Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)

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 president and CEO of Xoom.com and president and CEO of Ofoto, and co-founded When.com. In this conversation with Stanford adjunct lecturer and STVP director of principled entrepreneurship Jack Fuchs, Joaquin discusses his commitment to “world positive investing” and his belief that many highly successful 21st century businesses will be devoted to solving the world’s biggest problems. 

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 marketplace, logistics and payments services. In this conversation with Darius Teter, executive director of Stanford Seed, Anammah explores the challenges of building a marketplace business in Africa as well as the huge untapped potential of e-commerce on the continent.

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 Stanford adjunct lecturer Ravi Belani, Koller examines the key turning points in her diverse and innovative career, and speaks about how she searched for the opportunities that would have the greatest impact on the world. 

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-risking the enterprise. As you de-risk the enterprise, he explains, you create opportunities for larger fundraising rounds.

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 support moms impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this conversation with Stanford adjunct lecturer Ravi Belani, Saujani discusses the root causes of the gender gap in tech and explores what companies and individuals still need to do to make the field more fair and equitable.

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 School. In this conversation with Stanford adjunct lecturer Ravi Belani, Reinhart discusses how thredUp arrived at its business model, and explores the challenges, pivots, and insights that emerged during thredUP’s decade-long journey to becoming a publicly traded company.

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 also teaches Global Entrepreneurial Marketing in Stanford University’s School of Engineering. In this conversation with Stanford adjunct lecturer Ravi Belani, Smith walks listeners through the fundamental lessons of her Stanford class, using real-world examples to illustrate the importance of marketing in technology entrepreneurship.   

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 founded half a dozen other companies, raising more than $500 million in venture capital, and invested in numerous startups, including Reddit, Cruise Automation, Bird, and Rippling. In this conversation with Stanford adjunct lecturer Ravi Belani, Kan discusses the highs and lows of his life in startups, and explores what both success and failure have taught him about building entrepreneurial resilience and finding satisfaction.

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 entrepreneurship educators? In this episodes, Eesley poses that question to three thought leaders devoted to training future innovators: Jon Fjeld of Duke’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative, Hadiyah Mujhid of HBCUvc, and Elizabeth Brake of Venture for America. The conversations explore the many ways that entrepreneurship education can impact students and aspiring innovators — even if they never found a company themselves.

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 Stanford associate professor Chuck Eesley, she explores how syndicates, platforms and digital networks are reshaping angel investing.

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 largest fintech companies in the world. In this conversation with Stanford professor Riitta Katila, Zieger explains why Responsible Innovation Labs is developing frameworks for responsible technology innovation and explores what a principled 21st century technology ecosystem might look like.

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 book “Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success” (Currency, March 2021), which analyzes common patterns that sink both early- and late-stage startups, and also proposes a road map for deciding when to pull the plug and how to fail better.

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 21st century businesses, and explores how the concept of “enlightened self-interest” can create a framework for better decision-making without requiring a commitment to pure (and unrealistic) altruism.

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, and why having two CEOs is sometimes better than having one.

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, including Zoom, Robinhood, Datadog, and Allbirds. In this conversation with Stanford lecturer Toby Corey, Iguodala and Cline-Thomas discuss the evolving career paths for athletes, the unique value athletes bring as tech investors, and their shared passion for closing America’s racial wealth gap.

Maëlle Gavet is the CEO of Techstars and the author of Trampled by Unicorns: Big Tech's Empathy Problem and How to Fix It (Wiley, 2020). In this conversation with Stanford lecturer Toby Corey, she explores how to deploy “ruthless empathy” in tech by combining big ambitions and cutting-edge ideas with a deep respect for other people.

Howie Liu is the co-founder and CEO of Airtable. Inspired by his own experiences learning to code and building customized business apps, he co-founded the company in 2013 to democratize software creation. Prior to that, he was the founder of Etacts, an intelligent CRM tool that was acquired by Salesforce. While Etacts was a furious one-year sprint to acquisition, Liu followed a very deliberate, long-term approach with his second startup. In this conversation with Stanford lecturer Ravi Belani, he offers advice to innovators who seek to create complex products that can’t be prototyped in a week-long hacking session.

Miriam Rivera is the co-founder and managing director of Ulu Ventures, a seed stage venture fund focused on IT startups. Previously, she was a vice president and deputy general counsel at Google, where she joined as the company’s second attorney. In this conversation with Stanford adjunct lecturer Heidi Roizen, Rivera discusses the state of diversity and inclusion in Silicon Valley, how she evaluates investment opportunities to eliminate bias, and the importance of great mentors. 

Michelle Zatlyn is the co-founder, president, and Chief Operating Officer of Cloudflare, an internet security, performance, and reliability company that is on a mission to help build a better internet. In this conversation with Stanford lecturer Ravi Belani, Zatlyn discusses the intense challenges involved in scaling a high-growth business, and offers insights about how to find optimism and build a great team amid those challenges.

Othman Laraki is the co-founder and CEO of Color, a distributed healthcare and clinical testing company. From population genomics programs to high-throughput COVID-19 testing, Color provides the technology and infrastructure to power large-scale health initiatives. In this conversation with Stanford lecturer Toby Corey, Laraki discusses the genesis of Color, the immense challenges and opportunities in the healthcare sector, and Color’s race into COVID testing when the pandemic hit.

In our first-ever ETL Research bonus episode, we look at one of the first empirical studies of lean startup. In a recent paper published in the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, researchers Michael Leatherbee and Riitta Katila find that lean startup’s emphasis on “customer discovery” — that is, directly testing business hypotheses with potential costumers during product development — does help teams converge on business ideas. They also find that MBAs are both hesitant to embrace the method and especially successful when they choose to employ it. Katila is a professor in Stanford’s Department of Management Science and Engineering and research director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and Leatherbee is a professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile as well as President of the Advisory Board for Startup Chile. In this conversation they are joined by Stanford adjunct professor Steve Blank, whose Lean Launchpad class and 2003 book The Four Steps to the Epiphany were foundational to the lean startup movement.

Hemant Taneja is a managing director at General Catalyst, and has been an early investor in market-leading companies like Digit, Grammarly, Gusto, Livongo, Mindstrong, Samsara, Snap, and Stripe. His 2018 book Unscaled articulates the need for accountability, transparency, and explainability in AI technologies, and his 2020 book UnHealthcare proposes a new model for impactful healthcare innovation. He is also the author of the influential Harvard Business Review article “The Era of ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ is Over.” In this conversation with Stanford professor Tom Byers, Taneja discusses recent technological paradigm shifts, and urges founders and investors to build responsibly and drive positive social change by measuring and valuing impact as much as financial returns.

In January 2019, Aicha Evans was named CEO of autonomous vehicle startup Zoox, which was acquired by Amazon in 2020. Prior to joining Zoox, Evans served as Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer at Intel, where she drove Intel’s transformation from a PC-centric company to a data-centric company. In this conversation with Stanford adjunct lecturer and former Zoox board member Heidi Roizen, Evans discusses building cutting-edge technology in a crowded market, dealing with skeptics, and leading an innovative team.

While attending Harvard Business School, Katrina Lake saw an opportunity to combine data science with human stylists to reinvent the retail space. Lake founded Stitch Fix in 2011 to help women everywhere discover and explore their style through a truly client-focused shopping experience. In this conversation with Stanford lecturer Ravi Belani, Lake discusses experiencing and fighting bias, achieving massive and unexpected financial success, and leading with authenticity.

David Rogier is the founder and CEO of MasterClass, a streaming platform that allows members to watch video lessons from top-performing professionals like Steph Curry, Margaret Atwood, Martin Scorsese, Sarah Blakely and Serena Williams. In this conversation with Stanford lecturer Ravi Belani, Rogier discusses why he created MasterClass; how he engaged the right investors, advisors, and talent; and how he dealt with hundreds of people telling him that his idea was impossible.

Vlad Tenev is the CEO and co-founder of Robinhood, a fast-growing brokerage platform giving millions of people access to investment opportunities and financial tools. In this conversation with Stanford lecturer Ravi Belani, Tenev offers a behind-the-scenes view of high-stakes decisions related to the GameStop crisis, discusses the future of the financial services industry, and reflects on both past missteps and ongoing efforts to innovate at Robinhood and transform securities trading in the 21st century.

Stephanie Lampkin, a TEDx speaker and former downhill ski racer, is the founder and CEO of Blendoor, which creates enterprise software that leverages augmented intelligence and people analytics to mitigate unconscious bias in hiring. Her 15-year career in the tech industry has included founding two startups and working in technical roles at Lockheed, Microsoft, and TripAdvisor. In this conversation with Stanford lecturer Emily Ma, she discusses her experiences as a Black woman in tech, the importance of expanding our social graphs to solve diversity challenges, and why she’s largely opted out of chasing traditional venture capital.

Tony Mugavero is the co-founder and CEO of Rad (formerly known as Littlstar), a consumer streaming platform delivering live and on-demand Esports, music, comedy and sports. A veteran of the content streaming space, Mugavero has witnessed virtual reality’s transformation from an over-hyped new technology into a growing, real-world consumer experience. In this conversation with Stanford lecturer Emily Ma, he discusses how to build a sustainable business in a cutting-edge niche, why relationships are central to entrepreneurship, and how Rad has thrived amid the bumpy progress of VR.

Alyssa Ravasio is the founder and CEO of Hipcamp, a platform for booking outdoor stays, from national parks to blueberry farms. Hipcamp partners with private landowners to unlock more ways for people to get outside, while also preserving land and ecosystems. In this conversation with Stanford lecturer Emily Ma, Ravasio discusses the early days of Hipcamp, analyzes several major pivots, and unpacks the values that drive the company.

In this special micro-episode of ETL, Stanford lecturer Ravi Belani reflects on his key entrepreneurial takeaway from 2020. In a year that defied expectations, he notes that most companies start with good ideas but ultimately fail because founders spread their focus too thin. Belani shares clips from two 2020 ETL talks — one from PlayVS founder and CEO Delane Parnell and one from Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan. Both Parnell and Yuan, observes Belani, exemplify the laser focus that drives successful ventures.

In this special micro-episode of ETL, Stanford lecturer Toby Corey reflects on his key entrepreneurial takeaway from 2020. Corey emphasizes that the entrepreneurial journey is a process, particularly when entrepreneurs are presented with extreme challenges or are solving big problems. He shares a clip from the ETL talk “Reimagining Meat,” featuring Beyond Meat founder and CEO Ethan Brown. Brown shares how his early experiences with animal agriculture, his concern about the connections between meat consumption and climate change, and his interest in the science of building meat from plants culminated in starting Beyond Meat.

In this special micro-episode of ETL, Stanford associate professor Chuck Eesley reflects on his key entrepreneurial takeaway from 2020. In a year that defied expectations and presented entrepreneurs with unique challenges, Eesley stresses that entrepreneurs have a responsibility to create a more diverse and inclusive tech ecosystem. To drive the point home, he shares a clip from the ETL talk “Entrepreneurship and Racial Justice,” featuring OHUB executive director and CEO Rodney Sampson and RUNWAY CEO Jessica Norwood. In this clip, Sampson highlights the importance of viewing entrepreneurship through an antiracist lens.

In this special micro-episode of ETL, Stanford professor Tom Byers reflects on his key entrepreneurial takeaway from 2020. In a year that defied expectations, Byers underscores that more than ever, entrepreneurs have a responsibility to consider the implications and consequences of their technologies and ideas on society. He shares a clip from Floodgate founding partner Ann Miura-Ko’s 2020 ETL talk “Disruption and Abundance,” in which Miura-Ko emphasizes the importance of responsible tech.

In this special micro-episode of ETL, Stanford professor of the practice Tina Seelig reflects on her key entrepreneurial takeaway from 2020. Seelig observes that, especially in times of great change and uncertainty, entrepreneurs can be empowered by the necessity to innovate. When it comes to COVID-19, the challenges of the pandemic also presented an opportunity to refine remote work. Seelig shares a clip from Digits co-founder Jeff Seibert’s 2020 ETL talk “Making Remote Work Better,” in which he explains how his company has leveraged remote work to drive both efficiency and creative collaboration.

In December 2018, Sarah Friar was named CEO of Nextdoor, the world’s largest private social network for neighborhoods. Prior to leading Nextdoor, she was CFO of Square and SVP of Finance & Strategy at Salesforce. She serves on the boards of Walmart and Slack, and is the co-founder of Ladies Who Launch, a nonprofit that celebrates and empowers women entrepreneurs. In this conversation with Stanford professor Tom Byers, she discusses what attracted her to Nextdoor, and explores how she aims to amplify helpful, neighborly behavior on a social network.

Ravi Mhatre is a founding partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners and focuses primarily on software/cloud infrastructure, applications and internet investments. Before starting Lightspeed, Mhatre was an investor with Bessemer Venture Partners and before entering the venture capital industry, he was with Silicon Graphics, where he was a product manager and later directed the company’s workstation market development efforts. In this conversation with Stanford lecturer Ravi Belani, he explores what a career in VC looks like, and talks about some of the sectors and technologies that he believes are poised to transform the future.

Jessica Norwood is the founder of RUNWAY, an organization that uses entrepreneurship to close the wealth gap in Black communities by providing pre-seed and friends-and-family capital to fund Black-owned companies. Rodney Sampson is the CEO and executive chairman of Opportunity Hub (OHUB), a multi-campus entrepreneurship center and tech hub that empowers underestimated and under-tapped communities. In this conversation moderated by Stanford associate professor Chuck Eesley, Norwood and Sampson discuss how we can address racial disparities in startup funding, and build a more equitable and inclusive entrepreneurial community.

After growing and leading the team that developed WebEx, Eric Yuan left his role as Corporate Vice President of Engineering at Cisco in 2011 to found Zoom Video Communications. Santiago Subotovsky, a general partner at Emergence Capital, led his firm’s investment in Zoom. In this conversation with Stanford lecturer Ravi Belani, they discuss what drove Zoom and how they built the confidence to launch this new company into an already crowded video conferencing market.

An entrepreneur, investor, business leader, and rocket-scientist, Sylvia Acevedo is the author of Path to the Stars: My Journey from Girl Scout to Rocket Scientist, which tells the story of her journey from a small town in New Mexico to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Acevedo most recently served as CEO of Girl Scouts of the USA. In this conversation with Stanford professor Tina Seelig, she shares how some important early lessons in perseverance built a mindset that allowed her to excel as both a scientist and an entrepreneur.

As the president and CEO of Vir Biotechnology, as well as in his role as head of BIO’s Coronavirus Collaboration Initiative, George Scangos has emerged as a global leader in the fight against COVID-19. In this conversation with Stanford structural biology professor Jody Puglisi, Dr. Scangos explains the challenge of building financially viable therapies for infectious diseases, talks about the current status of COVID-related research, and explores how to build an innovative and meaningful career in biotech.

Delane Parnell is the founder and CEO of PlayVS, which is building the technology infrastructure for high school and college esports leagues. Prior to starting PlayVS, Parnell worked at IncWell Venture Capital, where he became the youngest black venture capitalist in the United States. In this talk, he explores his own journey from undertaking small-scale business as a teenager to building a billion-dollar company. He also explores the complexities of creating a multi-stakeholder business, and addresses how he and his team have responded to racism and gender disparities.

An experienced tech exec, Shellye Archambeau serves on the boards of Verizon and Nordstrom as well as several other companies. She is the former CEO of MetricStream, a Silicon Valley-based governance, risk, and compliance software company that, during her tenure, grew from a fledgling startup into a global market leader. Anticipating the launch of her first book, Unapologetically Ambitious: Take Risks, Break Barriers and Create Success on Your Own Terms (2020), she speaks with Stanford professor Tina Seelig about how to advocate for oneself, find mentors and sponsors, beat imposter syndrome, and build an impactful career.

Adam Pisoni co-founded Yammer in 2008, and oversaw product, analytics, and engineering as the SaaS company scaled to 500 employees and was acquired by Microsoft in 2012 for $1.2 billion. More recently, he has turned his attention to the US education system. Abl, the company he founded in 2015, aims to help all schools move beyond the 20th century model of education. In this talk, he describes how inequities manifest themselves in K-12 education, and explores the roles that innovative social ventures can play in addressing those inequities.

Ann Miura-Ko is a lecturer in Stanford’s Department of Management Science and Engineering and a co-founding partner at Floodgate, a VC firm focused on seed-stage investments. A repeat member of the Forbes Midas List and the New York Times Top 20 Venture Capitalists Worldwide, she was one of the first investors in Lyft and Refinery29, and has been an early backer of many others, including Xamarin and Thinkful. Here, she shares her takes on foundational entrepreneurial concepts like “product-market fit” and shares a vision for how bold, even disruptive innovation and shared abundance can co-exist.

Description goes here.On November 8, 2016, Michael Tubbs was elected to serve as the mayor of the City of Stockton, California. Upon taking office in January 2017, Tubbs became both Stockton’s youngest mayor and the city’s first Black mayor. Among other accomplishments, he leveraged a $1 million grant to launch the nation’s first ever mayor-led guaranteed income pilot. Here, he talks about building trust with constituents and creating relationships and coalitions across political boundaries, and discusses solutions to pressing racial and economic inequities.

Kevin Weil is the VP of Product for Novi, Facebook’s digital wallet for the Libra payment system. Previously, Weil was VP of Product at Instagram (overseeing consumer, growth, and monetization products) and SVP of Product at Twitter (where he led product development and design across Twitter’s consumer and ad products, as well as Vine and Periscope). In this talk, he explores the mission that drives both Libra and Novi, and shares a number of crucial insights on digital product design.

Amy Chang is an executive vice president at Cisco. Following the acquisition of her startup Accompany by Cisco in 2018, she led Cisco's multi-billion dollar Collaboration business and its Webex portfolio. In this talk, she describes an approach to networking that’s built on affinity and even friendship rather than short-term, transactional goals. She shares how her relationships and network shaped her career as she navigated a path from electrical engineering at Stanford to her current roles at Cisco and on the Proctor & Gamble board, with formative stops at McKinsey, Google, and elsewhere.

Debbie Sterling is the founder and CEO of GoldieBlox, an award-winning children’s multimedia company known for disrupting the “pink aisle” in toy stores around the world, and challenging gender stereotypes with a girl engineer character. In 2015, Sterling was inducted as a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship under the Obama administration and honored by the National Women’s History Museum with a “Living Legacy” Award for her work to empower girls around the world. Here, she explores the strategies, pivots, and mission-driven commitments that have helped GoldieBlox thrive.

Jeff Seibert is a serial entrepreneur and active angel investor. His current focus is Digits, which he co-founded in 2018 to build modern, intelligent, real-time finance tools for business owners. Seibert previously served as Twitter’s Head of Consumer Product and led the company’s product efforts for iOS, Android and the Web, as well as its Developer and Data platforms. He was also the co-founder and CEO of Crashlytics and the co-founder and COO of Increo. In this talk, he describes the origin of Digits, and particularly focuses on one aspect of the company: its full-throttled embrace of remote work long before COVID-19 made remote work the global default.

Olympian in luge, television reporter, airline pilot, and venture capitalist… Bonny Simi’s career path has been anything but linear. Simi is now the president of JetBlue Technology Ventures, the venture capital arm of JetBlue Airways that invests in and partners with early-stage startups that are improving the future of travel and hospitality. In this talk, she shares how she leaned into her creativity and curiosity, and found the courage to blaze her own path.