Feeling Entrepreneurial?

Stanford University's Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar is a weekly speaker series that brings innovation leaders from business, finance, technology, education, and philanthropy, to share their insights with aspiring entrepreneurs from all over the world.

Spring 2012-2013 Speaker Lineup

All lectures are held in in NVIDIA Auditorium

April 10	Nassim Taleb ~Author, "The Black Swan" and "Antifragile: Things that Gain From Disorder." Nassim N. Taleb is a former derivatives trader who became a scholar and philosophical essayist in 2006. Although he is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University's Polytechnic Institute, he self-funds his research and operates in the manner of independent scholars. Taleb is the author of The Black Swan (2007 through 2010) and Antifragile (2012). His works focuses on decision making under uncertainty, as well as technical and philosophical problems with probability and metaprobability, in other words "what to do in a world we don't understand".
April 17	Monica Lam ~ Stanford Professor and Co-Founder, MokaFive Monica Lam is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University since 1988. She received a B.Sc. from University of British Columbia in 1980 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1987. She is the Faculty Director of the Stanford MobiSocial Computing Laboratory and a co-PI in the POMI (Programmable Open Mobile Internet) 2020 project, which is an NSF Expedition started in 2008. Her current research interests are in building an open and federated social computing infrastructure. She has worked in the areas of compiler optimization, software analysis to improve security, and simplifying computer management with virtualization.
April 24	Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta ~ Co-Founders, Pulse. Pulse was founded in May 2010 by Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta, two graduate students at Stanford's acclaimed d.school. What began as a class assignment quickly turned into a true passion project, as the two worked tirelessly to revolutionize the mobile news reading experience. The result is an app that has garnered praise from Steve Jobs, won the prestigious Apple Design Award, was named one of TIME's top 50 apps of 2011, and more. Now with over 20 million users (and adding more than a million new users every month), Pulse has solidified its place at the forefront of the modern news industry.
May 1	Kate Mitchell ~ Co-Founder and Partner, Scale Venture Partners. As a co-founder and partner of ScaleVP, Kate is instrumental in building the firm's team and strategic direction. She also leads investments in software and business services - including Infrastructure and Mobile. Kate has actively worked with portfolio companies such as Hubspan, Jaspersoft, mBlox, Tonic Software and Wayport. Before joining ScaleVP in 1996, Kate was a Senior Vice President at Bank of America, where she led the development and launch of the company's Internet banking services. In addition to technology management, she has significant experience in corporate finance and business development. Kate holds an M.B.A. in Finance from Golden Gate University and a B.A. in Political Science from Stanford University. She also earned a certificate in Strategic Marketing from the Executive Education Program at Harvard Business School. Kate is past chairman of the National Venture Capital Association and a current member of its Executive Committee. Through NVCA, Kate actively highlights the importance of venture capital to the U.S. economy, advocates for regulatory and economic policies that promote and reward entrepreneurship nationwide. She sits on the boards of directors of Silicon Valley Bank and the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. She is a charter member of Environmental Entrepreneurs (Silicon Valley).
May 8	Justin Rosenstein ~ Co-Founder, Asana Justin Rosenstein last worked at Facebook as a tech lead and engineering manager on projects from presence solutions for businesses to back-end site-performance to front-end abstractions. Prior to that, he was a product manager at Google for three years, leading projects in Google's communication and collaboration division. Before that, he majored in math and got part way through a master's in computer science at Stanford.
May 15	Chris Redlitz and Beverly Parenti ~ Managing Director & Director of Operators at KickLabs and Co-Founders, The Last Mile. In 2010, Chris Redlitz and his wife Beverly Parenti co-founded The Last Mile program, designed to teach incarcerated men and women fundamental business skills and entrepreneurial training. The program launched at San Quentin State Prison in California, and it has been a rousing success. The curriculum will include computer programming in the fall of 2013. The Last Mile is the most progressive prison program in the world, and it has been covered by nearly every major news service. The program will expand to several other states in 2013, and it is expected to be adopted across America in the next five years. Several graduates from The Last Mile program are expected to participate in the ETL session, providing a perspective of what it is like to become an entrepreneur from inside the walls, transitioning to the free world. Chris has been on the forefront of emerging technologies since the commercialization of the web. He is the Founding Partner of KickLabs, a world renowned technology accelerator and Transmedia Capital, a seed stage investment fund both based in San Francisco. Chris co-founded AdAuction, the first online media exchange in 1997 which was the precursor to the current auction based and dynamic pricing platforms in online media. He received Ad Age's prestigious i20 award for his accomplishments in the development of interactive advertising. Early in his career, Chris held management positions for Reebok Int'l and owned the first athletic specialty retail chain in Southern California. Beverly has been an integral part of emerging technology companies that include online payment solutions, e-commerce, financial services, advertising, lead generation, search and P2P technology. Beverly is currently the Director of Operations for KickLabs and the General Manager of a new immersive technology incubator, launching this year in San Francisco. Beverly was a founding member of First Virtual Holdings, the first secure online payment system that she helped take public in 1996. With a background as a dancer and certified fitness instructor, Beverly understands the importance of fitness, health and performance in the competitive business environment, and founded BodyAmi.
May 22	Jocelyn Goldfein ~ Director of Engineering, Facebook Jocelyn Goldfein is a Director of Engineering at Facebook, where she drives new product design and architecture and helps scale the engineering organization. Her teams are responsible for key Facebook product features like news feed, search, and photos. Prior to joining Facebook, Jocelyn was Vice President and General Manager at VMware, where she ran the engineering and product teams for VMware's desktop products. She previously was Director of Engineering at e-mail management start-up MessageOne. Jocelyn holds a bachelors degree in computer science from Stanford University.
May 29	Ferdinando Buscema ~ Magic Experience Designer An award winning magician and gambling expert, Ferdinando is a charming and refined entertainer, performs internationally, in corporate and private events. He is a credited performer at the World Famous Magic Castle in Hollywood, the most exclusive stage for magical entertainment.