Who you are defines how you build.

This is the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series.

Brought to you by Stanford E. Corner.

On today's episode, we have Maureen Fan, co-founder and CEO of Baobab Studios, an Emmy Award-winning virtual reality animation studio.

Maureen was named one of the most creative people of the year by Ad Age.

She graduated from Stanford with degrees in computer science, art, and psychology.

Here's Maureen.

Thank you.

And it's so awesome to be back, but I'm deeply jealous because we didn't have this engineering quad when I was here.

Every single year I come back, I get more and more jealous about how awesome you guys have had it.

But Stanford was the best place to have my undergraduate degree, as you'll see in my presentation. So to answer what the Beobab tree is, it's this tree that is native

to Madagascar, and my co-founder, Eric Darnell directed all four Madagascar films. So we

thought it made sense. Also, it has an amazing story, because I'm going to talk about storytelling today,

about how the gods were angry at this tree.

So they threw the tree down, and it fell upside down,

and its roots were the branches instead, and its head became the roots,

and that's why it's such a funny-looking tree.

But the mission of our company is to inspire you to dream by bringing out your sense of wonder and we felt this tree really

showed that. So I'm going to talk today about defining your own path. I'm going to tell you about

my path to becoming an entrepreneur. I never expected to become an entrepreneur. I'm deeply

introverted, deeply insecure, all sorts of issues. So I didn't think I would have what it took to become an entrepreneur. I'm deeply introverted, deeply insecure, all sorts of issues. So I didn't

think I would have what it took to become an entrepreneur, but through my path from Stanford to

...