Culture

Derek Belch is co-founder and CEO of STRIVR Labs, a Palo Alto-based startup that uses virtual reality to train athletes. Belch laid the foundation for STRIVR during the 2014 season with the Stanford Cardinal football team, when he was an assistant coach for the team while completing a master's degree. His thesis project was exploring virtual reality applied to sports training, and he worked with the Cardinal during the season to build and test the technology that is now STRIVR. Belch was a former kicker for the Cardinal from 2003 to 2007 and is one of only two Stanford kickers in history to hit two field goals over 50 yards in a single game. He kicked the winning extra point in Stanford's historic upset of USC as 42-point underdogs. Belch holds three degrees from Stanford (B.A. in communication; M.A. In journalism; M.A. in media studies), as well as an MBA from the University of Southern California.

Minnie Ingersoll is Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer at Shift Technologies, Inc., which offers an online marketplace for buying and selling cars. Before joining Shift, Ingersoll worked at Google for more than 11 years. From 2011 to 2013, she was a principal at Google.org leading projects focused on technology for government. From 2002 to 2011, she was a Google product manager, leading efforts to create Google Fiber, deploy a city-wide WiFi network, improve Google AdWords and maximize search quality. She holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BS in computer science from Stanford University.

Federica Marchionni is Chief Executive Officer of Lands' End, Inc. She assumed the CEO position and joined the company's board of directors in February 2015, overseeing a diverse and dedicated team of people representing catalog, retail and online operations in the United States, Europe and Japan. Prior to that, Marchionni spent over a decade at Dolce&Gabbana, most recently as president of Dolce&Gabbana USA Inc., elevating the brand's positioning and redesigning strategies for expansion across multiple channels, target customers and geographic areas. She also oversaw the opening of its flagship store in New York City and other locations in world-class destinations including Toronto, Chicago, Aspen and Boston. As a global group director, Marchionni led business development for business units in more than 100 countries. Before Dolce&Gabbana, Marchionni was senior vice president at Ferrari, where she acted as the chief executive of a division that generated an important portion of the company's worldwide sales. She started her career in the fast-growing tech sector, working for industry leaders such as Samsung, Phillips and Ericsson. Marchionni graduated from La Sapienza University in Rome with a master's degree in business administration, studied in France and the U.K. and speaks four languages.

James Freeman is founder and CEO of Blue Bottle Coffee. Prior to opening Blue Bottle, he was a San Francisco-based freelance clarinetist. He opened Blue Bottle Coffee in the summer of 2002 in a 186-square-foot former potting shed in Oakland, Calif. Freeman is the author of "The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee," which was published by 10 Speed Press. He has been Imbibe Magazine's coffee professional of the year and one of Fast Company Magazine's 100 most creative people in business. Blue Bottle Coffee now has over 20 cafes and four roasteries spread across the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, Los Angeles and Tokyo. Blue Bottle has been featured in national and international press including ABC, NBC, and Fox, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and GQ. Freeman and his family live in San Francisco, and he is a member of the city's regional Citroen car club.

Dharmesh Shah is a co-founder and chief technology officer at HubSpot, which develops software for inbound marketing and sales. Prior to HubSpot, he was founder and chief executive officer of Pyramid Digital Solutions, a software company acquired in 2005. In addition to co-authoring "Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs" and "Inbound Marketing: Attract, Engage, and Delight Customers Online," Shah founded and writes for OnStartups.com, a top-ranking startup blog with over 350,000 members in its online community. In 2013, Shah published HubSpot's Culture Code, which has garnered over 1 million views on SlideShare. He is an active member of the entrepreneurial community in the Boston area, an angel investor in over 40 startups, and a frequent speaker on the topic of startups and inbound marketing. Shah holds a B.S. in computer science from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and an M.S. in the management of technology from MIT.

Emily Ma heads special projects in business innovation at X, the moonshot factory formerly known as Google[x] that focuses on developing high-impact hardware technologies that have the potential to massively improve hundreds of millions of lives. Projects include the self-driving car and the smart contact lens, which aims to change the lives of 450 million diabetics by monitoring biochemistry in real time. Ma works at the intersection of business, technology, geopolitics and design, which is fundamental to the 'moonshot thinking' mindset at X. She started her career as a mechanical engineer and roboticist, and currently holds lecturer appointments jointly at the Stanford School of Engineering and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Emily holds seven patents spanning medical devices to consumer electronics and has a bachelor's and master's degree in mechanical engineering, and an MBA, from Stanford University.

Lisa Sugar is founder and president of Popsugar, a pop-culture website for women that partners with retailers and offers marketing services to connect brands with consumers. Sugar started writing about pop culture in 2005 and teamed up with her husband, Brian, to transform her hobby into a business. Now a leading independent media and technology company for women, Popsugar's mission is "to help women live their happy and healthiest lives." The company's team of 100-plus content creators report on entertainment, celebrities, fashion, beauty, fitness, food and more. Prior to Popsugar, Lisa Sugar was a media planner at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners and at Young & Rubicam. She began her career at Showtime and Fox, after graduating from The George Washington University.

Michael Moritz is Chairman of Sequoia Capital. He joined the firm in 1986 and has served on the boards of a variety of companies from inception to their emergence as global, publicly traded companies, including Flextronics, Google, PayPal and Yahoo! He is currently a director of [24]7 Customer, 6WunderKinder, GameFly, Green Dot, Instacart, Klarna, LinkedIn, POPSUGAR, Skyscanner, Strava, Stripe, Thanx and The Melt. Prior to joining Sequoia Capital, Moritz co-founded Technologic Partners, and was a correspondent for TIME, where he was the magazine's San Francisco bureau chief. While at TIME, he wrote two books: "Going For Broke, The Chrysler Story," and "The Little Kingdom, the Private Story of Apple Computer." Moritz graduated from Christ Church, Oxford, with a master of arts degree in history. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, the American novelist Harriet Heyman.

Michael Tubbs was elected as the youngest city councilmember in Stockton, California's history, earning more than 60 percent of the citywide vote. While in office, Tubbs has established literacy programs in concert with the Housing Authority, and the University of the Pacific, drafted and passed Ban the Box legislation, piloted an anti-recidivism back to work program, and has created community-wide coalitions such as the San Joaquin County Alliance for Boys and Men of Color, Reinvent South Stockton Coalition, and the Black Community Crusade. Tubbs has interned at Google and at the White House and earned a bachelor's degree with honors, and a master's degree in policy, organization and leadership studies from Stanford University. He is a Truman Scholar and a recipient of the Dinkelspiel Award, the highest award given to undergraduate students at Stanford. Tubbs is the founder of The Phoenix Scholars and the Summer Success and Leadership Academy at the University of the Pacific and was featured on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, as a speaker at TEDx San Joaquin and TEDx Stanford. He has been honored as one of Black Enterprise's "Top 4 under 40," The Root's "Top 25 Under 25," and one of Reader's Digest's "50 Things to Love About America."

Rebecca Lynn is a General Partner at Canvas Venture Fund, where she focuses on early-stage investments in financial services, digital health, SaaS and mobile. Ranked No. 23 out of 100 top tech investors on Forbes's 2015 Midas List, Lynn led Canvas's investments in FutureAdvisor, CrowdFlower, HealthLoop and Viewics, and currently sits on the boards of each. In 2007, Lynn joined Morgenthaler Ventures and continues to serve on the boards of that firm's portfolio companies. She led an early-stage investment in Lending Club, which was the largest U.S. technology IPO of 2014 and the fourth largest U.S. Internet IPO since 2001 behind Facebook, Twitter and Google. Born and raised in the Midwest, Lynn began her career at Procter & Gamble's corporate headquarters in Cincinnati, where she launched new products internationally. She then joined NextCard in the San Francisco Bay Area as employee number 30, and rose up the ranks to become VP of Marketing and head of customer acquisition. Lynn is a member of the California Bar Association and a member of the U.S. Patent Bar, with a focus on intellectual property litigation and corporate law. She has a chemical engineering degree from the University of Missouri and a JD/MBA from the University of California at Berkeley.

James Beshara is co-founder and CEO at Tilt, a platform that offers people a free, easy and highly social way collect, fundraise or pool money with their groups. Since 2012, over 300,000 groups have used Tilt to turn their ideas, large and small, into reality - whether it's saving a local toy store, sending the Jamaican Bobsled team to the Olympics, or protecting their community from rising crime. Tilt has also built out tools for businesses to run their own branded crowdfunding campaigns. Recently named one of Forbes magazine's "30 Under 30," Beshara has been pushing the collaborative funding envelope since 2007. Before Tilt, he studied development economics as an undergraduate and then went on to build dvelo.org, a site for crowdfunding loans and donations to poverty-alleviation organizations in developing countries. Beshara earned a B.A. in economics from Wake Forest University and has studied sustainable development at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Persis Drell is the Frederick Emmons Terman Dean of the Stanford School of Engineering, the James and Anna Marie Spilker Professor in the School of Engineering and a professor of materials science and engineering and physics. She assumed the post of dean in September 2014 and has been on the faculty at Stanford since 2002. Drell was director of the 1,600-employee U.S. Department of Energy SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory from 2007 to 2012. During her tenure there, she transitioned it from being a lab dedicated primarily to research in high-energy physics to one now seen as a leader in a number of scientific disciplines. Drell received her bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics from Wellesley College and earned a Ph.D. in atomic physics from the University of California, Berkeley. She then switched to high-energy experimental physics and worked as a postdoctoral scientist with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Drell is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a fellow of the American Physical Society. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award.

Christina Smolke is an associate professor of bioengineering in Stanford University's School of Medicine. Her research focuses on developing modular genetic platforms for programming information processing and control functions in living systems, resulting in transformative technologies for engineering, manipulating, and probing biological systems. She has pioneered the design and application of a broad class of RNA molecules, called RNA devices, that process and transmit user-specified input signals to targeted protein outputs, thereby linking molecular computation to gene expression. In addition to her appointment at the School of Medicine, Smolke is, by courtesy, a professor of chemical engineering and belongs to Stanford's interdisciplinary institute Bio-X and the university's Neurosciences Institute. In 2012, the National Institutes of Health honored her with the NIH Director's Pioneer Award. Smolke earned her undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from the University of Southern California and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley.

Astro Teller oversees X, Google's moonshot factory. Teller is also co-founder and director of Cerebellum Capital, Inc., an AI-based hedge fund, as well as the co-founder and chairman of Flux.io, a spin-out from X in the architecture and construction space. From 2007 to 2010, Teller was the founding CEO of Cerebellum Capital. From 1999 to 2007, he was the founding CEO of BodyMedia, a leading wearable body-monitoring company that was sold to Jawbone in 2013. From 2003 to 2010, Teller was a co-founder and chairman of Zivio Technologies, an intellectual-property holding company. Prior to starting BodyMedia, Teller was co-founder, chairman and CEO of Sandbox Advanced Development, an advanced development technology company. Before his tenure as a business executive, Teller taught at Stanford University and was an engineer and researcher for Phoenix Laser Technologies, Stanford's Center for Integrated Systems and The Carnegie Group, Inc. He holds a B.S. in computer science from Stanford University, a master's of science in symbolic and heuristic computation, also from Stanford, and a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a recipient of the prestigious Hertz fellowship. Teller is also a writer. In 1997, Random House published his first fiction novel, "Exegesis," which went on to critical acclaim and publication around the world in many other languages. He has since published a second novel, sold a movie to Paramount, placed many op-ed pieces and journal articles, and his third book, this one a nonfiction work called "Sacred Cows" about our society's confusions about marriage and divorce, was published in July 2014.

Stewart Butterfield is co-founder and CEO of Slack, a platform for team communication used by hundreds of thousands of professionals everyday. Its customers range from well-known startups like Buzzfeed, Stripe and AirBnb to established giants like Adobe and PayPal. Prior to Slack, Butterfield co-founded and led Flickr from its inception in late 2003 through its 2005 acquisition by Yahoo! and until 2008, by which point it was one of the largest web services in the world with over 50 million users and billions of photos. In nearly two decades working on the web, Butterfield has had a distinguished career as a designer, entrepreneur and technologist. He has been named one of the "100 Most Influential People in the World" by Time Magazine, BusinessWeek's Top 50 Leaders, and been featured in interviews and articles by hundreds of publications and broadcasters including the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, The New York Times, CNN and Financial Times.

Andrew Braccia is a general partner in the Silicon Valley office of Accel Partners, a venture capital firm with a global presence that focuses on early and growth-stage investments in high-tech innovations. Braccia joined Accel in 2007, and his investment focus areas include consumer internet services, online marketplaces and next generation business software. Prior to Accel, Braccia held a variety of executive positions in business development, general management and operations over nearly a decade-long career at Yahoo! He was responsible for running the Search and Marketplaces Division. Braccia holds a B.S. in business administration from the University of Arizona.

Kyle Forster is co-founder of Big Switch Networks, which delivers fit-for-purpose data center networking solutions designed for enterprises, cloud providers and service providers. Prior to Big Switch, Forster spent most of his career at Cisco, initially as the technical assistant to Senior Vice President Mike Volpi, and later as a product manager in the cellular and wifi business units. In between Cisco and Big Switch Networks, Forster was vice president of product management at Joost, a peer-to-peer Internet TV company from the founders of Skype. He started his career at e-business consulting company Scient, first as a java developer and later engineering manager and co-founder of the wireless practice. He holds a B.S.E. in electrical engineering from Princeton University, an M.S. in computer science and an M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Ron Gutman is an inventor and serial technology entrepreneur who has started and built several successful companies in digital health. He's currently the founder and CEO of HealthTap, a fast-growing digital-health startup that offers on-demand patient treatment services through an app that connects paying members with a network of over 67,000 U.S. doctors for answers, tips, checklists, news and live virtual consults. Gutman is responsible for the vision, innovation, products and growth at HealthTap. He is also a writer who has contributed to Fortune and Forbes, and speaks at health and technology conferences such as TED, Stanford Medicine X and Health2.0. He is also an angel investor and an advisor to health and technology companies.

Sean George is president and chief operating officer of Invitae, a genetic information company that aggregates the world's genetic tests into a single service with better quality, faster turnaround time, and a lower price than most single-gene diagnostic tests today. Prior to Invitae, George was co-founder and CEO of Locus Development, an early-stage genetic analysis startup. And before Locus, he served as chief operating officer at Navigenics, an early leader in personalized medicine. Previously, George has also served as senior vice president (SVP) of marketing and SVP of life-science business at Affymetrix. In the past, he has also worked at McKinsey & Co. and Molecular Probes. George holds a B.S. in molecular genetics from UCLA, an M.S. in molecular biology from the University of California-Santa Barbara, and a Ph.D. in molecular genetics from UC Santa Cruz.

John Collison grew up in Ireland and started building websites when he was 14. He was studying physics at Harvard University when he dropped out to work on Stripe full time. Along with his older brother Patrick, John Collison started Stripe in 2010 to make accepting payments online simpler and more inclusive. John Collison serves as president of the San Francisco-based company, which offers a "developer-friendly way" to accept payments online and in mobile apps, and processes billions of dollars a year for thousands of companies of all sizes.

Kathryn Gould started her career as a scientist, before turning to high-tech entrepreneurship. After earning her undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto, Gould worked as a physicist at Argonne National Laboratory, just outside Chicago. She earned her M.B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1978 and went on to join Oracle in its early days as its first vice president of marketing. She then went on to become one of the first women venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, serving as general partner at Merrill, Pickard, Anderson & Eyre. In 1995, she became one of the first women in the valley to found a VC firm, Foundation Capital.

Shah Selbe is a National Geographic Explorer, spacecraft propulsion engineer, ocean conservation technologist and the Southern California region representative of Engineers Without Borders. For an independent graduate study program at Stanford with the university's Center for Ocean Solutions, Selbe created FishNET, a platform approach harnessing technology to detect and track illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing worldwide. At Boeing Space and Intelligence Systems, he works as a satellite propulsion systems engineer. On behalf of Engineers Without Borders, Selbe has built homes in Mexico, solar energy projects in Mali, water distribution systems in Malawi, and a rainwater catch system in Tanzania that lets students spend time in school instead of fetching water.

Visionary architect and MacArthur Fellow Jeanne Gang is the founder and principal of Studio Gang Architects, a Chicago-based collective of architects, designers and thinkers whose projects confront pressing contemporary issues. Driven by curiosity, intelligence, and radical creativity, Gang has produced some of today's most innovative and award-winning architecture. Her work has been honored and exhibited widely, most notably at the International Venice Biennale, MoMA, the National Building Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Alon Cohen is co-founder and president of Houzz, a leading platform for home remodeling and design, where users can browse millions of professional home photos, find products, save images, share and collaborate. More than 25 million unique users visit Houzz monthly, via computer or mobile device, viewing over 4 million photos of professionally designed home interiors and exteriors. Cohen co-founded Houzz with his wife, Adi Tatarko.