Culture

Bill Drayton is the founder and CEO of Ashoka. He has been a social entrepreneur since he was a New York City elementary school student. In elementary school, Drayton loved geography and history and was equally unmotivated in Latin and math. His real passion in those years went to sailing, and starting and running a series of newspapers in his school and beyond. In high school he created and built the Asia Society into the largest student organization. By high school he was also a NAACP member and actively engaged in and deeply moved by civil rights work. At Harvard he founded the Ashoka Table; and, at Yale Law School, he launched Yale Legislative Services which, by the time he graduated, engaged one third of the student body in helping key legislators throughout the northeast design and draft legislation. Drayton is also a manager and management consultant - choices that also grow from his fascination with how human institutions work. Although he loves and thinks first in historical terms, he is trained in economics, law, and management, the three key-interventionist disciplines. He was a McKinsey and Company consultant for almost ten years, gaining wide experience serving both public and private clients. For four years, he was Assistant Administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where he had lead responsibility for policy, budget, management, audit, and representing the environment in Administration-wide policy development, notably including budget, energy, and economic policy. He successfully "intrapreneured" a series of major innovations and reforms in the field, ranging from the introduction of emissions trading to the use of economics-defined incentives to remove the advantage of delaying compliance. Later he founded and led Save EPA (an association of professional environmental managers that helped the Congress, press, administration, citizen groups, and public understand and the block much of the radically destructive policies proposed by the Administrator Ann Gorsuch and others). Drayton also founded and led Environmental Safety (which helps develop and spread better ways of implementing environmental laws). He also served briefly in the White House, and taught both law and management at Stanford Law School and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He is currently significantly involved as board chair of Get America Working! and Youth Venture, both major strategic innovations for the public good. Drayton was elected one of the early MacArthur Fellows for his work, including the founding of Ashoka. Yale School of Management gave him its annual Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence. The American Society of Public Administration and the National Academy of Public Administration jointly awarded him their National Public Service Award, and the Common Cause gave him its Public Service Achievement Award. He has also been named a Preiskel-Silverman Fellow for Yale Law School and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Most recently in 2005, he was selected one of America's Best Leaders by US News & World Report and Harvard's Center for Public Leadership. In the same month he was the recipient of the Yale Law School's highest alumni honor, The Yale Law School Award of Merit- for having made a substantial contribution to Public Service.

Cyriac Roeding is the co-founder and CEO of Shopkick. Roeding caught his "mobile virus" by living in Tokyo in 1994, and by traveling the world observing mobile behavior, all the way to monks in Bhutan in the Himalayan Mountains. He created his first mobile startup in Europe in 1999 in five countries, then founded CBS's mobile division in 2005 in Los Angeles, and led the team to Emmy nominations and profitability. In 2008, he joined Kleiner Perkins's iFund in Silicon Valley as an EIR, where the idea for shopkick was born. Cyriac started his entrepreneurial endeavors as a paper boy turned software developer (he sold his first computer program to a newspaper publisher at 15), and as a radio host in Germany and Lithuania.

Padmasree Warrior serves as the chief technology & strategy officer at Cisco. She is charged with aligning technology development and corporate strategy to enable Cisco to anticipate, shape, and lead major market transitions. She helps direct technology and operational innovation across the company and oversees strategic partnerships, mergers and acquisitions, the integration of new business models, the incubation of new technologies, and the cultivation of world-class technical talent. In her previous role, Warrior served as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and also co-led Cisco's worldwide engineering organization. As Senior Vice President, Engineering, she was responsible for core switching, collaboration, cloud computing and data center/virtualization, security, and architectures for business transformation. Warrior joined Cisco in 2007. Prior to that, she was executive vice president and CTO at Motorola. Under her leadership, Motorola was awarded the 2004 National Medal of Technology. Warrior has been widely recognized for her creative, visionary leadership. SVForum in Silicon Valley celebrated her Visionary Award, and the International Museum of Women presented her with the Innovator Award for Women in Technology. Forbes named her one of "The World's 100 Most Powerful Women," for two years running. In 2012, Business Insider called her one of the "25 Most Influential Women in Wireless," the Aspen Institute honored her with its first Leadership in Science and Technology Award, and CloudNOW recognized her with its first annual CloudNOW Award. The Wall Street Journal has called Warrior one of "50 Women to Watch,"Fast Company included her among the "100 Most Creative People in Business," and TheEconomic Times listed her as "the 11th Most Influential Global Indian." Warrior has served on government initiatives, industry advisory boards, and charitable and community organizations. She received the United States Pan Asian American Chamber of Commerce's Excellence Award and YWCA Metropolitan Chicago's Outstanding Woman of Achievement Award. In 2007 she was inducted into the Women in Information Technology International Hall of Fame. Warrior holds a bachelor of science degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi and a master of science degree in chemical engineering from Cornell University.

Dr. Matthew Rabinowitz has had dual careers in industry and academia. He completed his B.A., M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees at Stanford University, receiving both the Levin and Terman Awards the highest academic honors offered respectively in engineering and physics and a graduate fellowship to the school of engineering. While completing his dissertation, Rabinowitz co-founded an intelligent online merchandizing company, Panop.com, which later sold for $100M. Shortly after, Rabinowitz started his second company, Rosum, which developed a location technology using TV signals to augment GPS. Rosum received the World Economic Forum "100 Technology Pioneers" award when he was CTO. In 2003, Rabinowitz's life took a turn. A family member had a child born with a genetic disease and the child died. Rabinowitz experienced firsthand the trauma, stress, and devastation that an unexpected diagnosis of genetic disease can bring to a family and he was moved to action. Drawing on expertise from his seemingly unrelated background, he embarked on a journey with the goal of ensuring that other families need not experience similar pain wrought by the inability to have a healthy child. Bringing together a team of experts in medicine, engineering, statistics, and genetics, along with his own skills in optimization, signal processing, informatics, and entrepreneurship - Natera was born. Rabinowitz is now an authority in the field of prenatal and preconception informatics-based genetic testing. He has served as the Principal Investigator on six research grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health from which multiple publications have emerged in the leading journals of the field such as Bioinformatics, Human Reproduction, and Molecular Human Reproduction. He actively presents at medical conferences around the world,including at the annual meeting of the American College of Medical Genetics, American Society of Reproductive Medicine, and Fetal Medicine Foundation World Congress. Rabinowitz is a board member, advisor, and angel investor for multiple technology companies in the fields of biotech, communications, cleantech and healthcare. He has received the Scott Helt Memorial Award from IEEE and was selected by MIT Technology Review Magazine as one of the top 35 technology innovators under 35 in the US.

Ferdinando Buscema is a corporate specialist designing "magical experiences" for organizational growth. With a background in mechanical engineering, humanistic psychology and hermetic traditions, Buscema has been chosen as a partner by multinational companies to create high-value training events, on the themes of innovation, leadership and communication skills. As a conjurer and sleight-of-hand artist, Ferdinando is a credited performer at the Magic Castle in Hollywood, the most exclusive stage for magical entertainment in the world. Buscema is the Magic Experience Designer at IED Istituto Europeo di Design, serves as Advisor for the philanthropic foundation Fetzer Institute, and is a Magister Ludi at Mister Gamer.

Jocelyn Goldfein is a Director of Engineering at Facebook, where she drives new product design and architecture and helps scale the engineering organization. Her teams are responsible for key Facebook product features like news feed, search, and photos. Prior to joining Facebook, Jocelyn was Vice President and General Manager at VMware, where she ran the engineering and product teams for VMware's desktop products. She previously was Director of Engineering at e-mail management start-up MessageOne. Jocelyn holds a bachelors degree in computer science from Stanford University.

In 2010, Chris Redlitz and his wife Beverly Parenti co-founded The Last Mile program, designed to teach incarcerated men and women fundamental business skills and entrepreneurial training. The program launched at San Quentin State Prison in California, and it has been a rousing success. The Last Mile is the most progressive prison program in the world, and it been covered by every major news service. The program will expand to several other states in 2013, and it is expected to be adopted across America in the next five years. Chris Redlitz has been on the forefront of emerging technologies since the commercialization of the web. He is the Founding Partner of KickLabs, a world renowned technology accelerator and Transmedia Capital, a seed stage investment fund both based in San Francisco. He co-founded AdAuction, the first online media exchange in 1997 which was the precursor to the current auction based and dynamic pricing platforms in online media. He received Ad Age's prestigious i20 award for his accomplishments in the development of interactive advertising. Early in his career, Redlitz held management positions for Reebok Int'l and owned the first athletic specialty retail chain in Southern California.

Before co-founding Asana, Justin Rosenstein worked at Facebook as a tech lead and engineering manager on projects from presence solutions for businesses to back-end site-performance to front-end abstractions. Prior to that he was a product manager at Google for three years, leading projects in Google's communication and collaboration division. While at Stanford, Rosenstein majored in math, got part way through a master's in computer science, and served as a member of the Mayfield Fellows Program.

As a co-founder and partner of Scale Venture Partners, Kate Mitchell focuses on building the firm's team and strategic direction. Mitchell has actively worked with portfolio companies such as Hubspan, Jaspersoft, mBlox, Tonic Software and Wayport. Previously, Mitchell was a senior vice president at Bank of America, where she led the launch of the company's Internet banking services. Mitchell is also a past chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, where she promoted the value of venture capital to the U.S. economy, and advocated for regulatory and economic policies that promote and reward entrepreneurship.

Pulse was founded in May 2010 by Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta, two graduate students at Stanford's acclaimed d.school. What began as a class assignment quickly turned into a true passion project, as the two worked tirelessly to revolutionize the mobile news reading experience. The result is an app that has garnered praise from Steve Jobs, won the prestigious Apple Design Award, was named one of TIME's top 50 apps of 2011, and more. Now with over 20 million users (and adding more than a million new users every month), Pulse has solidified its place at the forefront of the modern news industry.

Pulse was founded in May 2010 by Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta, two graduate students at Stanford's acclaimed d.school. What began as a class assignment quickly turned into a true passion project, as the two worked tirelessly to revolutionize the mobile news reading experience. The result is an app that has garnered praise from Steve Jobs, won the prestigious Apple Design Award, was named one of TIME's top 50 apps of 2011, and more. Now with over 20 million users (and adding more than a million new users every month), Pulse has solidified its place at the forefront of the modern news industry.

Nassim N. Taleb is a former derivatives trader who became a scholar and philosophical essayist in 2006. Although he is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University's Polytechnic Institute, he self-funds his research and operates in the manner of independent scholars. Taleb is the author of The Black Swan (2007-2010) and Antifragile (2012). His work focuses on decision making under uncertainty, as well as technical and philosophical problems with probability and metaprobability, in other words "what to do in a world we don't understand."

Ching-Yu Hu is an entrepreneur born and raised in Silicon Valley. As a co-founder and director of business development at Skybox Imaging, Hu is responsible for driving new business opportunities with strategic alliances and partnerships around the world. Since co-founding Skybox, she has played a key role in supporting Skybox's Series A, B, and C venture capital financing, marketing, sales, and various business operations initiatives. In 2008, Hu met her three co-founders who shared a vision of building a big data company powered by small satellites. Prior to Skybox, she held various roles at JPMorgan and TIAA-CREF creating portfolio optimization models, analyzing large volumes of transactional data to determine risks and exposures of financial assets, and other data analytics projects. As an undergraduate, Hu conducted research in the Industrial Engineering Operations Research department focusing on uncertainty modeling and robust portfolio optimization. She earned her Master's degree in Management Science & Engineering at Stanford University. She previously earned a Bachelor's degree in Operations Research Management Science, and a Bachelor's degree in Statistics from University of California, Berkeley.

John Fenwick is a former active-duty US Air Force officer with experience managing a range of national intelligence and military space programs, all focused on transitioning new capabilities from lab bench to orbit. He is a co-founder and vice president of flight programs at Skybox Imaging. In addition to development roles spanning the national space community, his tenure at the Pentagon also included several years of space intelligence advocacy on Capitol Hill. Prior to his work inside the Beltway, Fenwick designed and built airborne imaging cameras as an Air Force research physicist. Fenwick met his Skybox co-founders while earning an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He previously earned an M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, where he was a Draper Laboratory Fellow and built more than a few robots. He is also a distinguished graduate of the US Air Force Academy, where he jumped out of several perfectly good airplanes and served as Table Commandant.

Julian Mann is an aerospace engineer and entrepreneur originally from Ukiah, CA. He serves as a co-founder and vice president of product development at Skybox Imaging. His work in the aerospace industry has spanned a broad spectrum, including NASA's manned space program, where he worked conducting oversight and risk analysis on the Constellation program. Additionally he has spent several years advocating for the advancement of microsatellite technology throughout the industry. Mann got his initial exposure to microsatellite technology through his activities at the Stanford Space Systems Development Lab (SSDL) where he conducted both his undergraduate and graduate research. Prior to Skybox, his focus on the commercialization and proliferation of microsatellite technology led him to found Astronautical Development, LLC, which specialized in nanosatellite engineering, and provided products and services to several US government agencies. At Skybox, Mann focuses on the development of the company's core technology, managing the relationship between near-term product development and long-term technology strategy. Additionally he is responsible for the company's IP portfolio and strategic corporate partnerships with other technology companies.

Dan Berkenstock is an entrepreneur and engineer from Chicago, IL with a healthy respect for the risks & rewards of doing business in space. He is also fascinated by scalable and novel data streams thatrevolutionize the ways that consumers, businesses, and governments make decisions in their day-to-day lives. As a Co-Founder and the Executive Vice President & Chief Product Officer of Skybox Imaging, Berkenstock leads the vision, implementation, and delivery of revolutionary information products & services derived from timely satellite imagery. Previously, he was the founding CEO of Skybox. In this role he led the company from inception: raising $21M in equity financing from leading silicon valley venture capitalists, building the team to 50, obtaining the company's NOAA operating license, and overseeing the design & successful critical design review of SkySat-1. Berkenstock is currently on leave from the Ph.D. program in Aeronautics & Astronautics at Stanford University, where he also received his masters degree. Prior to co-founding Skybox, he researched optimal designmethods for spacecraft in the Advanced Supercomputing Division of NASA's Ames Research Center. Berkenstock has also worked as a counterproliferation analyst at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,developing methods to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Berkenstock has worked at several early stage startup companies and served as a cooperative education student for NASA at Johnson Space Center. At JSC, Dan was a certified scuba diver at NASA's NeutralBuoyancy Laboratory where he assisted in training astronauts for extravehicular activities. Dan has supported two space shuttle missions as an assistant to the Assembly Checkout Office in Mission Control,performed computational analysis on the space shuttle, and supported T-38 trainer jet activities at Ellington Field.

Stephen Cohen currently serves as Executive Vice President, and sits on the board of Palantir Technologies, a private company in Palo Alto, CA that develops software analysis products used by governments and financial organizations around the world. Prior to joining Palantir, Stephen worked at Clarium Capital Management. Stephen graduated with a BS in Computer Science from Stanford University. His primary interest is creating leverage on real-world problems through Natural Language Processing, Linguistics, and Machine Learning inspired techniques.

Tom Kosnik is a Fenwick and West Consulting Professor, Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), at Stanford School of Engineering. He is an International Advisor for National University of Singapore Entrepreneurship Centre, and a cofounder of Gear Up Ventures, a global partnership that helps entrepreneurs in organizations large and small to create new markets and disrupt existing markets. Teaching: His current courses include Global Entrepreneurial Marketing, Technology Entrepreneurship, New Venture Creation, and Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Program. He taught Marketing at Harvard Business School from 1985-89, and launched HBS's Entrepreneurial Marketing course in1995-97. Professional Education: Kosnik helps leaders and teams in start-ups, global companies, and other organizations to apply best-of-class tools to overcome real-world challenges. Topics include: * Gear up: Your Best Idea Ever! Interactive anti-book/digital models for creating or disrupting a market * Circles of Influence: Getting entrepreneurial players in different regions to bet on your new venture * Negotiating the Triple Chasms of Generation, Gender and Culture: Building trust across borders * Global Entrepreneurial Marketing: Creating new markets and entering new country/markets * The STVP Case Collection: Cases on clean tech, social media, global ventures * Designing Systems that Summon the Spirit: Bringing the best out of people at work Past and current clients include: American Management Systems; Apple Computer; Applied Materials; China Mobile Communications Corporation; Clean Tech Open; Cypress Semiconductor; Cummins Engine; Electronic Arts; Ernst & Young; National University of Singapore Entrepreneurship Centre; HP China; IBM; Microsoft; Nuance Communications; Younoodle, Yunnan Tin Company, and over 50 startups. Advisor: Kosnik has served as a leadership coach and advisor to hundreds of entrepreneurial leaders and teams from 1980 to the present. Education: BA in History and International Relations, Duke University (1972), MBA, University of Virginia (1977), Ph.D., Stanford Graduate School of Business (1986).

Cindy Padnos is the founder and Managing Partner of Illuminate Ventures. Padnos focuses primarily in cloud computing sector with a particular emphasis on B2B Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications and platforms, big data/real-time analytics, enterprise social, technology-enabled services and mobile communications investments. She currently serves as a director of privately held portfolio companies BrightEdge, CalmSea, Hoopla and Xactly Corporation. Prior to founding Illuminate, she was a director of Outlook Ventures, where she sourced more than half of the firm's new investments including companies in the IT infrastructure, software/SaaS, consumer Internet and mobile application spaces.

Prior to joining Greylock in 2011, Mr. Lilly was CEO of Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox, an open source Web browser used by more than 450 million people. He also co-founded Reactivity, an enterprise security infrastructure company acquired by Cisco in 2007, where he served as founding CEO and later CTO. He is currently on the Board of Directors of Citrus Lane, Clearslide, Code for America, Mozilla Corporation, and the Participatory Culture Foundation. He is a board observer at Tumblr, lead's Greylock's investment in Dropbox, and led the investment in Instagram. He is a co-inventor on seven United States patents.

Steven J. McCormick, the president and a trustee of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, leads the Foundation's work to turn bold ideas into lasting change in environmental conservation, science, and patient care. The Foundation is among the top ten largest private foundations in the U.S. and one of the largest funders of scientific research and environmental conservation in the world. Before joining the Foundation, Mr. McCormick spent six years as the president and CEO of The Nature Conservancy.

An orthopedic surgeon, inventor, and entrepreneur, Dr. Hank C. K. Wuh has led the development of over twenty biomedical and consumer healthcare products from concept to global commercialization. Dr. Wuh is founder and CEO of Skai Ventures, a hybrid of venture capital and technology accelerator focused on creating and investing in high growth companies by transforming novel, ingenious ideas from scientists at leading universities into disruptive innovations. Dr. Wuh is also founder and CEO of Cellular Bioengineering, Inc., developing advanced, bioengineered corneas for transplantation.

Sue Siegel is a GE Corporate Officer and the CEO of healthymagination. Siegel is a 25-year industry leader with corporate and venture capital experience in growing companies that bring key enabling technologies to the forefront of biomedical research and healthcare. Prior to joining GE, Siegel was a general partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures where she led investments spanning enabling technology platforms, molecular diagnostics and digital health, which leveraged the convergence of these disciplines in driving personalized, consumer-driven and information-based healthcare. Prior to joining Mohr Davidow Ventures, Siegel served as President and Director of Affymetrix, Inc., a publicly traded company that pioneered GeneChip technology, which propelled the expansion of the genomics field and accelerated the early development of personalized medicine. During her tenure, Siegel grew the company from an early stage company into a global leader with a multi-billion dollar market cap and the gold-standard gene expression platform for biomedical research. Siegel's other industry experience includes senior leadership positions with Amersham International, now part of GE Healthcare, E.I. DuPont & Co., Eastman Kodak Co., and Bio-Rad. Siegel served on corporate boards including Affymetrix, Pacific Biosciences, Crescendo Biosciences, RainDance Technologies, Personalis, Analyte Health, Corventis, Navigenics, On-Q-ity, and Didimi. Siegel was named a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute and was featured in the bestselling business book: Multipliers: How The Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter and was recognized as one of "The 100 Most Influential Women in Silicon Valley." She also served or serves on select advisory boards, including the President's Circle of the National Academies, the Advisory Council of The Gladstone Institutes, a preeminent biomedical research organization at the University of California, San Francisco, the Stanford University Medical School Institute for Immunity, Transplantation, and Infectious Diseases (ITI). Siegel holds a Bachelor of Science in Biology from the University of Puerto Rico and a Master of Science in Biochemistry from Boston University School of Medicine. She has completed the Stanford Director's College and executive management coursework at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management and the Harvard Business School.

Jess Lee is CEO of Polyvore, a social commerce technology company. Prior to co-founding Polyvore, Lee was a product manager at Google, where she worked on Google Maps and launched features like My Maps and draggable driving directions. After four years at Google, Lee became hopelessly addicted to making Polyvore sets and decided the only cure was to join the Polyvore team. Jess has a degree in computer science from Stanford University.