Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)

Ethan Brown is the founder, president and CEO of Beyond Meat. In this talk, Stanford lecturer Toby Corey interviews Brown about how his company has redefined “meat.” Brown shares some of the key lessons learned from Beyond Meat’s startup story and explores some of the pivotal moments of his journey from idea to IPO.

Andy Karsner is a senior strategist and “Space Cowboy” at X, the “moonshot factory” at Alphabet (Google’s parent company). He has spent two decades driving renewable energy innovation and other climate solutions, including serving as the Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy from 2005 to 2008. In this talk, Emily Ma, Food Systems Lead at X, interviews Karsner about the nation’s preeminent natural security challenges and explores where he finds the greatest hope for designing solutions.

Joseph Tsai is a co-founder and the executive vice chairman of Alibaba Group, a global Internet technology company based in China. He is also the owner of the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets and the WNBA’s New York Liberty, along with several other sports and sports media companies. In this conversation with Stanford professor Tom Byers, Tsai tells stories and shares strategies from a career that has built many important bridges between China and North America.

Amy Francetic is the founder and managing partner of Buoyant Ventures, a venture fund that invests in digital climate solutions. In this talk, delivered on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day and in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic, Francetic sheds light on the evolution of the clean tech market and shares why now, more than ever, is an opportune time to invest in clean energy and energy efficiency.

Heidi Roizen, now a partner at Threshold Ventures, spent time as the CEO and co-founder of T/Maker and the VP of Worldwide Developer Relations at Apple before pursuing a career in venture capital. Along the way, she’s experienced several significant disruptions, including the dot-com crash of the early 2000s and the subsequent Great Recession. In this talk, delivered amid the COVID-19 pandemic, she shares ten concepts that can guide leaders in times of crisis.

What does a venture capitalist actually do day-to-day, and how do they make decisions? Annie Kadavy is a managing director at Redpoint Ventures, and in this conversation with Stanford professor of the practice Tina Seelig, she shares what her job looks like, then presents five mini-case studies looking at how VCs scope investments and manage companies.

As a lecturer in Stanford’s Department of Management Science and Engineering, Ravi Belani regularly teaches MS&E 472, the Stanford course associated with the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series. He is also the managing director of Alchemist Accelerator, an accelerator program that focuses on enterprise businesses and has funded startups like LaunchDarkly, Rigetti Computing and Zipongo. Before Alchemist, he spent four years as an associate at the VC firm DFJ. There, he was instrumental in backing the company that later became Twitch, which was acquired by Amazon for $970 million in 2014. In this talk, he draws on his keen observations of the Silicon Valley ecosystem to identify the factors that align to create the most transformational venture-scale businesses.--------------------Stanford eCorner content is produced by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. At STVP, we empower aspiring entrepreneurs to become global citizens who create and scale responsible innovations. CONNECT WITH USTwitter: https://twitter.com/ECorner LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/stanfordtechnologyventuresprogram/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/StanfordTechnologyVenturesProgram/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/ecorner  LEARN MOREeCorner Website: https://ecorner.stanford.edu/STVP Website: https://stvp.stanford.edu/ Support our mission of providing students and educators around the world with free access to Stanford University's network of entrepreneurial thought leaders: https://ecorner.stanford.edu/give.

Mark Gainey, co-founder of Strava, explains how the 'inch wide, mile deep' strategy helped Strava find its niche in the market. Gainey discusses the importance of focusing on passionate road cyclists, building a niche brand, and expanding globally through product design changes and community integration. He also explores Strava's business model, addressing challenges such as lawsuits and military base accusations. Lastly, he analyzes Strava's subscriber rate and future plans for increasing subscribers.

Mar Hershenson co-founded Pear VC in 2013, and under her watch the firm has made seed and pre-seed investments in category-defining companies like DropBox, Gusto, DoorDash and Branch Metrics. Along the way, she’s spent a significant amount of time mentoring student-entrepreneurs. In this talk, she focuses on some of the most common questions and concerns she hears from student entrepreneurs, offering insights she’s gained both as a serial startup founder and as a seed-stage VC investor.

Backed by corporate investors that included Cisco, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce, Omar Tawakol founded Voicea in 2017, and served as the company’s CEO until its acquisition by Cisco in September 2019. Voicea’s core offering was EVA, an  in-meeting AI assistant that transcribed meetings, generated highlights, and pushed relevant meeting content to productivity tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams. EVA is now being rolled into Cisco’s Webex Assistant, and Tawakol is currently the VP and GM of the Cisco Contact Center. In this talk, he explores the strategies he employed as he scaled Voicea and landed it at Cisco. He also draws on his experience building BlueKai, a data exchange and data management platform company he founded in 2007 and sold to Oracle in 2014, and draws contrasts between the two very different B2B business models.