Stanford eCorner

After growing and leading the team that developed WebEx, Eric Yuan left his role as Corporate Vice President of Engineering at Cisco in 2011 to found Zoom Video Communications. Santiago Subotovsky, a general partner at Emergence Capital, led his firm’s investment in Zoom. In this conversation with Stanford lecturer Ravi Belani, they discuss what drove Zoom and how they built the confidence to launch this new company into an already crowded video conferencing market.

An entrepreneur, investor, business leader, and rocket-scientist, Sylvia Acevedo is the author of Path to the Stars: My Journey from Girl Scout to Rocket Scientist, which tells the story of her journey from a small town in New Mexico to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Acevedo most recently served as CEO of Girl Scouts of the USA. In this conversation with Stanford professor Tina Seelig, she shares how some important early lessons in perseverance built a mindset that allowed her to excel as both a scientist and an entrepreneur.

As the president and CEO of Vir Biotechnology, as well as in his role as head of BIO’s Coronavirus Collaboration Initiative, George Scangos has emerged as a global leader in the fight against COVID-19. In this conversation with Stanford structural biology professor Jody Puglisi, Dr. Scangos explains the challenge of building financially viable therapies for infectious diseases, talks about the current status of COVID-related research, and explores how to build an innovative and meaningful career in biotech.

Delane Parnell is the founder and CEO of PlayVS, which is building the technology infrastructure for high school and college esports leagues. Prior to starting PlayVS, Parnell worked at IncWell Venture Capital, where he became the youngest black venture capitalist in the United States. In this talk, he explores his own journey from undertaking small-scale business as a teenager to building a billion-dollar company. He also explores the complexities of creating a multi-stakeholder business, and addresses how he and his team have responded to racism and gender disparities.

An experienced tech exec, Shellye Archambeau serves on the boards of Verizon and Nordstrom as well as several other companies. She is the former CEO of MetricStream, a Silicon Valley-based governance, risk, and compliance software company that, during her tenure, grew from a fledgling startup into a global market leader. Anticipating the launch of her first book, Unapologetically Ambitious: Take Risks, Break Barriers and Create Success on Your Own Terms (2020), she speaks with Stanford professor Tina Seelig about how to advocate for oneself, find mentors and sponsors, beat imposter syndrome, and build an impactful career.

On the heels of summer’s inspiring ETL Revisited conversations, we’re launching right into fall! Our first guest will be tech executive, board director and author Shellye Archambeau on September 30. Over the next two months she’ll be joined by guests like Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan, PlayVS founder and CEO Delane Parnell, and Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get new episodes delivered straight to you every Wednesday.

Adam Pisoni co-founded Yammer in 2008, and oversaw product, analytics, and engineering as the SaaS company scaled to 500 employees and was acquired by Microsoft in 2012 for $1.2 billion. More recently, he has turned his attention to the US education system. Abl, the company he founded in 2015, aims to help all schools move beyond the 20th century model of education. In this talk, he describes how inequities manifest themselves in K-12 education, and explores the roles that innovative social ventures can play in addressing those inequities.

What if entrepreneurship education placed ethics at the same level of importance as fundraising and product-market fit? In the fourth episode of our “Entrepreneurship and Ethics” miniseries, Stanford professor Tom Byers speaks with fellow entrepreneurship educators Laura Dunham (University of St. Thomas) and Jon Fjeld (Duke University) about how they’re elevating the role of applied ethics in entrepreneurship education.

Ann Miura-Ko is a lecturer in Stanford’s Department of Management Science and Engineering and a co-founding partner at Floodgate, a VC firm focused on seed-stage investments. A repeat member of the Forbes Midas List and the New York Times Top 20 Venture Capitalists Worldwide, she was one of the first investors in Lyft and Refinery29, and has been an early backer of many others, including Xamarin and Thinkful. Here, she shares her takes on foundational entrepreneurial concepts like “product-market fit” and shares a vision for how bold, even disruptive innovation and shared abundance can co-exist.

On November 8, 2016, Michael Tubbs was elected to serve as the mayor of the City of Stockton, California. Upon taking office in January 2017, Tubbs became both Stockton’s youngest mayor and the city’s first Black mayor. Among other accomplishments, he leveraged a $1 million grant to launch the nation’s first ever mayor-led guaranteed income pilot. Here, he talks about building trust with constituents and creating relationships and coalitions across political boundaries, and discusses solutions to pressing racial and economic inequities.