The Stanford Ecopreneurship Podcast

Stanford Professor David Lobell was using satellites to measure things like crop efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions when he was approached by fellow Profs. Marshall Burke and Stefano Ermon. “Marshall came to me and said, I know you're doing all this cool stuff in agriculture with remote sensing, but I'm trying to get information on poverty, and it seems like you should be able to tell me some...

"Our economic systems are blind to the values of nature," says Stanford Prof. and world-renowned ecologist Gretchen Daily. "We could assume that nature was infinite and that's what was assumed for the most part. But now, everybody's waking up to reality." As the co-founder and faculty director of the Stanford Natural Capital Project, Prof. Daily has redefined how we understand and value nature’s r...

“Usually, it takes the founders — the inventors — really strong faith to say, I believe this is so important,” says Stanford Prof. Yi Cui. “There's many challenges ahead of me, but I'm willing to put in my multiple years of life to be so dedicated to making it into the real world.” Prof. Cui grew up in China but has spent most of his life in the US, where he founded several companies, including th...

"There's just no way I could not do it," says Impossible Foods founder and former CEO Pat Brown. "I felt like there's nothing more important I could do in terms of really having a positive impact on the world." Brown is also an active professor emeritus of biochemistry at Stanford, and the co-founder of the Carbon Ranch in Arkansas. In this episode of the Stanford Ecopreneurship Podcast, Sam McClu...

"I realized that it's not just about the technology. It's also the policy, the business model,” says Magnefy CEO Dr. Joseph Kao. “To really bring impact at a bigger scale to the world, we really need to understand interdisciplinary research and bring together different experts." Prof. Senesky is the co-founder of Magnefy, which uses AI to predict the needs of critical power assets like transformer...

"The one thing that's almost impossible to change—or put another way, it's locked in on day one—is timing," says Stanford Professor Will Cheuh. "If you get the timing right, man, you are on a streak. But if you get the timing wrong, even with the same people, the same idea, nothing will happen." In this episode of the Stanford Ecopreneurship Podcast, join our host Sam McClure and Will Chueh, Direc...

Some of the world’s most powerful ideas start in a university lab. These innovations drive humanity forward and make our lives on Earth more sustainable. But how do we get those ideas out of the lab and into the real world? On the Stanford Ecopreneurship Podcast, Sam McClure sits down with academics, technologists, and policy leaders at Stanford to understand how they are building a resilient and...