Stanford eCorner

Mark Gainey is the co-founder and executive chairman of Strava, a platform where more than 50 million athletes around the world track their workouts and compare their stats. In this talk, he explains the “inch wide, mile deep” strategy that informed both Strava and his previous startup, Kana Communications. He explores how, by first focusing intently on the niche category of passionate road cyclists, Strava earned a credibility that ultimately allowed the company to scale into many other sports.

Mar Hershenson co-founded Pear VC in 2013, and under her watch the firm has made seed and pre-seed investments in category-defining companies like DropBox, Gusto, DoorDash and Branch Metrics. Along the way, she’s spent a significant amount of time mentoring student-entrepreneurs. In this talk, she focuses on some of the most common questions and concerns she hears from student entrepreneurs, offering insights she’s gained both as a serial startup founder and as a seed-stage VC investor.

Backed by corporate investors that included Cisco, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce, Omar Tawakol founded Voicea in 2017, and served as the company’s CEO until its acquisition by Cisco in September 2019. Voicea’s core offering was EVA, an in-meeting AI assistant that transcribed meetings, generated highlights, and pushed relevant meeting content to productivity tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams. EVA is now being rolled into Cisco’s Webex Assistant, and Tawakol is currently the VP and GM of the Cisco Contact Center. In this talk, he explores the strategies he employed as he scaled Voicea and landed it at Cisco. He also draws on his experience building BlueKai, a data exchange and data management platform company he founded in 2007 and sold to Oracle in 2014, and draws contrasts between the two very different B2B business models.

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.

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.