Boardroom Governance with Evan Epstein

0:00 Intro. 1:34 Start of interview. 2:12 Keir's "origin story" . He grew up in the Bay Area and went to high school in Oakland where he ran track and got a scholarship to go to Ohio State . After realizing he wasn't going to be an Olympian, he decided to study law at U Penn . When he graduated in 1999, he joined the SEC where, among other matters, he was part of the shareholder proposals taskforc...

0:00 Intro. 1:45 Start of interview. 2:40 Ana's "origin story" . She was born and raised in Rio do Janeiro, Brazil. She got degrees in law and economics, and started her career in sales at IBM in Brazil in the mid-1980s. In 1992 she moved to the U.S. to get an MBA at Northwestern University . That led to a career of over 30 years in technology, M&A and global business transformations. A couple of...

0:00 Intro. 1:45 Start of interview. 2:40 Annemarie's "origin story" . She was born and raised in New Jersey. She went to the University of Delaware and later to the Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law . She got her first job at the SEC (Corp Fin) right out of law school. She spent 6 years at the SEC, 5 of them focused on international corporate finance (bringing international co...

0:00 Intro. 2:08 Start of interview. 2:42 Dan's "origin story" . He was born and grew up in Arizona, with a stint in Atlanta, GA. He later attended the University of Arizona on a Flinn Foundation scholarship. He then went off to graduate school to Stanford (Econ), later transitioning to Stanford Law School . He practiced law in Arizona for a year and came back to the Bay Area "almost on any excuse...

0:00 Intro. 1:39 Start of interview 3:41 Marian's "origin story" . She grew up in Allentown PA, and when she was 12, she moved to Naples TX. She later attended Reed college in Portland OR.  She got interested in urban planning and studied an MSc at LSE . She realized that change would come from corporations (private sector) and took her first job as an analyst at Glass Lewis & Co in 2005 (only the...

0:00 Intro. 1:31 Start of interview 2:30 Anne's "origin story" . She grew up in Colorado and after attending college, she moved to DC to work on the Hill and later in the Reagan Administration (U.S. Department of Energy). She moved to Sacramento in the late 1980s, where she worked in and out of state government. In her role as Chief Deputy Director of the CA Department of Finance (under Governor S...

0:00 Intro. 1:30 Start of interview 2:00 Lisa's "origin story" . She grew up in Silicon Valley and after attending college at Stanford, she moved to Mexico City for 3 years where she worked in a boutique consulting firm. She later got an MBA at Harvard Business School . She then joined Bain & Co ., became CEO of KnowledgeX (later sold to IBM ) and co-founded ValuBond . She joined Visa in 2009, and...

0:00 Intro. 1:18 Start of interview 2:01 Anat's "origin story" . She grew up in Israel. She practiced corporate law, VC fund formation, startup representation and M&A in Israel before moving to the U.S.  7:03 Her academic focus at Case Western Reserve University School of Law (Cleveland, Ohio). 9:12 On the practice of compelling employees, who are not yet stockholders, to waive their stockholder i...

0:00 Intro. 1:37 Start of interview 2:19 Joel's "origin story" . He grew up in Stamford, Connecticut ("it was a land of many corporate headquarters"). He went to Wharton undergrad and U. Penn Law School. Later, he clerked at the Court of Chancery in Delaware and worked at Skadden 's Wilmington office in Delaware "[the office] had been built around the hostile takeover litigation in the 1980s." In...

0:00 Intro. 1:42 Start of interview 2:26 Stilpon's "origin story" . He grew up in Greece and studied law at the University of Thessaloniki. He later got an LLM at Harvard Law School. He practiced corporate law in Greece, but left the country permanently in the mid 1980s. He joined the OECD where he became the first Head of the Corporate Affairs Division. In that position, he lead the team which pr...

Intro. (1:35) - Start of interview. (2:19) - Christa's "origin story" . She grew up in Dixon, California. She later went to CSU Sacramento and got her MBA at USC.  She started working as a bank teller in college and ended up as the President & CEO of Mechanics Bank in the Bay Area.  They sold the bank in 2015 to a PE firm owned by a Texas billionaire. After that sale, she started joining boards of...

Intro. (1:35) - Start of interview. (2:22) - David's "origin story" . He grew up as an "army brat" including living in Germany for about 10 years. He went to high school in West Point, NY. He stayed to go to college in Buffalo, where he also got his MBA. He left the Army and came to CA, where he ran IT for a company. He eventually went to law school first to Santa Clara, and then to UC Davis. (4:1...

Intro. (1:40) - Start of interview. (2:00) - Matt's "origin story" . He grew up in San Diego, CA. He's lived in and around New York City for the last 30 years. After college he worked as a consultant (Mercer Consulting) and VC (General Atlantic). In 1995 he joined the executive team of MovieFone , a small cap public company. He helped the company "figure out what the internet was all about." They...

Intro. (1:40) - Start of interview. (2:17) - Margaret's "origin story" . She grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas. She graduated from college (history major) the year that Bill Clinton ran for President. She took a job in the Bill/Gore '92 campaign. That led to her work in the Clinton White House. It shaped her understanding of how politics and power works. She later went to graduate school to study p...

Intro. (2:10) - Start of interview. (2:57) - David's "origin story" . He grew up in coal mining town in southern Illinois. He went to college at what is now known as the Missouri University of Science & Technology . He later worked as an engineer and got his PhD in accounting from the U. of Kansas. He was a Professor at Kellogg for about 7 years, at Wharton for about 20 years and he's been a Profe...

Intro. (1:40) - Start of interview. (2:34) - Dan's "origin story" . He grew up in southern California, did his undergrad at Stanford where he studied international relations. This prompted his quest to do something "cross-border." He did an exchange program in his junior year to Santiago, Chile, where he met his now wife and that planted a seed to do something related to Latin America. After law s...

Intro. (1:19) - Start of interview. (2:03) - Jackie's "origin story" . She grew up in South Africa where she studied psychology and later got her bachelor’s degree in economics and management from Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. Her focus on corporate governance research started in 1998 after taking a research fellowship position at the Center for Business Research at Cambridge Univ...

(0:00) Intro (2:22) Start of interview (3:04) Aaron's "origin story" . He got interested in Bitcoin early on, and collaborated on the launch of Ethereum. He co-authored a book called The Rule of Code, Blockchain and the Law (2018). He's been constantly playing around with the technology itself and he co-founded OpenLaw , which makes it easy to create legal agreements that work with Ethereum. Most...

Intro. (1:22) - Start of interview. (1:51) - Jeff's "origin story" . He grew up in Dayton, Ohio. He went to Carnegie Mellon University for undergrad "to study engineering and play football." He graduated with electrical and computer engineering degrees, and took off to Silicon Valley. He first worked in the semiconductor industry with Altera . He later got into financial services, first with Gehrs...

Intro. (1:18) - Start of interview. (1:51) - Manny's "origin story" . He grew up in Oxnard, CA . He went to Cornell University for undergrad and "that's probably the first time he realized that the rest of the world did not look like Oxnard." His foray into film studies, including at Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle , also known as Paris III. (8:05) - His decision to go to law school. (9:34) - H...

Intro. (1:11) - Start of interview. (3:04) - Kendrick's "origin story" . He was born in Vietnam and grew up in the Bay Area. After law school he worked at Goodwin Procter for a couple of years before taking a position in-house for a large fund-of-funds ( Permal Group ) in NYC. He then worked at the Stanford Rock Center with Joe Grunfdest.  After Stanford, he joined AngelList as the GC, and launche...

Intro. (1:30) - Start of interview. (2:12) - Abe's "origin story" . He grew up in L.A and moved up to the Bay Area where he attended Berkeley for college and law school. After law school he went to Seattle and worked in-house for US West Communications (now Qwest Corporation). Back in northern California he joined another telecom before joining the founding team at Glass Lewis in 2003 ("the market...

Intro. (1:24) - Start of interview. (1:54) - Priya's "origin story". She was born in India and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. She went to Harvard college and studied law at Chicago Law School. After graduation she clerked for Judge Frank Magill (U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, in North Dakota). She later joined WSGR as a corporate securities attorney during the dot com boom in Sili...

Intro. (1:25) - Start of interview. (2:14) - Maureen's "origin story". (3:00) - Why she focused on WeWork as the subject of her book " The Cult of We " with her WSJ colleague Eliot Brown . She took over the IPO beat at the WSJ in 2016, "when there were almost no IPOs." Tech companies were staying private for longer with a ton of capital flowing into the private markets. That's when she started fol...

Intro. (1:08) - Start of interview. (1:42) - Robin's "origin story": she grew up in Indiana, "sought warmer weather" so she headed to Duke for college. She later got an MBA at Harvard and started her consulting career at Booz Allen in SF. Five years later she started her own firm, SCA Consulting, focusing on executive compensation and strategy, based out of L.A. She sold that firm to Mercer in 200...