oxford’s Said Business School and teaching himself to code, Srin Madipalli found himself compelled by the power of technology to transform the lives of people with disabilities. He soon co-founded Accomable, a web app that grew to list accessible accomodations in 60 countries around the world. In November of 2017, Accomable was acquired by Airbnb, and Madipalli joined Airbnb as its accessibility product and program manager. There, he has overseen the ad...
Nov 06, 2019•46 min•Season 15Ep. 5
LaunchDarkly now helps over 1,000 customers — including major companies like Atlassian and BMW — release code, monitor and manage features, and make data-driven decisions about software functionality. But growth didn’t come overnight, explains CEO and co-founder Edith Harbaugh. She describes the multi-year slog of scaling up a B2B company, and demonstrates how she made the most of a number of less-than-ideal jobs, building a diverse toolkit of skills that ultimately contributed to her success as...
Oct 30, 2019•45 min•Season 15Ep. 4
Barbara Liskov was already breaking new ground in 1968, when she became one of the first American women to earn a doctorate in the emerging discipline of computer science. After receiving that PhD at Stanford, she went on to design several influential programming languages, including CLU, an important precursor to Java. More recently, as an Institute Professor at MIT and head of the institute’s Programming Methodology Group, she has undertaken crucial research on distributed systems, information...
Oct 23, 2019•44 min•Season 15Ep. 3
Not long after landing at PagerDuty in 2016, Jennifer Tejada embarked on that harrowing rite of passage for CEOs of fortunate young startups: the pursuit of an IPO. Tejada raised a $90 million Series D round in late 2018, and saw PagerDuty go public on April 11, 2019. Her path to that point, she observes, was anything but linear. She tells the story of how a very “average” University of Michigan grad ended up becoming the CEO of a public SaaS company, and describes how gritty perseverance, some ...
Oct 16, 2019•51 min•Season 15Ep. 2
In 2012, inspired by the HR headaches they’d observed working for technology companies, Sarah Nahm and a few friends founded Lever, a talent recruitment platform aimed at transforming the hiring process with intuitive yet data-driven software. Two years later, in 2014, she was named CEO. Based on her experiences designing what became Lever and then leading the company, she puts forward a model of entrepreneurial leadership that is about more than just stubborn confidence, and thrives by embracin...
Oct 09, 2019•43 min•Season 15Ep. 1
From developing a brand identity to cultivating the right conditions for musical exploration, successful recording artists are masters of the creative process. Hosted by Stanford professor Bob Sutton, Sickamore, a hip-hop artist, photographer and the creative director at Interscope Records, joins Sam Seidel, director of K-12 strategy and research at Stanford's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, for an intimate conversation about what entrepreneurs can learn from the music industry, how to navig...
Jun 12, 2019•1 hr 28 min•Season 14Ep. 26
Honeycomb co-founder and CEO Christine Yen spent a decade as a software engineer before creating her own company. She describes how her deep domain knowledge and relationships with like-minded software developers propelled her startup’s launch, and shares how she built an energetic human architecture around a highly technical B2B product.
Jun 05, 2019•47 min•Season 14Ep. 25
The podcast market was growing rapidly when Luminary Media was founded at the beginning of 2018, and it was even bigger by the time the company launched its podcasting service on April 23, 2019. Just a month after that launch, CEO Matthew Sacks and co-founder/head of talent Lauren Perkins step back to assess how they identified an opportunity in the podcasting space, built a team and launched a product with a library of exclusive content in a little over a year. They also address the negative he...
May 29, 2019•53 min•Season 14Ep. 24
At age 26, Chip Conley founded Joie de Vivre Hospitality and grew the company into the second largest boutique hotel brand in the United States. After he sold the business, he accepted a strategy role at Airbnb, and his interactions with a predominantly millennial workforce led him to found the Modern Elder Academy, a “midlife wisdom school” in Baja that encourages individuals with a lifetime of experience to carve a purposeful path through the modern workplace. Here, he shares the insights that...
May 22, 2019•44 min•Season 14Ep. 23
In the 1990s, Toby Corey co-founded the world’s largest web development company. Since then, he’s started other companies; held senior management positions at SolarCity, Tesla and most recently PlanGrid; and lectured in Stanford's Department of Management Science & Engineering. Now, he finds himself as concerned by social and environmental problems as with building companies. In response to global crises of climate change and inequality, he advises an approach that he calls “zentrepreneurshi...
May 15, 2019•51 min•Season 14Ep. 22
When Capella Space’s first prototype satellite launched in December 2018, it was the culmination of over three years of nonstop effort. Capella Space founder and CEO Payam Banazadeh explains how he fused experienced gained at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Stanford’s Management Science and Engineering masters program to build the satellite imaging company. As an early-stage CEO, he provides insights into the many risks and strategic decisions that precede product roll-out....
May 08, 2019•50 min•Season 14Ep. 21
Nicole Hu and her two co-founders created One Concern to help communities prepare for and mitigate natural disasters by harnessing the power of AI. She explains how they use machine intelligence as a predictive tool, and shares strategies for identifying a central problem, securing investment and growing a mission-driven team.
May 01, 2019•47 min•Season 14Ep. 20
Ritu Narayan founded Zūm in 2014 to solve a problem that working parents (herself included) face every day: transporting and caring for children before and after school. She describes her journey from the Delhi Institute of Technology to Silicon Valley and unpacks three factors that catalyze sustained growth: passion, perseverance and people.
Apr 24, 2019•42 min•Season 14Ep. 19
From high school computer science classes all the way up to VC partner meetings, women and people of color remain underrepresented in the technology ecosystem. Even so, diversity-focused social scientist and venture capitalist Freada Kapor Klein is hopeful about the future of technology and entrepreneurship. As a partner at Kapor Capital, she provides seed-stage funding to technology startups that make a positive social impact on low-income communities and communities of color. Drawing on her wo...
Apr 17, 2019•50 min•Season 14Ep. 18
You can’t do it all, no matter what our crazed culture tells you—and there’s no shame in walking away from a commitment that isn’t working out, as long as you do it thoughtfully, respectfully, and with plenty of advance warning. On this episode of LEAP!, Tina Seelig, Professor of the Practice in Stanford’s Department of Management Science & Engineering, and guests Konstantine Buhler of Meritech Capital Partners and John Melas-Kyriazi of Spark Capital embrace the negative, exploring when, why...
Mar 20, 2019•22 min•Season 14Ep. 17
As Google’s first engineering director, Alberto Savoia led the team that launched Google’s revolutionary AdWords project. After founding two startups, he returned to Google in 2008 and he assumed the role of “Innovation Agitator,” developing trainings and workshops to catalyze smart, impactful creation within the company. Drawing on his book " The Right It ," he begins with the premise that at least 80 percent of innovations fail, even if competently executed. He discusses how to reframe the cen...
Mar 13, 2019•46 min•Season 14Ep. 16
Navin Chaddha, managing director at the venture capital firm Mayfield, describes the firm’s core values and examines the drivers behind several of the firm’s most successful investments. Mayfield’s investment strategy, he explains, is to focus on the founder rather than the company. He describes how impactful founders identify their mission early and pivot when necessary, all while maintaining a firmly people-centered mindset.
Mar 06, 2019•43 min•Season 14Ep. 15
Midway through a M.D./Ph.D program at UCLA, Alice Zhang made a discovery that she felt could reverberate far beyond the halls of academia. So she shifted directions, leaving her Ph.D program to found Verge Genomics, a biomedical firm that aims to unite genetic research and artificial intelligence in service of drug discovery. She describes how AI can revolutionize the drug discovery process, and reframes risk-taking as a simple series of optimistic next steps.
Feb 27, 2019•51 min•Season 14Ep. 14
Cars can be much more than just boxes that get their owners around. John Viera, a former director and sustainability lead at Ford Motor Company, and Raj Kapoor, chief strategy officer at Lyft, join Stanford adjunct professor Pedram Mokrian to discuss opportunities for innovation in the field of transportation, particularly in the context of sustainability concerns and accelerating urbanization. Innovators, they suggest, need to think of transportation as a converging ecosystem, rather than as a ...
Feb 20, 2019•45 min•Season 14Ep. 13
Opportunities in the cryptocurrency sector extend well beyond simply investing in Bitcoin or Ethereum, says Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan. He compares the digital currency landscape to the early days of mobile—a space poised to create an entirely new set of innovations and business models. For entrepreneurs looking to make a play in everything from social networking and banking to collectibles markets and real estate, he suggests, crypto’s underlying blockchain technology is worth investigating...
Feb 13, 2019•46 min•Season 14Ep. 12
Roles expand and shift at a breakneck pace in a high-growth startup, says Meebo co-founder Elaine Wherry. Interns find themselves in charge of massive, mission-critical projects. Engineers are suddenly tasked with hiring and managing multiple teams. Wherry shares her insights on how to thrive in a rapidly expanding technology venture, drawing on the heady years between developing Meebo’s initial instant messaging platform in 2005 and landing the company at Google seven years later....
Feb 06, 2019•49 min•Season 14Ep. 11
Global trade has existed for centuries, but hasn’t evolved with technology. Ryan Petersen, CEO and founder of Flexport, learned this the hard way as an entrepreneur managing the supply chain of his brother’s motorcycle sales business, and took it as an opportunity to update the industry. Petersen shares his insights on how entrepreneurs can solve some of the world’s biggest challenges and how the Internet can be a force for good. -------------------- Stanford eCorner content is produced by the S...
Jan 23, 2019•55 min•Season 14Ep. 9
Dan Widmaier, co-founder and CEO at Bolt Threads, is on a mission to disrupt the garment industry through technology and science. He shares his perspective on sustainability, the future of the environment and how to focus on the task at hand instead of distractions.
Dec 05, 2018•49 min•Season 14Ep. 8
Brad Bao, co-founder and executive chairman of Lime, shares his mission to create close-knit neighborhoods through mobility. Highlighting Lime’s achievements, he challenges the notion that companies cannot succeed if they are socially responsible.
Nov 28, 2018•44 min•Season 14Ep. 7
