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
Seelig believes that while working in a team it is important to make everyone else on your team successful.
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.
This interactive exercise is designed to give participants the experience of identifying opportunities, understanding customer point of view, rapid prototyping, and giving a pitch. In this exercise, participants interview one another about what they like/hate about their wallets. Based upon what they learn, they build new wallets for their customer.
Tina Seelig, Executive Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, walks us through a life-changing hands-on classroom activity where students are taught to identify opportunities in nooks and crannies. With five dollars in seed funding and two hours of execution, she reports on the success of the exercise, and that many students reaped over one hundred times the initial investment (and others built a business without using any funding at all). Look for problems around you, says Seelig, and convert them into opportunities that create value. Embrace the opportunity to challenge assumptions and identify true cultural, social, or technological need.
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.
This five minute video captures the essence of a two hour workshop in which student teams must reconstruct a jigsaw puzzle. Several puzzles are mixed together and the pieces distributed randomly to teams. The teams are urged to challenge assumptions, leverage resources, seize opportunities, pay attention to the market, and to create value. Every ten minutes the "market" changes. The video shows the set-up of the game, the action, and several minutes of debriefing with the teams. In this two hour exercise, students must develop a strategy, they need to collaborate and compete, they must negotiate and barter, they need to be creative, and they must divide the tasks at hand in order to create the most value.
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.
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. 
According to Seelig, if you are not failing sometimes, then you are not taking enough risks. Silicon Valley supports a culture of risk taking and embraces failure. She encourages everyone to take risks and not to get daunted by the fear of failure.
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. 
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.
"The harder I work, the luckier I get", says Seelig. Get out there and put yourself in a position to make yourself lucky, she adds.
Seelig often makes her students write failure resumes as a way to recognize the mistakes that they have made as well as the lessons they have learned from those mistakes.
Seelig believes that it is important to build relationships and network with the people you meet everyday. It is a small world and as you go through life you are going to meet the same people again and again, she adds.
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.
Tina Seelig, Executive Director for the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, believes that every problem is an opportunity for a creative solution. The way you view any problem depends on your attitude.
This video montage is narrated by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program's Executive Director, Tina Seelig. It documents the diverse events that made up Entrepreneurship Week 2009 at Stanford University. Faculty, staff, and student groups from the Stanford Entrepreneurship Network put together this entire week of panels, workshops, mixers, and fairs.