Stanford Technology Ventures Program
Tina Seelig is the Executive Director for the Stanford Technology Ventures Program where she is responsible for the management, operations, and dissemination efforts of STVP. In addition, Tina is the Director of the Stanford Entrepreneurship Network and the co-Director of the Mayfield Fellows Program. Tina also teaches a course in the Department of Management Science & Engineering on Creativity and Innovation.
Prior to joining STVP, Tina worked as an entrepreneur, management consultant, author, and scientist. Tina received her Ph.D. from Stanford University Medical School in 1985 where she studied Neuroscience.
Tina has worked as management consultant for Booz, Allen, and Hamilton, has written several popular science books and has designed a series of educational games. Her books include The Epicurean Laboratory, Incredible Edible Science, and a series called Games for Your Brain.
After Tina's first book was published in 1991, she became interested in how books are marketed. This led her to start a company designed to help match books with buyers. The product was a multimedia system for bookstore customers, called BookBrowser. BookBrowser was a kiosk-based system that allowed customers to identify books of interest. With the help of a team of engineers and graphic designers, Tina built the business and sold the company in 1993.
After selling her business, Tina worked as a Multimedia Producer for Compaq Computer Corporation. In this position Tina led a team of engineers, artists, scriptwriters, and education specialists through the design and implementation of a series of multimedia titles.
Tina's current position as Executive Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program takes advantage of her technical background, in addition to her experiences as a manager, entrepreneur, and educator.
Related Links: stvp.stanford.edu
Last Updated: Fri, Jul 8, 2011
HarperCollins President and CEO Brian Murray discusses the shifting economics of publishing and how his company, which launches 12 new products per day, is working to succeed in this disruptive period. In conversation with STVP Executive Director Dr. Tina Seelig, Murray also talks about issues of digital rights management, his company's willingness to explore new business models, and how HarperCollins manages relationships with other major players in the space.
Former U.S. Undersecretary of Energy Kristina Johnson discusses the empowering experiences of her life and career in academia, government and private industry. In a conversation with STVP's Tina Seelig, Johnson identifies the strengths of each of these areas to affect change and innovation, and offers lessons in leading a life that can capitalize on new opportunities.
Stanford Technology Ventures Program's Executive Director Tina Seelig shares rich insights in creative thinking and the entrepreneurial mindset. Her talk, based on her 2009 book, What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20</i>, cites numerous classroom successes of applied problem-solving and the lessons of failure.
According to Brian Murray, CEO and president of HarperCollins, the publishing industry has traditionally functioned using a business-to-business model, eschewing direct relationships with consumers. In conversation with STVP Executive Director Tina Seelig, Murray explains why his company puts its authors forward as the brand.
Brian Murray explains why publishing companies function much like venture capitalists, investing millions of dollars a year into developing new products in a culture business. Here the CEO and president of HarperCollins also articulates how the company leverages their understanding of the marketplace when placing bets on authors and projects.
As a powerful distribution channel and a growing competitor in publishing, Amazon plays a disruptive role in the publishing industry. HarperCollins CEO and President Brian Murray describes the "complicated relationship" publishers have with Amazon, who is a partner they work with and compete against. "The term 'frenemy' is a great term to capture what business is like today," says Murray, here in conversation with STVP Executive Director Tina Seelig.
In response to a question from STVP Executive Director Tina Seelig, HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray explains how his early engineering background continues to serve him as leader of a major publishing company. Murray believes engineers are solvers of complicated problems by training, and that, "a publishing company, any company, is one big, complex problem" needing to be solved.
HarperCollins President and CEO Brian Murray discusses the shifting economics of publishing and how his company, which launches 12 new products per day, is working to succeed in this disruptive period. In conversation with STVP Executive Director Dr. Tina Seelig, Murray also talks about issues of digital rights management, his company's willingness to explore new business models, and how HarperCollins manages relationships with other major players in the space.
Former U.S. Undersecretary of Energy Kristina Johnson discusses the empowering experiences of her life and career in academia, government and private industry. In a conversation with STVP's Tina Seelig, Johnson identifies the strengths of each of these areas to affect change and innovation, and offers lessons in leading a life that can capitalize on new opportunities.
Former U.S. Undersecretary for Energy Dr. Kristina Johnson articulates the advantages of various sectors to make impact on critical issues and to drive innovation. Interviewer Dr. Tina Seelig also provides background on the Epicenter, the National Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation, that seeks to bring entrepreneurship and innovation skills into undergraduate engineering education.
STVP Executive Director Tina Seelig explains the difference between convergent and divergent thinking, and identifies how the latter allows individuals to create an infinite number of answers to a problem. As a real world example, Seelig tells the story of the legendary one-word admission examination used by All Souls College at the University of Oxford. 
The re-combination of information is critical to developing new ideas, says STVP Executive Director Tina Seelig. This is the same reason innovation flourishes throughout the world in places where different people and ideas come together, such as ancient Alexandria and modern day San Francisco. But how do you teach this? Seelig shares how metaphors can be a powerful key to unlocking creativity through the combination of ideas.
Challenging the first and second wave of answers and assumptions helps creative teams move on to breakthrough ideas that appear in the third wave, says Dr. Tina Seelig, executive director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. Here the lecture audience participates in an exercise that reveals a group's willingness to go with the first right answer, which can be major barrier to unleashing full creative potential.
STVP Executive Director Tina Seelig discusses how reframing problems can open new approaches to finding solutions. Narrow definition of problems is a danger, says Seelig, and reframing can be a valuable tool in the process of creative thinking. In this clip, Seelig encourages the audience to come up with a new type of nametag, but by reframing the problem to address the real underlying need. 
Stanford Technology Ventures Program's Executive Director Tina Seelig shares rich insights in creative thinking and the entrepreneurial mindset. Her talk, based on her 2009 book, What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20</i>, cites numerous classroom successes of applied problem-solving and the lessons of failure.
Tina Seelig, Executive Director of Stanford Technology Ventures Program, speaks about the lesson that is the crux of entrepreneurship: All problems are opportunities, and the larger the problem, the grander the opportunity. Furthermore, she talks about the challenges that arise in the methods for teaching these concepts, and the necessity to get people out of their comfort zone in order to encourage creative problem-solving. This clip also includes a video quote from Vinod Khosla. 
If you had five dollars and two hours, what would you do to make as much money as possible? In this clip, STVP Executive Director Tina Seelig recalls a classroom exercise in creative thinking and entrepreneurship that posed this quandry to student teams. The results were manifold and varied, often taking advantage of locally needed services, niche markets, and valuable time. These in-class experiments contain many valuable lessons on creative thinking in the start-up realm, including skills, ideas, and innovation as assets that always lend value.
Solving problems is an important aspect of entrepreneurship, but it's not the entire solution. Aspiring students also need to learn how to make their own good luck, says STVP Executive Director Tina Seelig. Hard work is imperative, but it doesn't always mean a fortunate outcome. It takes optimism, an open mind, shrewd networking skills, and the ability to find the veiled "million dollars in the room." Seelig cites a personal anecdote where, through perseverance and curiosity, she turned an encounter with a stranger over frozen lemonade in a grocery store into a long-lasting relationship and a helicopter ride to a private ski resort overseas.
What's the secret sauce of Silicon Valley? Failure, reports Tina Seelig, Executive Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. To develop more successes, she urges, entrepreneurs have got to take a risk, and this is the notion behind every deal in the entire ecosystem. Venture capitalists fund risk and, by association, failure, in order to find the "hits" in the haystack. Failure is a perfectly acceptable part of the entrepreneurial process, provided that the smart entrepreneur learns from their errors along the way.