Ernestine Fu is managing general partner of venture capital firm Brave Capital. Over the past decade, Fu has worked across the startup ecosystem, including negotiating merger and acquisition agreements, organizing SPVs for later-stage companies, angel investing in and advising companies that have since been acquired, and advising banks on venture debt. Alongside her role at Brave Capital, she is also a Venture Partner at Alsop Louie Partners. In this presentation and conversation with Stanford a...
Feb 14, 2024•48 min•Season 22Ep. 5
ETL is off this week, but in its place, we’re pleased to share the first episode of a new podcast from Stanford eCorner and STVP called Move Fast and Fix the Planet. It’s about climate and sustainability entrepreneurship, and this episode features ETL host Emily Ma, head of special projects in sustainability, real estate, and workplace services at Google. Delve into Emily's journey as an intrapreneur focusing on sustainability within Google's internal operations, particularly in the realm of foo...
Feb 07, 2024•52 min•Season 22Ep. 4
Robert I. Sutton is an organizational psychologist and professor emeritus of Management Science and Engineering in the Stanford School of Engineering. Hayagreeva “Huggy” Rao is the Atholl McBean Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science, the Sociological Research Association, and the Academy of Management. In this conversation with Stanford lecturers Ravi Belani and Emily Ma, Sutton and Rao...
Jan 31, 2024•48 min•Season 22Ep. 2
Adrian Rodriguez is the co-founder and CEO of Dreamlinks, a startup developing AI-powered building blocks that make creating virtual 3D worlds as fun as playing with LEGO bricks. Prior to founding Dreamlinks, Rodriguez taught game design at StreetCode Academy, created a web design course for blind programmers, and worked as the CTO of AMPAworks, a company that uses computer vision to automate inventory tracking in hospitals. In this presentation, Rodriguez shares his journey as an entrepreneur w...
Jan 24, 2024•48 min•Season 22Ep. 1
Jessica Jackley is an entrepreneur and investor best known as the founder of Kiva, the first microfinance crowdfunding platform, with $2 billion in loans since 2005. She is currently a founder and general partner at Untapped Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm championing unexpected founders. In this presentation, Jackley shares her journey to becoming a mission-focused entrepreneur and offers insights to inspire others to ask, “What if things were different?” —-------------------------...
Dec 06, 2023•47 min•Season 21Ep. 8
Sarah Lamaison is the co-founder and CEO of Dioxycle, which is pioneering sustainable chemistry by building breakthrough technologies that convert industrial carbon emissions into everyday chemicals with unprecedented energy and cost efficiency. In this presentation, Lamaison explains how her company fits into the future of carbon-capture technology, then shares advice for tech founders — especially in the climate tech industry —who want to build successful companies. —--------------------------...
Nov 22, 2023•46 min•Season 21Ep. 7
Michelle Lee is the founder and CEO of Medra, which combines recent advances in robotics and computer vision to build lab automation technology. She has previously worked at NVIDIA, SpaceX, and McKinsey. Prior to founding Medra, Lee was an assistant professor in computer science and electrical computer engineering at New York University. In this presentation and conversation with Stanford adjunct lecturer Ravi Belani, Lee explains why she decided to start her deep tech company and uses her exper...
Nov 15, 2023•48 min•Season 21Ep. 6
Andy Dunn is an entrepreneur, author, and investor. Dunn co-founded the menswear e-commerce brand Bonobos in 2007 and served as the company’s CEO for its first 10 years, pioneering the digitally native brand movement. In 2022, Dunn published a memoir lifting the veil on the mental health demons he’d been privately battling as he built Bonobos. “Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind” chronicles his journey at the intersection of entrepreneurship and bipolar disorder. In this conversat...
Nov 08, 2023•50 min•Season 21Ep. 5
Kathleen Eisenhardt is the Stanford W. Ascherman M.D. Professor in the Stanford School of Engineering. She is also a faculty member with STVP, the Stanford Engineering Entrepreneurship Center, and the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. Among the most widely cited entrepreneurship scholars in the world, Eisenhardt is the author of over 100 articles and several books, most recently (with Don Sull), “Simple Rules: How to Survive in a Complex World.” In this presentation, Eisenhardt shares strategies for...
Nov 01, 2023•47 min•Season 21Ep. 4
Andrew Ng is the managing general partner at AI Fund, a startup studio building new AI companies from the ground up; the founder of DeepLearning.AI; and an adjunct professor of computer science at Stanford University. In this presentation and conversation with Stanford adjunct lecturer Ravi Belani, Ng talks about upcoming opportunities for entrepreneurs exploring AI technology and addresses questions of responsibility and risk. —----------------------------------- Stanford eCorner content is pro...
Oct 25, 2023•46 min•Season 21Ep. 3
Garry Tan is president and CEO of Y Combinator, which funds hundreds of companies per year through a web-based application. Tan is also the co-founder, board partner and advisor of Initialized Capital, an early stage venture capital fund, and co-founded Posterous, a blog platform acquired by Twitter. In this presentation, Tan shares advice and insights for aspiring entrepreneurs and startup founders that challenges prevailing wisdom.
Oct 18, 2023•48 min•Season 21Ep. 2
Cody Coleman is the co-founder and CEO of Coactive AI, an analytics platform for visual content. Coactive AI leverages artificial intelligence to make it easy for enterprise companies to search, filter, and analyze large amounts of image and video data by bringing structure to unstructured data. In this presentation, Coleman shares how his life story has shaped the type of entrepreneur he aims to be. He gives advice for fellow founders who want to build positive company cultures and teams....
Oct 11, 2023•48 min•Season 21Ep. 1
Josh Wolfe co-founded Lux Capital to support scientists and entrepreneurs who pursue counter-conventional solutions to the most vexing puzzles of our time in order to lead us into a brighter future. The more ambitious the project, the better—like, say, creating matter from light. Wolfe is a director at Shapeways, Strateos, Lux Research, Kallyope, CTRL-labs, Variant, and Varda, and helped lead Lux Capital’s investments in Anduril, Planet, Echodyne, Clarifai, Authorea, Resilience, and Hadrian. He ...
Jun 07, 2023•49 min•Season 20Ep. 8
Rahul Roy-Chowdhury is Grammarly’s CEO as of May 1, 2023. He was previously the company’s Global Head of Product, overseeing everything that makes the company’s writing assistance software tick, managing the product, design, and data science teams. Before coming aboard at Grammarly, Roy-Chowdhury spent many years at Google leading the Privacy, Safety, and Security teams to unified solutions across Google’s product portfolio. In this presentation and conversation with Stanford adjunct lecturer Ra...
May 31, 2023•46 min•Season 20Ep. 7
Claire Hughes Johnson is a corporate officer and advisor for Stripe, a global technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the internet. From 2014 to 2021, Claire served as Stripe’s Chief Operating Officer, responsible for scaling the company’s worldwide operations to meet the needs of its rapidly growing user base. During her tenure as COO, Stripe grew from less than 200 employees to more than 6,000. She is also the author of Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Buil...
May 24, 2023•49 min•Season 20Ep. 6
Julia Collins is the founder and CEO of Planet FWD, which is empowering the next generation of sustainable consumer companies with its climate management platform. Planet FWD is focused on decarbonizing global supply chains with the belief that all organizations can achieve Net Zero. The platform is inspired by Planet FWD’s own snack brand, Moonshot, which launched in 2020 as the first climate-friendly snack brand. In this conversation with Mo-Yun Lei Fong, executive director of STVP, the Stanfo...
May 17, 2023•47 min•Season 20Ep. 5
Ben Collier and James Kanoff are two co-founders of The Farmlink Project, a student-led movement that has provided over 100 million pounds of nutritious food to communities facing hunger in the United States. They started the project out of their college dorm rooms at Brown and Stanford University during the pandemic by renting a U-Haul truck to connect farmers with surplus to their local food bank. In this presentation, Collier and Kanoff share Farmlink’s story and how they have led the rapidly...
May 10, 2023•49 min•Season 20Ep. 4
Frederic Kerrest is the executive vice chairman and co-founder of Okta. He is responsible for Okta's day-to-day operations, working with employees, partners, and customers to deliver on the company's vision of enabling any organization to use any technology. Kerrest is the author of “Zero to IPO,” a WSJ Bestseller guidebook to building startups featuring insights from some of the world’s most successful and recognizable entrepreneurs. He’s also the co-host of the “Zero to IPO” podcast. In this p...
May 03, 2023•48 min•Season 20Ep. 3
Ilya Sutskever is the co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI, which aims to build artificial general intelligence that benefits all of humanity. He leads research at OpenAI and is one of the architects behind the GPT models. In this conversation with Stanford adjunct lecturer Ravi Belani, Sutskever explains his approach to making complex decisions at OpenAI and for AI companies in general, and makes predictions about the future of deep learning. —----------------------------------- Stanford eC...
Apr 26, 2023•51 min•Season 20Ep. 2
Deb Liu is the CEO of Ancestry. With over 19 years in the tech industry, she has been named one of Business Insider’s most powerful female engineers and one of PaymentsSource’s most influential women in payments. She was previously a senior executive at Facebook, where she created and led Facebook Marketplace. Her book, “Take Back Your Power: 10 New Roles for Women at Work,” was published in August 2022. In this conversation with Stanford adjunct lecturer Ravi Belani, Liu shares stories from her...
Apr 19, 2023•45 min•Season 20Ep. 1
Karabo Morule is the founder of Capital Art, which is an art fintech and the first art collection management service that is focused on collectors of modern and contemporary African art. Morule is also a non-executive director at TymeBank, South Africa’s first bank to have its core banking system in the cloud. In this conversation with Stanford adjunct lecturer Vimbayi Kajese, Morule discusses the African art market, including the ways it’s been shaped by injustice and the opportunities it prese...
Mar 15, 2023•49 min•Season 19Ep. 8
Connie Chan is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley-based technology venture capital firm with $35B in assets under management across multiple funds, where she focuses on investing in consumer technology. Chan joined the firm in 2011 as a deal partner on the investment team before becoming a general partner in 2018. She serves on the boards of Cider, Whatnot, and KoBold. In this conversation with Stanford adjunct lecturer Ravi Belani, Chan shares her career and life advice ...
Mar 08, 2023•46 min•Season 19Ep. 7
Austin Russell is the founder and CEO of Luminar, the 27 year old global leader in automotive lidar hardware and software technology. Under Russell’s leadership, Luminar has developed the first lidar and software technology capable of power producing autonomous vehicles, has amassed over 50 commercial partners including the majority of the world’s largest automakers, and went public on the Nasdaq in December 2020 with a current market valuation of approximately $7 billion. In this conversat...
Mar 01, 2023•50 min•Season 19Ep. 6
Emmy Sobieski, CFA, is the chief operating officer of Competitive Storytelling, Inc., which helps venture-backed founders from seed and beyond tell their story through methods such as the Founder Fundraising Program. Sobieski is also the author of the book $100M Careers: The 5 Fastest Paths to Wealth Beyond Your Wildest Dreams , released in December 2022. In this conversation with Mo-Yun Lei Fong, executive director of STVP, the Stanford Engineering Entrepreneurship Center, Sobieski shares her a...
Feb 22, 2023•53 min•Season 19Ep. 5
Nikil Viswanathan is the co-founder and CEO of Alchemy, the world's leading web3 developer platform. Alchemy is hailed as the fastest growing company in history, going from public launch to a $10 billion valuation in just 16 months. Alchemy powers over $100 billion in transactions globally, including the majority of the NFT industry, top web3 companies, and traditional enterprises. In this presentation, Viswanathan shares the key lessons he’s learned during his entrepreneurial journey, from his ...
Feb 15, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Season 19Ep. 4
Dave Vasen is the founder and CEO of brightwheel, the leading subscription software platform for early education. In April 2016, Vasen appeared on ABC’s “Shark Tank” and secured a $600,000 investment at one of the highest all-time valuations for the TV show. In this conversation with Stanford lecturer Emily Ma, Vasen shares his experience creating a software solution customized to fit the particular needs of the early childhood education space. —----------------------------------- Stanford eCorn...
Feb 08, 2023•46 min•Season 19Ep. 3
Annie Hockey is the co-CEO of Column, a nationally chartered bank that publicly launched in 2022 for developers who are building modern financial products and services. Hockey leads, among other functions, the regulatory, legal, accounting, and human resources aspects of Column. In this conversation with Stanford lecturer Emily Ma, Hockey discusses how she and her co-founder/co-CEO have navigated the complex regulations of the banking industry while building an innovative fintech company. —-----...
Feb 01, 2023•44 min•Season 19Ep. 2
Elise Densborn is the co-CEO of Splendid Spoon, a direct-to-consumer meal delivery platform that offers ready-to-eat, plant-based meals. Densborn was first introduced to Splendid Spoon as a customer. After over a decade in the finance industry, she joined the Splendid Spoon team as a consultant in 2018 and quickly rose through the ranks in permanent roles as VP of finance and insights and COO, becoming co-CEO in 2021. In this conversation with Stanford lecturer Emily Ma, Densborn shares the adva...
Jan 25, 2023•45 min•Season 19Ep. 1
Dante Disparte is chief strategy officer and head of global policy at Circle, a global financial technology firm at the center of digital currency innovation and open financial infrastructure. He is responsible for overseeing the company strategy, communications, policy and public affairs. In this conversation with Stanford adjunct lecturer Ravi Belani, Disparte discusses important lessons from high-profile failures in the financial tech industry and his hopes and advice for building an ethical ...
Dec 07, 2022•48 min•Season 18Ep. 8
Dr. Trevor Martin is the CEO and co-founder of Mammoth Biosciences, which addresses challenges across healthcare, agriculture, environmental monitoring, biodefense, and more through discovery of novel CRISPR systems to power the next generation of CRISPR-based synthetic biology products. Ursheet Parikh is a partner at the venture capital firm Mayfield, where he co-leads the Human and Planetary Health investment practice, which includes an investment in Mammoth. In this conversation with Stanford...
Nov 23, 2022•47 min•Season 18Ep. 7
