Ultimately, we decided to wind down Sidewire after realizing that the business model we envisioned wouldn't achieve the venture-scale returns our investors expected.

Despite having a great set of investors, we struggled to retain users on Sidewire, even with high-quality content, indicating a challenge in engaging audiences with serious discussions.

My time at Stanford was pivotal; it was the first class to start with Facebook, which changed perceptions about young people being able to innovate and bring game-changing ideas to market.

When I returned to San Francisco, I was inspired by the explosion of technology connecting people in unprecedented ways, leading me to believe we could leverage these connections for meaningful purposes.

The Stanford Bitcoin group, which I co-founded in 2012-2013, was a response to the skepticism around Bitcoin at the time, and we engaged in research and education about cryptocurrency.

I left Stanford in early 2008 to found a genomics company that has become very successful, testing about 3% of all birds in the United States.

I started my first company out of my dorm room at Stanford, aiming to help students get jobs at banks and consulting firms, but it ultimately didn't work out because no one was using LinkedIn at the time.

A friend encouraged me to join the Sloan Fellowship program at Stanford, which led me to start my entrepreneurial journey at 48 years old.

I started my podcast, The Social Radars, to reconnect with the startup community and share stories of triumph and failure from founders. I wanted to create informal conversations with startup founders so people could understand the real stories behind the startups, rather than just scripted media messages.