Stanford eCorner

Irma Olguin, Jr. is the CEO and co-founder of Bitwise Industries, a startup founded in Fresno, California that aims to create diverse tech workforces that can reinvigorate underestimated cities across the United States. Morgan Simon is a founding partner of Candide Group, which works with families, foundations, athletes, and cultural influencers who want their money working for justice. She is als...

Ranjay Gulati is the Paul R. Lawrence MBA Class of 1942 Professor of Business Administration and the former unit head of the Organizational Behavior Unit at Harvard Business School. He is an expert on leadership in turbulent times, and his latest book, Deep Purpose: The Heart and Soul of High-Performance Companies (Harper Collins, February 2022), shows how companies can embed purpose to deliver im...

Russ Altman is the Kenneth Fong Professor of Bioengineering, Genetics, Medicine, Biomedical Data Science and (by courtesy) Computer Science at Stanford University. His primary research interests are in the application of computing to problems relevant to medicine. Kim Branson is a senior vice president and Global Head of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at GSK, where he leads the GSK.a...

A lawyer, public policy expert, and tech entrepreneur, Paola Santana is the founder and CEO of GLASS, a software ecosystem using artificial intelligence to power high-performing governments. Her work includes engaging with The White House, the United States Congress, the FAA, and NASA to enact regulatory frameworks for new transportation technologies, and developing public infrastructure projects...

Alongside his wife Crystal, Chris Sacca built Lowercase Capital into an extraordinarily successful VC firm, leveraging very early-stage investments in transformational technology companies like Twitter, Uber, Instagram, and Stripe. He retired in 2017, but came out of retirement to head up the science and investing team at Lowercarbon Capital, which is pursuing ambitious solutions to the climate cr...

Payal Kadakia is the founder of ClassPass, the health and wellness app that ​​connects users to fitness classes and other health-positive experiences in 30 countries worldwide. Kadakia is also the founder and artistic director of The Sa Dance Company. Kadakia’s first book, LifePass: Drop Your Limits, Rise to Your Potential, is forthcoming in February 2022. In this conversation with Stanford adjunc...

Jessica McKellar is the founder and CTO of Pilot, an accounting firm powered by software that has raised more than $160 million in venture capital funding. She also founded Zulip, a group collaboration tool that was acquired by Dropbox in 2014, and Ksplice, which was acquired by Oracle. In this conversation with Stanford adjunct lecturer Emily Ma, McKellar discusses her 15-year journey founding th...

Josh Giegel is the co-founder of Virgin Hyperloop, a company dedicated to making hyperloop transportation a reality. Giegel founded the company in 2014, when hyperloop was an idea on a whiteboard in a garage. A little over two years later, Virgin Hyperloop built a full-scale prototype. Previously, at SpaceX, Giegel led the successful testing of six different rocket engines. He then shifted to lead...

Alexandr Wang is the founder and CEO of Scale AI. He founded Scale while at MIT at the age of 19, after recognizing that he could accelerate companies’ abilities to deploy AI by combining a machine learning-powered data labeling system with human insight to ensure that models are trained on high-quality, trusted datasets. In this conversation with Stanford adjunct lecturer Emily Ma, Wang discusses...

Sara Menker is the founder and CEO of Gro Intelligence, which uses data, analytics, and forecasting models to inform companies involved in the agricultural supply chain and organizations impacted by climate change. Hans Tung is a managing partner at GGV Capital, focusing on early-stage investments across the global digital economy. In this conversation with Stanford adjunct lecturer Emily Ma, Menk...

James Joaquin is the co-founder and managing director of Obvious Ventures, leading the team’s investments focused on plant-forward approaches to food (like Beyond Meat), “good for you” consumer goods (like Olly), and companies at the forefront of how people find and do their best work (like Incredible Health). Joaquin has been working in venture capital since 2007. Prior to investing, he served as...

Juliet Anammah is the chairwoman of Jumia Nigeria and the Chief Sustainability Officer of Jumia Group, the largest e-commerce platform in Africa and the first African tech startup to be listed on the NYSE. She previously served as the CEO of Jumia Nigeria for more than 4 years, overseeing the growth and transition of Jumia Nigeria from online retail to a full digital ecosystem that included market...

Daphne Koller is the CEO and founder of insitro, a machine learning-enabled drug discovery company. Previously, she was a professor of computer science at Stanford University for 18 years, co-founder and co-CEO of Coursera, and the Chief Computing Officer of Calico, an Alphabet company in the healthcare space. She received the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2004. In this conversation with Stan...

It’s understandable that, amid a flurry of pitch meetings and rejections, founders might find themselves mystified about what venture capital investors want. However, according to Bessemer Venture Partners operating partner Jeff Epstein, it’s actually very simple: They want to see a business that has the potential to grow exponentially, some evidence of traction, and a concrete plan for further de...

Reshma Saujani is the founder of Girls Who Code and the Marshall Plan for Moms, and is the author of the forthcoming book Pay Up: The Future of Women and Work (and Why It's Different Than You Think). She has spent more than a decade building movements to fight for women and girls’ economic empowerment, working to close the gender gap in the tech sector, and most recently advocating for policies to...

James Reinhart is the co-founder and CEO of thredUP, one of the world's largest online resale platforms. thredUP designed a digital resale experience that aims to take the work and risk out of thrift in an effort to make used clothes the new normal and create a more sustainable future for fashion. Prior to thredUP, he helped develop one of the nation’s premier public schools, Pacific Collegiate Sc...

As the Chief Marketing Officer for companies that have included Twilio, Jive, Genpact, Nuance, and Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Lynda Kate Smith has owned go-to-market strategy and full marketing responsibilities across a diverse set of industries, particularly in the area of tech products and services. She is currently a consultant/fractional CMO for mParticle and Misty Robotics, and...

Justin Kan is an entrepreneur and investor best known as the co-founder of Twitch. In 2006, Kan launched the live video service Justin.tv, a company that started when he strapped a camera to his head and streamed his life to the internet 24/7. Over the next 8 years, he and his co-founders turned the business into Twitch, which ultimately sold to Amazon in 2014 for $970 million. Kan has also founde...

In a recent paper, Stanford professor Chuck Eesley and Notre Dame professor Yong Suk Lee observed that formal entrepreneurship education helped Stanford alumni founders raise more funding and scale more quickly than peers who received no formal entrepreneurship training. But entrepreneurship education didn’t lead to a higher rate of startup creation itself. What should that finding mean for entrep...

Ashley Flucas is the founder and general partner of Flucas Ventures. Based in West Palm Beach, Florida, the syndicate of around 2,000 angel investors has invested in more than 200 startups. Flucas, a graduate of Duke University and Harvard Law School, also serves as a partner at Jupiter, a Florida-based real estate finance fund with $3 billion in assets under management. In this conversation with...

Jon Zieger is a co-founder and the executive director of Responsible Innovation Labs, a nonprofit working to create tools and standards to help innovative companies scale responsibly. He was previously the general counsel of Stripe, where he built and oversaw the company’s legal, compliance, public policy, and corporate security functions and helped Stripe scale from a small startup to one of the...

Tom Eisenmann is the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School; Peter O. Crisp Chair of Harvard Innovation Labs; and faculty co-chair of the HBS Rock Center for Entrepreneurship, the Harvard MS/MBA Program, and the Harvard College Technology Innovation Fellows Program. In this conversation with Stanford professor Tom Byers, he shares insights from his...

Nicole Diaz is the Global Head of Integrity & Compliance Legal for Snap Inc., where her responsibilities include promoting ethical business standards and adherence to the Code of Conduct, managing risk in key areas such as anti-bribery and trade law, and leading internal investigations. In this conversation with Stanford professor Tom Byers, Diaz insists that ethics is a strategic imperative for 2...

Jannick Malling is the co-founder and co-CEO of Public.com, an investing social network where members can own fractional shares of stocks and ETFs, follow popular creators, and share ideas within a community of investors. In this conversation with Stanford lecturer Toby Corey, Malling discusses building magical products in a highly regulated industry, turning company values into everyday tools, an...

Rudy Cline-Thomas is the managing director of Mastry, Inc., which brings together athletes and technology companies to create platform-building opportunities. A three-time NBA Champion, Andre Iguodala has played for the Miami Heat, the Golden State Warriors, the Denver Nuggets, and the Philadelphia 76ers. Off the court, Iguodala has invested in more than 50 companies through his firm F9 Strategies...