Tracy Chou (Block Party) - Founding a Mission-Driven Startup
Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)
Stanford eCorner
4.5 • 740 Ratings
🗓️ 6 May 2026
⏱️ 47 minutes
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Summary
Tracy Chou is a product-minded engineering leader and exited founder with more than 15 years of experience building and scaling consumer and enterprise products. She is best known for her work advocating for diversity and inclusion in tech, and for being founder and CEO of Block Party, a platform for online safety, privacy, and anti-harassment, which was recently acquired by DeleteMe. In this conversation with Adjunct Lecturer Emily Ma, Chou explains how her early experiences working at tech startups inspired her to found a mission-driven company and how Block Party balanced mission and profitability.
Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders is produced by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), the entrepreneurship center at the Stanford School of Engineering, and published on eCorner by STVP. STVP empowers aspiring entrepreneurs to become global citizens who create and scale responsible innovations.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, |
| 0:03.0 | brought to you by Stanford E-Corner and the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. |
| 0:07.0 | Hello everyone, my name is Emily Ma. |
| 0:09.0 | I am an adjunct lecturer for the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, |
| 0:12.0 | and today it is my pleasure and honor to welcome Tracy Chelle back to Stanford. |
| 0:18.0 | Yes. |
| 0:19.0 | So, a quick intro. Tracy is a product-minded engineering leader and exited founder with 15 years building |
| 0:26.6 | and scaling consumer and enterprise products. |
| 0:29.6 | She is best known for her work advocating for diversity and inclusion in tech and being a founder and CEO of Block Party, |
| 0:35.6 | a platform for online safety, privacy, and anti-harassment. |
| 0:39.3 | It was recently acquired by Delete Me. |
| 0:42.3 | Big deal. Very big deal. Congratulations. |
| 0:44.3 | She was an early engineer at Pinterest, Cora, and the U.S. Digital Service. |
| 0:50.3 | For her advocacy and activism work, Tracy has appeared on the covers of the Atlantic Magazine, Wired, and MIT Technology Review, and has been honored as one of Times Women of the Year. |
| 1:01.0 | Tracy graduated from Stanford with an MS in computer science and a BS in electrical engineering, where she was a term in scholar and Mayfield Fellow, elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi. |
| 1:12.6 | Throughout her career, Chow has been recognized as a leading voice on diversity and inclusion issues in technology, |
| 1:18.6 | culminating in her selection as one of Times Magazine 12 women of the year in 2022. |
| 1:25.6 | Welcome, Tracy. Please give her a warm welcome. |
| 1:30.3 | So first questions first. I know a lot of our students are thinking, I got to like get a |
| 1:39.3 | start up right out of the gate when I graduate, right? That's a big deal. It's a lot, a lot of pressure to do that. |
| 1:45.6 | You chose a slightly different route. |
| 1:47.0 | You chose to be employee number four at Quora. |
... |
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