Innovation

Dave Peterson is a co-founding partner at Play Bigger Advisors, a firm that specializes in category design, positioning and marketing for technology ventures ranging from early-stage startups to publicly traded companies. Peterson has been an entrepreneur, founding (and killing) his own startup, and co-founding a consulting strategy firm with Christopher Lockhhead, a co-founding partner at Play Bigger Advisors. Peterson has served as a marketing vice president and chief marketing officer at three previous companies, and he loves helping companies define, develop and dominate their market categories.

Al Ramadan is a co-founding partner at Play Bigger Advisors, a firm that specializes in category design, positioning and marketing for technology ventures ranging from early-stage startups to publicly traded companies. Ramadan has been a company co-founder, pioneered new markets, taken them public, won big and lost big. His mission is to help great technology design and dominate their categories. Born in Australia, Ramadan is also a mentor, father, outdoorsman and passionate surfer. He was named as one of the most influential people in the digital economy by Time Magazine, sailed in the Americas Cup, awarded an honorary aviator by the U.S. Navy and hiked the John Muir Trail.

Bernard Roth is the Rodney H. Adams Professor of Engineering at Stanford University. He has published widely in the areas of design, creativity, education, kinematics and robotics, and has received many awards for both his teaching and research. Roth has served as an industrial and government consultant, was a director of several corporations, and has held top leadership positions in several international professional societies. Roth is one of the founders of Stanford's "d.school," where he now serves as academic director. His latest book, "The Achievement Habit," was published in July 2015 by HarperCollins.

Richard K. Miller is president of Olin College of Engineering, in Needham, Mass. He was its first employee in 1999, and he previously served as dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Iowa from 1992 to 1999. The prior 17 years were spent on the engineering faculty at University of Southern California and the University of California-Santa Barbara. With a background in applied mechanics and current interests in innovation in higher education, Miller is the author of more than 100 reviewed journal articles and other technical publications. Together with two Olin colleagues, he received the 2013 Bernard M. Gordon Prize from the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education. A member of both the NAE and the National Academy of Inventors, he received the Marlowe Award for creative and distinguished administrative leadership from the American Society for Engineering Education in 2011. A frequent speaker on engineering education, Miller received the 2002 Distinguished Engineering Alumnus Award from the University of California-Davis, where he earned his B.S. He earned his M.S. from MIT and Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology, where he received the 2014 Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award.

Jane Marie Chen is co-founder and CEO of Embrace Innovations, a social enterprise startup that aims to help the 20 million premature and low birth-weight babies born every year, through a low-cost infant warmer. The Embrace infant warmer costs about 1 percent of a traditional incubator, and is currently distributed across clinics in India, with pilots being conducted in 10 countries. The Embrace infant warmer is estimated to have helped about 200,000 babies to date. Prior to Embrace, Chen worked with nonprofit organizations on healthcare issues in developing countries. She spent several years as program director of a startup HIV/AIDS nonprofit in China (Chi Heng Foundation) and worked for the Clinton Foundation's HIV/AIDS Initiative in Tanzania. She also worked at Monitor Group as a management consultant, advising Fortune 500 companies. Chen has been a TED speaker and was selected as one of Forbes' Impact 30 in 2011. In 2012, Chen was named as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, and was featured in Dove's "Real Role Models" campaign for women and girls. In 2013, Chen and the other co-founders of Embrace were awarded the prestigious Economist Innovation Award, under the category of Social and Economic Innovation. In the same year, Chen and her co-founder were also recognized as Schwab Social Entrepreneurs of the Year by the World Economic Forum.

DJ Kleinbaum is co-founder and co-CEO of Emerald Therapeutics and the Emerald Cloud Laboratory. The lab comes from Emerald Therapeutics, a venture-backed biotechnology company based in South San Francisco, Calif., and its business is conducting life-science experiments online and helping researchers design their studies, organize their data and analyze their results. Kleinbaum and his team operate at the intersection of computation and the life sciences, bringing together individuals with backgrounds ranging from organic chemistry and molecular biology to electrical engineering and computer science. Kleinbaum received a B.S. in biological sciences from Carnegie Mellon University and a Ph.D. in chemistry from Stanford University.

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.

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.

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.

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."

Brit Morin is the founder and CEO of Brit + Co, an online platform that provides tools to teach, inspire and enable creativity among women and girls. From traditional crafts to high-tech manufacturing, Brit + Co connects over 10 million users with makers, designers, chefs and inventors. An advisor and investor in various technology startups, Morin has appeared on national TV programs like The Today Show, Rachael Ray, Steve Harvey and others. She has also been a contributor for Katie Couric, CNN, Yahoo and the Huffington Post, and has been profiled and quoted as an expert and entrepreneur in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fortune and Forbes. Morin is also author of the bestselling book Homemakers: A Domestic Handbook for the Digital Generation, which debuted in March 2015.

Scott Cook co-founded Intuit Inc. in 1983 and now serves as the chairman of the Executive Committee. Before founding the financial software maker, Cook managed consulting assignments in banking and technology for Bain & Company, a corporate-strategy consulting firm. He previously worked for Procter & Gamble, the household products giant, in various marketing positions, including brand manager, for four years. Cook is a member of the board of directors of eBay, Procter & Gamble, the Harvard Business School Dean's Advisory Board, the Center for Brand and Product Management at the University of Wisconsin, and the Intuit Scholarship Foundation. Cook earned an MBA from Harvard University and received a bachelor's degree in economics and mathematics from the University of Southern California.

Lyndon Rive is co-founder and chief executive officer at SolarCity. He has grown the company from two to more than 6,000 employees and helped it become one of the most recognizable brands in clean energy. Rive has led the company's efforts to raise funds sufficient to finance more than $4 billion on solar projects from a range of investors, including Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Google, PG&E Corporation and U.S. Bancorp. Rive has also helped SolarCity enter a range of new markets to serve more than 300 schools and universities, more than 100 regional and national homebuilders, and major organizations including eBay, Intel, Walmart and the U.S. military. Prior to SolarCity, Rive co-founded Everdream, an industry leader in software and services for large-scale, distributed computer management. Rive negotiated the company's partnership with Dell Computer, which acquired Everdream in 2007. A lifelong entrepreneur, Rive founded his first company at the age of 17, and in his spare time has been a member of the U.S. National Underwater Hockey Team.

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.

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.

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.

William Marshall is co-founder and CEO of Planet Labs, which designs, builds and operates a network of Earth-imaging satellites that together comprise a global-sensing and analytics platform that seeks to unlock the ability to understand and respond to change at a local and planetary scale. Prior to Planet Labs, Marshall was a Scientist at NASA/USRA, where he developed a low-cost planetary bus, and has served as the technical lead on research projects in space debris remediation. Marshall has published over 30 articles in scientific publications and written a variety of space-related op-eds, including in the New York Times and Boston Globe. He received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Oxford and a master's in Physics with Space Science and Technology from the University of Leicester.

Chinedu Echeruo is a partner and head of principal investing at Constant Capital Partners. He is responsible for the firm's Venture Building and Accelerator group based in New York. Prior to joining Constant Capital, Echeruo founded two U.S-based Internet companies: HopStop.com and Tripology.com. Tripology.com was acquired in 2010 by Rand McNally and is now owned by USA Today. HopStop was acquired by Apple in 2013. He was also named Black Enterprise Magazine's Small Business Innovator of the Year and listed in the magazine's "Top 40 under 40." Before his entrepreneurial career, Echeruo was with AM Investment Partners, a $500 million volatility-driven convertible bond arbitrage hedge fund. Prior to completing his M.B.A., he spent several years in the Mergers and Acquisitions and Leveraged Finance groups of J.P. Morgan Chase, where he was involved in a broad range of mergers and acquisitions, financing and private equity transactions. He holds an M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School and B.S. in finance and accounting, with honors, from Syracuse University.

Laurene Powell Jobs is founder and chair of the Emerson Collective, an organization that supports social entrepreneurs and organizations working in the areas of education, immigration reform and social justice. The widow of the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, Powell Jobs also serves as president of the board of College Track, an after-school program she founded in 1997 to prepare underserved high school students for success in college. East Palo Alto-based College Track has since expanded to serve students in Oakland, San Francisco, New Orleans, Los Angeles and Aurora, Colo. In addition to her work with the Emerson Collective and College Track, Powell Jobs serves on the boards of directors of NewSchools Venture Fund, Conservation International and Stanford University. She also serves on the Chairman's advisory board of the Council on Foreign Relations. Powell Jobs holds a bachelor of arts and a bachelor of science in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, and an M.B.A. from Stanford's Graduate School of Business. Earlier in her career, she spent several years working in investment banking and later co-founded a natural foods company in California.

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.

Jennifer Pahlka is the founder and executive director of Code for America. She recently served as the U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She is known for her TED talk, "Coding a Better Government," and is the recipient of several awards, including MIT's Kevin Lynch Award, the Oxford Internet Institute's Internet and Society Award, and the National Democratic Institute's Democracy Award. Pahlka spent eight years at CMP Media, where she ran the Game Developers Conference, Game Developer magazine, Gamasutra.com and the Independent Games Festival.

Matt Rogers is founder and VP of Engineering at Nest Labs, creator of the Nest Learning Thermostat. By applying modern design and technology, Nest has made the thermostat sexy and revitalized a stagnant - yet very important - industry. Rogers is responsible for all product development at Nest, ranging from mechanical design to software to web services, and everything in between. Prior to Nest, Rogers was responsible for iPod software development at Apple, from concept to production. He was one of the first engineers on the original iPhone, and involved in the development of 10 generations of iPod, five generations of iPhone, and the first iPad. He earned his BS and MS degrees from Carnegie Mellon University.

Susan Koger is the co-founder and chief creative officer of ModCloth, an online retailer known for its innovative social shopping experience, unique apparel and decor, and wide range of styles sourced from independent designers around the world. As ModCloth's CCO, Koger employs her creative edge and love for vintage to inform all things ModCloth: from its careful curation of goods to the look and feel of the site and mobile apps. In 2013, ModCloth was recognized as one of Fast Company's "Most Innovative Companies," and Koger was listed in Forbes' "30 Under 30" and Refinery29's "30 Under 30: San Francisco."