You are listening to the Draper Fisher-Jervinson Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Seminar,

brought to you weekly by Stanford Technology Ventures Program at Stanford University School of Engineering.

I'd like to introduce our guest speaker for today, Ryan Phelan.

Ryan is a serial entrepreneur in the whole area of health, consumer health, and I would say

also living things, looking at some of the other ventures that Ryan has co-founded.

She's here today as a co-founder of DNA Direct, but she started out with Plain Tree back in 1978,

and she's going to tell you a little bit about some of those ventures.

You can see through her bio that there have been other interesting ventures along the way.

One that I'd love to hear her talk a little bit about, and I'll ask a question about it,

if we don't cover it in the main presentation, is the All-Species Foundation. So this idea of discovering all the species on the

planet. Ryan, we're delighted that you're here with us today and can't wait to hear what you

have to say. Let's welcome Brian Phelan.

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here this afternoon. I did a little bit of homework before coming here. I must say it was a bit stressful. I listened to a number of the podcasts of earlier speakers, and I thought, how could I possibly add to their articulate words of wisdom and their incredible experience.

And I thought of one area.

And that area is around really the just deposition of nonprofits and for-profit businesses

and the whole concept of running a business as a service

and running services as business. And so what I'd like to do

today is actually give you my personal story of serial entrepreneurship. I'm going to have you

walk through 30 years of my career together. It was also a challenge going back through my

archives, finding things I actually

kept and things I didn't keep, and finding out the number of things I could Google and the

things that I can't Google because they were just too damn long ago. So as I go through this

...