John Adler (Accuray), Trip Adler (Scribd) - Evolution of a CEO

Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)

Stanford eCorner

Business, Life Lessons, Creativity, Startups, Strategy, Thought Leadership, Education, Stanford University, Leadership, Challenges, Journey, Culture, Etl, Innovation, Founders, Stanford, Entrepreneurship

4.5 • 740 Ratings

🗓️ 13 January 2010

⏱️ 59 minutes

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Summary

Dr. John Adler, Jr. and John "Trip" Adler III discuss their entrepreneurial experience and evolution as a business leader: For Dr. Adler, he describes his bumpy course in developing his biotechnology company, Accuray Incorporated; for his son Trip, he emphasizes the persistence and luck in developing Scribd, a social publishing site. Despite building companies in different fields, the two offer the same central advice necessary in building a successful company: trust yourself, have common sense, and there are no rules.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You are listening to the DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, brought you weekly by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.
0:10.0	You can find podcasts and videos of these lectures online at eChorner.standford.edu.
0:16.0	We have never done this before. We have a father-son team today, and they are both
0:23.6	entrepreneurs of very, very different ventures. And so the theme today is about the evolution
0:29.6	of a CEO. We have one CEO from a high-tech medical technology company and one from a Web 2.0
0:36.6	hot startup. And I want to give you a little bit of background.
0:39.3	John Adler here, to my left, is a neurosurgeon at Stanford Medical School.
0:44.3	Now, for most people, that would be a big enough job.
0:47.3	But John realized that there were some huge opportunities,
0:50.3	actually some problems that he turned into opportunities,
0:53.3	of trying to figure out
0:54.1	how to make neurosurgery minimally invasive. And so he founded a company called Accurae that
1:01.1	has a product called the Cyberknife, and he'll tell us a little bit about it in a minute.
1:05.5	We also then have Tripp, his son, who of course grew up in the same household, watched this
1:09.8	all happening happening and was
1:11.0	still willing to go off and start a company as soon as he graduated from Harvard. So he
1:15.2	graduated from Harvard in 2006 with a degree in biophysics and then went off to go start the
1:21.4	company Scribd, which is, I would say, one of the most exciting startup companies in the
1:26.6	valley and maybe in the world. It has been named by Business Week as one of the most exciting startup companies in the Valley and maybe in the world.
1:28.3	It has been named by Business Week as one of the most intriguing startups, and Forbes called
1:32.8	it one of the hottest startups.
1:34.7	So they have millions of documents, tens of millions of visitors, and he's going to tell us
	...

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