Stanford eCorner

Juliet Rothenberg, lead product manager for Google's climate AI initiatives, shares how AI is revolutionizing climate solutions, from optimizing traffic lights to providing flood forecasting alerts for 80 countries. She also discusses the role of a product manager when the planet is one of your key stakeholders. Hosted by Mike Lepech, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford’s...

Shiza Shahid is the co-founder and co-CEO of Our Place, a mission-driven startup reimagining kitchenware for the modern, multiethnic, global kitchen. Prior to Our Place, Shahid also co-founded the Malala Fund with Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai. She led the organization as founding CEO, advocating for the rights of all girls to attend school. Shahid also launched NOW Ventures, an angel fund t...

Dan Dorosin, a partner at the law firm Fenwick & West, Discusses the unique legal and policy challenges faced by climate and sustainability startups, from navigating the intricacies of the Inflation Reduction Act to addressing funding complexities influenced by changing legislation. Gain insights into startup financing, law and policy implications, and the evolving landscape of climate tech entrep...

Daniela Amodei is president and co-founder of Anthropic, an AI safety and research company. Amodei manages the senior leadership team, leveraging her people and management experience to further the company’s goal of building reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. In this conversation with Stanford adjunct lecturer Emily Ma, Amodei talks about how Anthropic’s team of co-founders have bu...

Arvind Gupta was a genetic engineering major-turned-trader, became a design director at IDEO, founded the startup developer IndieBio, and is now a partner at Mayfield focused on human and planetary health. His mission is to invest in science-based companies that could change history. Learn what he thinks are the unique dynamics of venture capital funding for these companies, and hear his advice on...

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 a...

Patrick Flynn, a leader in climate action, discusses the essentials of transformative climate leadership in organizations, drawing on his seven years as head of global sustainability for Salesforce as well as extensive experience advising organizations. He shares how big companies can leverage their purchasing power, the need for bold action, and why he thinks climate and sustainability is a good...

Our first episode features 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 food systems. Learn about the unique opportunities and obstacles she’s encountered in building a more sustainable future. Gain insigh...

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 intrapren...

Join STVP, the Stanford Engineering Entrepreneurship Center, for a series of conversations with innovators, investors, and intrapreneurs about the opportunities, challenges, and considerations that make climate and sustainability entrepreneurship unique. Stanford professor Mike Lepech interviews experts in technology, venture capital, policy, and more, considering user behavior, scaling adoption,...

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...

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 inve...

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 o...

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 — especial...

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...

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” ch...

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), “Simp...

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 quest...

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 founde...

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...

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...

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...

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 t...

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-fri...

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 ban...