Well, it is a joy to be welcomed back as the guest host today. It couldn't, I could not be happier to introduce Eric

Volmer. I have known Eric for many, many years. He did his PhD right here in the MSNE

department with a focus on entrepreneurship. We taught together. He is truly remarkable. Eric has

a fascinating background that he's going to be able to share with us today.

Before he came back to Stanford to do his PhD, he was working in consulting at Accenture.

He came back, did his PhD, and then went to work for the government, where he had an amazing, amazing opportunity as chief strategy officer for the Office of Strategic Capital.

Pretty amazing, we're gonna learn a lot about that.

After doing that for a few years,

he came back to Stanford to work at the Gordian Nott

Center for National Security Innovation,

where he is the lead instructor there.

In addition to doing that, he just recently joined a very fast-growing startup called WebA.I.

So we're going to learn about all of these different experiences.

Eric really is an expert at the intersection of technology and policy.

This is a very, very special opportunity for us to learn about something we don't typically learn about here in Silicon Valley.

So without further ado, please join me and welcoming Eric.

Thank you, Tina. There truly has never been a more interesting and exciting time to be an entrepreneur.

And that's not just an extension of where we've been, excuse me, or some trajectory that we're on and some optimism about it.

It's that we're in a fundamentally new place. Can you feel that about

entrepreneurship right now? You look for jobs, you look for opportunities, you see

what's out there. The playbook that we've used over the last decades isn't the

playbook that we need right now or the playbook that we need to use in the future.

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