understanding a variety of career paths

Dine with inspiring leaders from various industries and organizations. At Leadership Dinners, you will interact with proven leaders and a small group of graduate students over dinner at the Faculty Club.  

In this highly interactive, two-session workshop, you will apply the innovation principles of design thinking to the "wicked problem" of designing your life and vocation in and beyond Stanford. This workshop offers you the opportunity to approach these lifelong questions with a structured framework and work out your ideas in conversation with your graduate peers. It is especially useful for students who are just beginning their career exploration or would like structured space to reflect on their interests.

Join us for a conversation with Emily Melton, partner at the venture capital firm DFJ. Melton began her career in entrepreneurship at DFJ, where she spent eight years building her skillset investing in companies like Meebo, Kudo and Flux. She worked at the Mayfield Fund for a just over a year, where she was involved in the firm's mobile and consumer investment strategy, before returning once more to DFJ.  

Melton graduated from Stanford with a bachelor’s degree in political philosophy and an MBA.

Join us for a conversation with Adam Pisoni, founder and CEO of Abl Schools, an educational resource management software. Before founding Abl Schools, he founded a web-design startup, Cnation, which led him to join Geni, a genealogy website. From ideas rooted in his time at Geni, Pisoni later co-founded Yammer, a social network for businesses (acquired by Microsoft)—where he oversaw product, analytics, and engineering. Pisoni is also the former director of web engineering at Shopzilla.

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

Join the School of Humanities & Sciences for wine and cheese and a chance to meet fellow grads in other humanities and arts departments, as well as a variety of campus leaders. Lanier Anderson (Senior Associate Dean for the Humanities and Arts) and Matthew Tiews (Associate Vice President for the Arts) will speak briefly about how you can take advantage of Stanford’s resources to plan broadly for your future. We will also distribute a guide to key professional development opportunities for humanities students.

Join us for a conversation with Maureen Fan, co-founder and CEO at Baobab Studios, an Emmy-award winning virtual reality animation studio. Before Baobab Studios, Fan held several senior production and project management roles, including VP of Games at Zynga. With interests in film, gaming and the consumer web, she’s been named one of The Most Creative People of the Year by Ad Age.

Fan graduated from Stanford with an interdisciplinary bachelor’s degree in computer science, art and psychology, and from Harvard University with a master’s degree in business.

Join us for a conversation with Dan Widmaier, co-founder and CEO at Bolt Threads, a biotech startup that produces biofabricated silk fibers based on proteins found in nature. With experience in both business development and science, Widmaier uses expertise in biology to lead Bolt Threads through tech development and financing.

Widmaier graduated from UC San Francisco with his Ph.D. in Chemistry and Chemical Biology, where his research focused on his design of genetic circuits to control microbial organelles.

Join us for a conversation with Jeremy Henrickson, Chief Product Officer at Coinbase, an online platform for buying, selling, transferring and storing digital currency. Henrickson began his career at Apple as a research engineer and at Reactive (later acquired by Cisco) as the Director of Technology Services. Over nine years, he held several executive product management and development roles at Guidewire before becoming VP of Product and Engineering, and later CPO, at Coinbase.

Henrickson graduated from Stanford with both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science.

Join us for a conversation with Puneet Agarwal, partner at True Ventures. Before True Ventures, Agarwal began his career as a product manager at a software startup later sold to IBM. After, he worked in tech investment banking and venture capital at the Mayfield Fund. Agarwal has several years of experience in product management and marketing roles, including his work as VP of product management at Geodesic Information Systems.

He graduated from Stanford with his bachelor’s and master’s in industrial engineering, where he was also a Mayfield Fellow.

Join us for a conversation with Manish Chandra, founder and CEO at Poshmark, a social marketplace platform for buying and selling clothing items. Before Poshmark, Manish founded Kaboodle, also a social shopping company. He has experience as a software engineer at Intel and as a marketing executive at Versant, Versata and Sybase.

Manish graduated from IIT Kanpur with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, the University of Texas at Austin with a master’s degree and Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley with an MBA.