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 2011-2012 Speaker Lineup
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Apr 11
NVIDIA Auditorium
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Jeff Church ~ Co-Founder, NIKA Water
Jeff Church is the cofounder of NIKA Water Company, a unique social entrepreneurial model that donates its profits in hopes of alleviating global poverty. After seeing the impacts of the global clean water crisis first-hand during a 2007 visit to Kenya, Church formed NIKA with business school classmate Mike Stone in March 2009. NIKA translates from Zulu as "to give." Church graduated from Michigan State University in 1983 with a B.A. in accounting and was named one of the top twenty-five graduating seniors out of 8,000 students. He later attended Harvard Business School and graduated with a Masters in Business Administration in 1988. Between graduating from Michigan State and attending Harvard, Church worked as a CPA for Ernst & Young.
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Apr 18
NVIDIA Auditorium
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Gale Anne Hurd ~ Film Producer & Screenwriter
Gale Anne Hurd is one of Hollywood's most respected film and television producers. Her work has advanced the role of technology in filmmaking, with credits that include The Terminator, Aliens and The Abyss. A Stanford alumna, Hurd is currently an executive producer of the popular and acclaimed television series, The Walking Dead. Join us as Hurd shares insights and lessons learned from her groundbreaking career in entertainment.
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Apr 25
NVIDIA Auditorium
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Frank Quattrone ~ Founder & CEO, Qatalyst Partners
Frank is a founder and CEO of Qatalyst. He began his career with Morgan Stanley in 1977, has advised technology companies since 1981, and ran the global Technology Groups for Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse. Over the past three decades, Frank and the teams he has led have advised on more than 400 mergers and acquisitions with an aggregate transaction value over $500B and on more than 350 financings that raised over $65B for technology companies worldwide. During this time, Frank has enjoyed the privilege of advising technology leaders including Accenture, Adobe, Amazon.com, AOL, Apple, Applied Materials, Ascend, Autonomy, Brocade, Cisco, Citrix, Cypress, Data Domain, eBay, Go Daddy, Google, HP, IBM, Informatica, Intel, Intuit, Isilon, Linear Technology, Motorola Mobility, National Semiconductor; Netezza, Netscape, Oracle, Palm, RIM, STMicroelectronics, Synopsys, SynOptics, 3PAR, VeriFone, VeriSign, VERITAS and Xilinx.
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May 2
NVIDIA Auditorium
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Rebeca Hwang is a Co-founder and CEO of YouNoodle, a startup based in San Francisco focused on building a meaningful platform for entrepreneurs around the world. Rebeca comes from a Chemical Engineering and Civil & Environmental Engineering background and received both her undergraduate and graduate degrees from MIT. Having participated and won entrepreneurship competitions at MIT, Rebeca continued her involvement with similar programs when she moved to Stanford to pursue her PhD in Environment and Resources. Rebeca was lead organizer of the Social E-Challenge Competition at Stanford, Co-founded Clean Tech Open (CTO), which is now one of the largest cleantech competitions in the US, and sat on judge panels for numerous competitions including the World Bank Competition. In addition to YouNoodle, Rebeca lectures "High Tech Entrepreneurship" at Stanford University and has been a speaker for the Ministry of Education in Denmark, University of Zaragoza in Spain, University of Porto in Portugal, University EAFIT in Colombia, EnterPrize Puerto Rico, IEEE Egypt, Tech de Monterey in Mexico, IIT India, and Global Startup Workshop in Buenos Aires, Norway, Spain, South Africa, and Iceland. Prior to founding StorWatts, Elizabeth Samara-Rubio led multiple teams that achieved breakthroughs in product affordability, reliability, and commercial adoption. As Director of Energy Markets and Products at Danaher, she led Corporate Breakthrough Innovation, taking products from R&D through Scale targeting the new Smart-Grid Global Electric Utility sector. She also secured $1M in funding for product development. At HP, where Elizabeth led product management, strategic marketing and research, she and her team developed and launched the HP Global Integration and Installation Operations business unit ($110M). She has also held leadership positions at early stage companies including Vice President of Marketing at ARX and Director of Product Management and Marketing at YY Software. Elizabeth earned her M.B.A. from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, where she was honored with a Fellowship from the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Business Administration. She earned her Bachelor's Degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Elizabeth was born in Colombia, S.A. and speaks fluent Spanish. |
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May 9
NVIDIA Auditorium
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Brian Murray ~ President & CEO, HarperCollins Publishers
Mr. Brian Murray has been Chief Executive Officer of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide of Harper Collins Publishers L.L.C and Harper Collins Publishers Limited since June 5, 2008 and its President since July 2007. Mr. Murray led the development of worldwide growth initiatives including digital strategy and investment. He also had direct responsibility for the HarperCollins General Books Group in the U.S. which includes HarperCollins, William Morrow and Collins publishing divisions. Mr. Murray served as Group President of Australia and New Zealand operations of Harpercollins Publishers Inc. Mr. Murray oversaw operations of the U.S. General Books Group. In addition, his portfolio of responsibilities includes oversight of HarperCollins Canada and HarperCollins Australia/New Zealand and serving as the U.S. Representative on the board of HarperCollins India. Prior to this, he served as Senior Vice President and Managing Director of HarperCollins General Books Group in New York. He joined HarperCollins in 1997 and played a key role in the division's financial turnaround. Mr. Murray came to HarperCollins from Booz Allen & Hamilton, one of the country's leading consulting firms, where he served as a Consultant in the Media Practice, working with a number of leading trade publishers. Mr. Murray worked for The Hearst Corporation's New Media Group before taking on his role at Booz Allen & Hamilton. Mr. Murray has been Director of NewsStand, Inc. since January 2007.
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May 16
NVIDIA Auditorium
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Daniel Ek ~ Co-Founder, Spotify
Daniel is a 26 year old technologist who started his first company 1997 at the age of 14. Currently he is the CEO and founder of Spotify, a legal music service that helps people discover, browse and play music. Spotify was founded as a reaction to the decline of the music industry. People listen to more music than ever, from a bigger diversity of artists. The underlying business has changed from being about ownership to an access model. Spotify facilitates that by offering a service in the cloud. Prior to Spotify, Daniel was the initial CTO of Stardoll, the fashion & entertainment community for tweens. He was also the CEO of uTorrent, the worlds most popular BitTorrent client with more than 100 million downloads. Daniel has also founded Advertigo, the advertising company acquired by TradeDoubler, as well as been a part of the nordic auction company Tradera (acquired by Ebay).
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May 23
NVIDIA Auditorium
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Adam Lashinsky ~ Author, Inside Apple
Adam Lashinsky covers Silicon Valley and Wall Street for FORTUNE and is the author of Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired - and Secretive - Company Really Works (Hachette Book Group/Grand Central Publishing). He has been on the magazine's staff since 2001, and for two years before that was a contributing columnist. In addition, Lashinsky is a contributor to the Fox News Channel, appearing weekly on the network's "Cavuto on Business" program on Saturday mornings; co-chair of FORTUNE's annual Brainstorm Tech conference; and a seasoned speaker and panel moderator. Lashinsky's cover-story subjects in FORTUNE have included Apple, Hewlett-Packard and Google. He also has written in-depth articles on Wells Fargo, Intel, Oracle, eBay, Twitter, and the venture-capital industry, as well as on topics ranging from San Francisco politics and oil-exploration technology to the post-Katrina economic recovery of New Orleans. Prior to joining FORTUNE, Lashinsky was a columnist for The San Jose Mercury News and TheStreet.com. Before moving to California, he was a reporter and editor for Crain's Chicago Business. As a Henry Luce Scholar, he worked for a year in Tokyo as a reporter for the Nikkei Weekly, the English-language version of Japan's main economic daily. He began his career in the Washington, D.C., bureau of Crain Communications.
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May 30
NVIDIA Auditorium
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Drew Houston is CEO and Co-Founder of Dropbox, and has led Dropbox's growth from a simple idea to a service relied upon by millions around the world. Drew leads Dropbox's activities, and is actively involved in its business and product decisions. Before founding Dropbox, Drew attended MIT where he studied computer science. He took a quick leave from school to form Accolade, an online SAT prep startup, and also worked as a software engineer for Bit9. After graduating from MIT, Drew recognized that people needed a way to bring their files with them without sending email attachments or carrying USB drives. He began writing a solution to this problem in early 2007 before showing an early version to Arash Ferdowsi in Boston. The two of them then began working on the project that would eventually become Dropbox.
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