Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)

Nicole Hu and her two co-founders created One Concern to help communities prepare for and mitigate natural disasters by harnessing the power of AI. She explains how they use machine intelligence as a predictive tool, and shares strategies for identifying a central problem, securing investment and growing a mission-driven team.

Ritu Narayan founded Zūm in 2014 to solve a problem that working parents (herself included) face every day: transporting and caring for children before and after school. She describes her journey from the Delhi Institute of Technology to Silicon Valley and unpacks three factors that catalyze sustained growth: passion, perseverance and people.

From high school computer science classes all the way up to VC partner meetings, women and people of color remain underrepresented in the technology ecosystem. Even so, diversity-focused social scientist and venture capitalist Freada Kapor Klein is hopeful about the future of technology and entrepreneurship. As a partner at Kapor Capital, she provides seed-stage funding to technology startups that make a positive social impact on low-income communities and communities of color. Drawing on her work both as an investor and a diversity researcher, she offers strategies that founders and funders alike can pursue to make the tech world more diverse and inclusive.

You can’t do it all, no matter what our crazed culture tells you—and there’s no shame in walking away from a commitment that isn’t working out, as long as you do it thoughtfully, respectfully, and with plenty of advance warning. On this episode of LEAP!, Tina Seelig, Professor of the Practice in Stanford’s Department of Management Science & Engineering, and guests Konstantine Buhler of Meritech Capital Partners and John Melas-Kyriazi of Spark Capital embrace the negative, exploring when, why, and how to say no. Life is full of great opportunities, but they’re not all for you.--------------------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.

As Google’s first engineering director, Alberto Savoia led the team that launched Google’s revolutionary AdWords project. After founding two startups, he returned to Google in 2008 and he assumed the role of “Innovation Agitator,” developing trainings and workshops to catalyze smart, impactful creation within the company. Drawing on his book "The Right It," he begins with the premise that at least 80 percent of innovations fail, even if competently executed. He discusses how to reframe the central challenge of innovation as a question not of skill or technology, but of market demand: Will anyone actually care? Savoia shares strategies for winning the fight against failure, by using a rapid-prototyping technique he calls “pretotyping.”--------------------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.

Navin Chaddha, managing director at the venture capital firm Mayfield, describes the firm’s core values and examines the drivers behind several of the firm’s most successful investments. Mayfield’s investment strategy, he explains, is to focus on the founder rather than the company. He describes how impactful founders identify their mission early and pivot when necessary, all while maintaining a firmly people-centered mindset.

Midway through a M.D./Ph.D program at UCLA, Alice Zhang made a discovery that she felt could reverberate far beyond the halls of academia. So she shifted directions, leaving her Ph.D program to found Verge Genomics, a biomedical firm that aims to unite genetic research and artificial intelligence in service of drug discovery. She describes how AI can revolutionize the drug discovery process, and reframes risk-taking as a simple series of optimistic next steps.

Cars can be much more than just boxes that get their owners around. John Viera, a former director and sustainability lead at Ford Motor Company, and Raj Kapoor, chief strategy officer at Lyft, join Stanford adjunct professor Pedram Mokrian to discuss opportunities for innovation in the field of transportation, particularly in the context of sustainability concerns and accelerating urbanization. Innovators, they suggest, need to think of transportation as a converging ecosystem, rather than as a collection of disparate technologies and business models. As shifting energy sources and big data come into play, car sharing companies and automotive manufacturers will find themselves both competing and collaborating in new ways.

Opportunities in the cryptocurrency sector extend well beyond simply investing in Bitcoin or Ethereum, says Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan. He compares the digital currency landscape to the early days of mobile—a space poised to create an entirely new set of innovations and business models. For entrepreneurs looking to make a play in everything from social networking and banking to collectibles markets and real estate, he suggests, crypto’s underlying blockchain technology is worth investigating.--------------------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.

Roles expand and shift at a breakneck pace in a high-growth startup, says Meebo co-founder Elaine Wherry. Interns find themselves in charge of massive, mission-critical projects. Engineers are suddenly tasked with hiring and managing multiple teams. Wherry shares her insights on how to thrive in a rapidly expanding technology venture, drawing on the heady years between developing Meebo’s initial instant messaging platform in 2005 and landing the company at Google seven years later.