Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders

As a Stanford Biodesign Innovation Fellow, Kate Rosenbluth was captivated by the unmet need to treat hand tremors. She discovered that the site of deep brain stimulation was accessible through the peripheral nerves in the wrist, and teamed up with Scott Delp, director of the Stanford Neuromuscular Biomechanics Lab, to found Cala Health, where she is now the chief scientific officer. The company’s wearable neuromodulation therapies merge neuroscience research with cutting-edge technology to deliver individualized peripheral nerve stimulation. Here, she presents a framework for “needs-based innovation,” and explores how she emphasized a needs-based approach in the context of Cala Health.

Kulveer Taggar is the co-founder and CEO of Zeus Living, a tech-driven property management company focused on disrupting the corporate housing market. The company raised a $55 million Series B round in December 2019, and has hosted more than 17,000 residents in its furnished units. In this talk, he explores how thinking on a scale of decades rather than just a few years has impacted his company’s culture and strategy.

Drawing on her experience launching and leading health companies like CardioDx and ParAllele, Melinda Thomas co-founded Octave Bioscience in 2014. Octave is developing a care management platform for neurodegenerative diseases, starting with multiple sclerosis, and aims to improve patient management decisions and create better outcomes while also lowering costs. In this talk, Thomas offers strategies for building deep, skills-driven entrepreneurial confidence.

In 2013, Sam Yam teamed up with his former Stanford roommate Jack Conte to create Patreon, a platform that connects content creators with members who provide recurring revenue. As co-founder and CTO, Yam built Patreon into a service that has funded more than one hundred thousand creatives, channelling more than one billion dollars to musicians, podcasters, and artists of all kinds. He describes the intense grind of scaling Patreon and looks at three central challenges that face most entrepreneurs, then focuses in on what makes the entrepreneurial path worth it.

Look back to one of our favorite talks from the ETL archives. Dave Evans, co-founder of the popular Life Design Lab at Stanford University, discusses the key concepts and exercises that guide students in their quest to figure out what they want to do in life. He underscores the importance of accepting who you are and connecting that to what you believe and do, while attacking dysfunctional notions like the one that dares you to be the “best version of yourself.” Can’t we have more than one?

Concerned with the ways that AI and machine learning often display biases against already marginalized groups, Laura Gomez created Atipica, a platform that uses those same tools to remove rather than exacerbate bias in the hiring process. Gomez is also a founding member of Project Include, a non-profit that aims to accelerate diversity and inclusion in the tech industry, and a member of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, as well as Code.org’s Diversity Council. She describes the trends that have contributed to her company’s growth and encourages founders from diverse backgrounds to engage with tech, build confidence, and drive change.

Look back to one of our favorite talks from the ETL archives. Entrepreneur Leila Janah describes how her social enterprise Samasource allows people in Africa and elsewhere to lift themselves out of poverty through dignified, fair-wage digital work like photo tagging for companies in Silicon Valley. She celebrates the entrepreneurial spirit in those who survive on next to nothing and explains how giving work is more effective than charity.

Backstage Capital founder and managing partner Arlan Hamilton built a venture capital fund from the ground up, while homeless. Her fund is dedicated to minimizing funding disparities in tech by investing in high-potential founders who are people of color, women, and/or LGBT. Hamilton herself identifies as all three. Started in 2015, Backstage has invested nearly $7 million into 120 startups led by underestimated founders. In this talk, Hamilton describes how and why she created her unique fund, and why she views underrepresented, underestimated founders as a category with massive potential.

In 2013, Aileen Lee coined the term “unicorn” to refer to the growing field of startups with $1 billion valuations. At the time, she was a year into her role as a founder and managing partner of Cowboy Ventures, and her team was preparing a now-influential internal report examining how (and how often) companies with these massive valuations tend to emerge. Her summary of the report, published by TechCrunch, uncovered many insightful datapoints, but also revealed that only 2 of the 39 unicorns they studied had female co-founders, a finding that catalyzed her advocacy for increased diversity in technology startups. She more recently became a founding member of All Raise, a nonprofit organization devoted to increasing the representation of women in the venture-backed tech ecosystem. She describes her circuitous path to a job in venture capital, surfaces some of the central strategies of seed-stage investing, and encourages people from diverse backgrounds to help transform the venture capital business.

While earning his MBA at the University of Oxford’s Said Business School and teaching himself to code, Srin Madipalli found himself compelled by the power of technology to transform the lives of people with disabilities. He soon co-founded Accomable, a web app that grew to list accessible accomodations in 60 countries around the world. In November of 2017, Accomable was acquired by Airbnb, and Madipalli joined Airbnb as its accessibility product and program manager. There, he has overseen the addition of new consumer-facing accessibility filters and features, while also exploring how Airbnb can make its hiring and management practices more inclusive for job candidates and employees living with disabilities. He describes how Accomable grew from a side-project into a fast-growing company that landed at Airbnb, and points out how focusing on accessibility can provide companies with a massive opportunity to engage with the disability community.

LaunchDarkly now helps over 1,000 customers — including major companies like Atlassian and BMW — release code, monitor and manage features, and make data-driven decisions about software functionality. But growth didn’t come overnight, explains CEO and co-founder Edith Harbaugh. She describes the multi-year slog of scaling up a B2B company, and demonstrates how she made the most of a number of less-than-ideal jobs, building a diverse toolkit of skills that ultimately contributed to her success as a founder and CEO. She urges entrepreneurs to draw encouragement from small wins, especially in the early stages, when customers are few and far between.

Barbara Liskov was already breaking new ground in 1968, when she became one of the first American women to earn a doctorate in the emerging discipline of computer science. After receiving that PhD at Stanford, she went on to design several influential programming languages, including CLU, an important precursor to Java. More recently, as an Institute Professor at MIT and head of the institute’s Programming Methodology Group, she has undertaken crucial research on distributed systems, information security and complex system failure issues. She is one of fewer than 100 individuals to receive an A.M. Turing Award from the Association of Computing Machinery. In a conversation with host Ann Miura-Ko, a lecturer in Stanford’s Department of Management Science and Engineering and founding partner of the venture capital firm Floodgate, Liskov explores how she discovered the nascent field of computer science, how she recognized and surmounted a number of fundamental computing challenges, and shares her concerns and hop

Not long after landing at PagerDuty in 2016, Jennifer Tejada embarked on that harrowing rite of passage for CEOs of fortunate young startups: the pursuit of an IPO. Tejada raised a $90 million Series D round in late 2018, and saw PagerDuty go public on April 11, 2019. Her path to that point, she observes, was anything but linear. She tells the story of how a very “average” University of Michigan grad ended up becoming the CEO of a public SaaS company, and describes how gritty perseverance, some fortunate early leadership opportunities, and a passion for understanding and embracing different perspectives drove her career forward. She offers strategies that aspiring leaders can employ to challenge themselves and build tenacity while creating diverse, high-performing teams.

In 2012, inspired by the HR headaches they’d observed working for technology companies, Sarah Nahm and a few friends founded Lever, a talent recruitment platform aimed at transforming the hiring process with intuitive yet data-driven software. Two years later, in 2014, she was named CEO. Based on her experiences designing what became Lever and then leading the company, she puts forward a model of entrepreneurial leadership that is about more than just stubborn confidence, and thrives by embracing the unknown and learning how to observe and trust others.

From developing a brand identity to cultivating the right conditions for musical exploration, successful recording artists are masters of the creative process. Hosted by Stanford professor Bob Sutton, Sickamore, a hip-hop artist, photographer and the creative director at Interscope Records, joins Sam Seidel, director of K-12 strategy and research at Stanford's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, for an intimate conversation about what entrepreneurs can learn from the music industry, how to navigate ambiguity, and why it's important to strike the right balance between open-ended creativity and project completion.

Honeycomb co-founder and CEO Christine Yen spent a decade as a software engineer before creating her own company. She describes how her deep domain knowledge and relationships with like-minded software developers propelled her startup’s launch, and shares how she built an energetic human architecture around a highly technical B2B product.

The podcast market was growing rapidly when Luminary Media was founded at the beginning of 2018, and it was even bigger by the time the company launched its podcasting service on April 23, 2019. Just a month after that launch, CEO Matthew Sacks and co-founder/head of talent Lauren Perkins step back to assess how they identified an opportunity in the podcasting space, built a team and launched a product with a library of exclusive content in a little over a year. They also address the negative headlines and Twitter backlash they received during launch week, and share strategies for responding to the kinds of mistakes that fast-moving startups often make.

At age 26, Chip Conley founded Joie de Vivre Hospitality and grew the company into the second largest boutique hotel brand in the United States. After he sold the business, he accepted a strategy role at Airbnb, and his interactions with a predominantly millennial workforce led him to found the Modern Elder Academy, a “midlife wisdom school” in Baja that encourages individuals with a lifetime of experience to carve a purposeful path through the modern workplace. Here, he shares the insights that have allowed him to flourish while shifting roles and accommodating to cultural change.  

In the 1990s, Toby Corey co-founded the world’s largest web development company. Since then, he’s started other companies; held senior management positions at SolarCity, Tesla and most recently PlanGrid; and lectured in Stanford's Department of Management Science & Engineering. Now, he finds himself as concerned by social and environmental problems as with building companies. In response to global crises of climate change and inequality, he advises an approach that he calls “zentrepreneurship,” and articulates principles aimed at helping entrepreneurs integrate creativity and ambition with social and environmental consciousness.

When Capella Space’s first prototype satellite launched in December 2018, it was the culmination of over three years of nonstop effort. Capella Space founder and CEO Payam Banazadeh explains how he fused experienced gained at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Stanford’s Management Science and Engineering masters program to build the satellite imaging company. As an early-stage CEO, he provides insights into the many risks and strategic decisions that precede product roll-out.