Stanford E. Corner presents the entrepreneurial thought leader series.

On today's episode, we have Josh McFarlane, a VC at Greylock Partners.

Josh is an experienced entrepreneur specializing in designing, building, and scaling technology-driven businesses.

Prior to his role of Greylock, he was a VP of product at Twitter.

Here's Josh.

In preparing for this talk, I sort of, I realized like how special this moment is for me.

And I went back through some old files and things, and I dug out a couple

of things that are particularly meaningful that I'll share with you. One is that it was 21 years ago

tomorrow that I applied to get into Stanford. And I know that because I found a letter that I wrote to the Dean of Admissions stated March 1st

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Which implored him to consider me a second time for admission to Stanford so actually got into Stanford as a as a freshman straight out of high school, but couldn't afford

it.

So I came from relatively humble upbringing.

I mean, I had like incredibly smart, hardworking parents.

I grew up in a small town in Wyoming.

My dad was a coal miner.

My mom worked at a community college.

Before that, they ran a small carpet store in our town.

And when I got into Stanford, which was really the product of a lot of good advice that I had

had from my family and my grandparents, I realized too late that I couldn't actually afford

it.

So I wrote Stanford a letter and said, hey, I can't afford it, but I'll be back.

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