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 Steve Vassallo, general partner at Foundation Capital.

Previously, Steve was vice president of product and engineering

at the social media platform, Ning. He also worked as a project leader and design engineer at IDEO,

where he developed successful products for companies such as Cisco, Nike, and BMW. Here's Steve.

You know, ETL was actually a favorite of mine when I came to Stanford almost 25 years ago. And in fact, even when I was at the business school almost 10 years later, I used to sneak over here because you guys always have these great, great talks and speakers.

And when Tina asked me actually to give

this talk, I have to say it was with some amount of sort of trepidation, because I was thinking

about the fact that 25 times a year, you all get to hear from these sort of fully formed,

successful Silicon Valley executives and leaders, dropping wisdom on sort of you all from their sort of decades of experience.

And I kind of was thinking about, well, this feels sometimes like these massive live oak trees that are all over campus.

And they're just like beautiful and large and strong.

But we sometimes forget that like they were little seedlings at one time,

and there are all these experiences that sort of add another ring or a branch to each of that

sort of greater whole. So, as Tina said, I've had a lot of different experiences and roles

in my career here, starting out as a product designer, then as an entrepreneur, and now as an

investor. So I thought it would be fun to actually deconstruct a few of the lessons that I have

kept learning over and over again from these many experiences, or as I sometimes think about them

now, as from Steve's jobs. Now, the first job I ever had was actually when I was a kid.

So I grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, and if you know, Worcester, a couple of you.

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