Leadership & Management

Silicon Valley Energy Summit is the premier annual event for people in Silicon Valley and beyond connected with sustainable energy. Participants gain insights on the latest energy technologies, corporate practices, market trends and emerging government policies. They interact with more than 400 other participants from the world’s largest IT companies, Silicon Valley startups, investment funds, utilities, government, environmental organizations and research institutions.

Let’s Have an Awesome Time Doing Science features high-profile researchers at Stanford giving non-research talks on subjects that are not often addressed in typical seminars but are nonetheless crucial for academic, personal, and professional development.

Join us for a conversation with Christine Yen, the co-founder of Honeycomb. Honeycomb’s core product is a tool that helps product development teams understand and debug complex software systems.  

Prior to founding Honeycomb, Yen was an engineer at Parse both before and after its 2013 acquisition by Facebook. She also founded Venuetastic, an event space booking system that launched through Y Combinator in 2011, and holds a BS in computer science from MIT.

The Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series is supported by the venture capital firm DFJ.

Join us for a conversation with Luminary Media co-founders Matthew Sacks and Lauren Perkins. Sacks and Perkins created Luminary Media in 2018 to make an impact on the growing podcast market, and the platform’s initial round of original content production includes podcasts with Lena Dunham, Guy Raz, Hannibal Buress and Russell Brand.

Sacks, Luminary Media’s CEO, was formerly a principal at New Enterprise Associates. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in history and later worked as an investment banking analyst at Goldman Sachs.

In this symposium, panelists will discuss gender equality today, what progress has been made in the last two decades, and what barriers prevent additional change. The audience will leave with a new understanding of the durability of inequality and with actionable steps to generate equality in their organizations and communities.

Panelists include:

Join us for a conversation with Chip Conley, who founded Joie de Vivre Hospitality at age 26 and grew the company into the second largest boutique hotel brand in the United States. An author of five books, most recently Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder, Conley has been named “Most Innovative CEO” by the San Francisco Business Times and is a strategic advisor for Airbnb. In 2018, he founded the Modern Elder Academy, a “midlife wisdom school” that encourages individuals with a lifetime of experience to carve a purposeful path through the modern workplace.

Join us for a conversation with Payam Banazadeh, the founder and CEO of Capella Space. Capella Space launched its first prototype satellite in December 2018 and aims to build a global satellite-based radar network to solve problems in areas like agriculture, infrastructure monitoring and disaster response. Before founding Capella Space in 2016, Banazadeh worked at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, where his work on two multi-million dollar missions earned him the NASA Mariner Award. In 2017, Payam was named to the Forbes “30 Under 30” list in enterprise tech.

Join us for a conversation with Nicole Hu, co-founder and chief technology officer of One Concern, which aims to help communities prepare for and mitigate natural disasters by harnessing the power of predictive AI. In 2016, Forbes named Hu one of the world’s top enterprise technology innovators in its “30 Under 30” list.

Hu earned a master’s degree in computer science from Stanford University and was a resident at the Stanford Graduate School of Business Venture Studio.

The Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series is supported by the venture capital firm DFJ.

Join us for a conversation with Ritu Narayan, founder and CEO of Zūm, a rapidly growing ride and care company for children. Prior to founding Zūm, Narayan held senior product management roles at Oracle, Yahoo! and eBay, and also founded TechX, an organization that connected the Stanford community with founders, CEOs and technology thought leaders.

Narayan studied computer engineering at the Delhi Institute of Technology and is a graduate of the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

The Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series is supported by the venture capital firm DFJ.

Join us for a conversation with Freada Kapor Klein, a founding partner at Kapor Capital and a pioneer in the field of organizational and cultural diversity. At Kapor Capital, Kapor Klein focuses on providing seed-stage funding to technology startups that make a positive social impact on low income communities and communities of color. Through her work with the Kapor Center and the Level the Playing Field Institute, she spearheads efforts to make the technology ecosystem and entrepreneurship more diverse and inclusive.