understanding a variety of career paths

Hemant Taneja is a managing director at General Catalyst, and has been an early investor in market-leading companies like Digit, Grammarly, Gusto, Livongo, Mindstrong, Samsara, Snap, and Stripe. His 2018 book Unscaled articulates the need for accountability, transparency, and explainability in AI technologies as they permeate deeper into daily life, and his more recent Harvard Business Review article “The Era of Move Fast and Break Things is Over” encourages entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to adopt frameworks for responsible innovation and investing.

In January 2019, Aicha Evans was named CEO of Zoox. Prior to joining Zoox, Evans served as Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer at Intel Corporation, responsible for driving Intel’s long-term strategy to transform from a PC-centric company to a data-centric company. Prior to Intel, she spent 10 years in various engineering management positions at Rockwell Semiconductors, Conexant and Skyworks.

Practice the art of informational interviews and make connections with other grad students in this preview of the popular d.school course, Designing the Professional.

Kathy Davies, lecturer and managing director, Life Design Lab

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John Armstrong, lecturer and fellow, Life Design Lab

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On November 8, 2016, Michael Tubbs was elected to serve as the mayor of the City of Stockton, California. Upon taking office in January 2017, Tubbs became both Stockton’s youngest mayor and the city’s first African-American mayor. Tubbs is also the youngest mayor in the history of the country representing a city with a population of more than 100,000 residents. In his first year as mayor, Tubbs secured $20 million to launch Stockton Scholars, a place-based scholarship that aims to triple the number of Stockton students entering and graduating from college.

Ann Miura-Ko is a co-founding partner at Floodgate, a seed-stage VC firm. A repeat member of the Forbes Midas List and the New York Times Top 20 Venture Capitalists Worldwide, she was one of the first investors in Lyft and Refinery29, and has been an early backer of many others, including Xamarin and Thinkful. In addition to partnering with entrepreneurs building impactful businesses based on truly intelligent AI, she is a co-sponsor of the AI Grant, a nonprofit research lab that funds work on open source AI.

Kevin Weil is the VP of Product for Novi, a new digital wallet for Facebook’s Libra payment system. Previously, Weil was VP of Product at Instagram, overseeing consumer, growth, and monetization products. Before joining Instagram in 2016, he was SVP of Product at Twitter, where he led product development and design across Twitter’s consumer and ad products, as well as Vine and Periscope. Earlier in his career he held software engineering and data science roles at Cooliris, Tropos Networks, Microsoft Research, and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

Amy Chang is an executive vice president at Cisco. Following the acquisition of her startup Accompany by Cisco in 2018, she led Cisco’s multi-billion dollar Collaboration business and its award-winning Webex portfolio, which includes Meetings, Teams, Devices, Calling, and Contact Center. Prior to Accompany, Chang was at Google, where she led the teams for Google Analytics, Website Optimizer, Trends, and multichannel attribution. She also previously held roles at eBay, McKinsey, Intel, AMD and Motorola.

Debbie Sterling is the founder and CEO of GoldieBlox, an award-winning children’s multimedia company known for disrupting the “pink aisle” in toy stores around the world, and challenging gender stereotypes with a girl engineer character. In 2015, Sterling was inducted as a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship under the Obama administration and honored by the National Women’s History Museum with a “Living Legacy” Award for her work to empower girls around the world. She holds a degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford University.

Bonny Simi is the president of JetBlue Technology Ventures, the venture capital arm of JetBlue Airways that invests in and partners with early-stage startups that are improving the future of travel and hospitality. Simi remains an active JetBlue pilot and is also a three-time Olympian in the sport of luge. She earned three degrees at Stanford University: a BA in communications, and masters degrees in management and engineering.

Adam Pisoni co-founded Yammer in 2008, and oversaw product, analytics, and engineering as the SaaS company scaled to 500 employees and was acquired by Microsoft in 2012 for $1.2 billion. More recently, he has turned his attention to the US education system. Abl, the company he founded in 2015, aims to help all schools move beyond the 20th century model of education.