 This is the Energy at Stanford and Slack program. We started it in 2011. And the goal was to introduce our incoming class of graduate students to all the things that are going on in energy on campus and create relationships and friendships and access points so that the students can fully take advantage of all we have to offer here. This year we have 129 students, so very impressive. And a little statistics, about half of them are from engineering, and you'll like this too, right? The biggest one is a mechanical engineering, yeah? But then material science and engineering and then civil and environmental. So those are the big ones in engineering. Business school, 19%, yeah, so very impressive. I don't know if you've gotten a chance to meet your dean, but anyway, here he is. And then the other 30% are very diverse. We've got a big contingent from energy resources engineering, chemistry, applied physics, statistics, music. So really, so it's open to everybody, and that's what we love about this program is people opting in. And so today joining us, we have three people who play very influential roles in the university. First, Tom Kenney is a professor of mechanical engineering and also the senior associate dean for student affairs in the School of Engineering. That's on your far left. And then we have Cam Moeller, and she's the university's vice provost and dean of research. I think this is her, what, third week, or second week? Second week, yeah. Second week, so ask her a really tough questions and we'll see how good she is while she thinks on her feet. She's had numerous leadership positions, most recently as senior associate dean for natural scientists. You're a physicist by training, I do believe. And she's also chaired the faculty senate and served on the university budget group and the 2016 presidential search committee. So she really knows the university in many more ways than many of us here. And it might be interesting to you. She was also the co-chair of the research subcommittee of the long range planning process that you heard about from Steve Graham on Monday. So if you have any more questions about that. And then- Questions and ideas. We're still taking ideas as well as questions. Is there a website that you can still- There's not, there's not, yeah. Okay, all right. Okay, and then finally we have John Levin who's the Dean of the Graduate School of Business here. And he has been a professor of interestingly of economics and the chair of the economics department. So it's just sort of a test of the unusual views that Stanford has about how people can contribute even beyond their traditional disciplinary background. So again, thanks. So what we'll do is we will, I have a set of questions. We'll try to limit that maybe to a half an hour to 40 minutes. And then we'll really open it up. So do think about your questions. Actually, if you have any questions as we're going along, I think that would be the best thing is just to ask away because again, this is really time for you. So just to get started, I thought I would ask each of you the same question. And basically it's what's going on in your school or area related to energy or energy security, energy in the environment, energy economics, energy and environment, climate, whatever. So energy broadly defined. And why don't we start right here to my right? So great to see all of you. And this is, so I thank you for organizing this fabulous week for the energy interested students. Really glad. So we've got so many GSB students. How many GSB, how many of you are MBA students? And how many are MSX students? Got an MSX, that's fantastic. So how many PhD students? Yes, from the business school. No, from the business school. No PhD students, okay. So I would say at the business school, we've got a bunch of things. I'd say the first thing is we get a significant number of students coming in every year who are interested in energy and make, I think from two directions. One is a set of students who come in who are interested in energy, the energy sector as a career opportunity. It's a field come from working in the oil fields or working in renewables and they sort of, so this is an opportunity both to learn business but also to reach out across the university and see what's going on on the technology frontier and thinking about sustainability and thinking about the business models, law, regulation and so forth. And actually that's one of our great points of contact with some of the engineering school, the pre-core institute as you're seeing here. It's just that's a, and you're a bridge for the rest of our students to get out to the university in terms of energy connections. That's one area. The other is we have quite a significant amount of energy research that the faculty are doing around business models for energy, around sustainability and things like supply chains, sustainability in cities, in economic policy and so forth. We have one faculty initiative, the energy business initiative, which is a joint initiative with the pre-core institute and also with the law schools involved in that as well, run by a fellow named Stefan Reichelstein. And then we have a set of classes about energy and about sustainability that we offer. Mostly they're MBA elective classes, but they're open, those are open to anyone at the university and those are classes on business models for energy about the, we have one about the power markets and electricity regulation and competition. We're, I hope in the next year we'll introduce a couple of new classes about sustainability. We have a few now. We have a new class that will be offered this year. It's actually not listed yet and explore courses that'll be on sustainability as particularly as it relates to climate change. That'll be taught by one of the models we use at the business school is to pair up academics and practitioners from industry and that'll be taught by a fellow from the Earth School, David LaBelle and Greg Page who was the CEO of Cargill is very interested in climate change. And then I would say we send a lot of people out into industry and so we're a great place to find connections to industry and we have alumni who are running big energy companies who are doing renewables who are running companies all around the world that are energy sector related companies. And so this is a good place to come in here some of those folks speak, come back to campus and meet them. So I guess I can answer that with two hats on first my last hat is Senior Associate Dean of the Natural Sciences. How many of you here are either now in a department or got an undergraduate degree in a department of applied physics, biology, chemistry, math, physics or statistics? Yes, okay, so quite a lot. So you see the role that natural sciences then has in energy research. And I think what characterizes the natural sciences at Stanford is the extent to which our faculty and our students move back and forth between doing foundational research and doing research that has impact on problems and of course those aren't necessarily different things but I don't think there's very many problems in the world that are there aren't any problems in the world today that are more important than energy. And in some cases there's foundational work that's needed in other cases. The foundational work has already been done and we need people to do the applied work and to get the word out. So that's natural sciences. And then in my new job as Dean of Research I oversee research policy and compliance for the whole university. So that kind of impacts everything to some extent and there the goal of the Dean of Research is to facilitate the work that all of you are doing and whatever ways it needs to be facilitated by making it possible for your grants to come in on time to helping you sort out whatever issue it is that you're having with IP or regulations that are preventing your research from going forward. And then the other thing we do in the Dean of Research is we have these wonderful institutes, independent labs and centers and the ones there that are most relevant for energy research, I would say are SIMES, the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, the Woods Institute and the Pre-Court Institute. So how many of you are affiliated with one of those three units? Woods, Pre-Court and SIMES. Really? That's surprising. Well, they all wrote it. Oh, they're all incoming, all incoming. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I forgot about it. Great. So Woods, Pre-Court and SIMES, all of those have a tremendous amount of wonderful programming that you'll get to know and also have opportunities for getting funding for doing research, either through your advisor or through your own work. So I'm Tom Kenney from the School of Engineering. I'd say every department in the School of Engineering has a pretty significant role in energy, either trying to figure out how to produce it, how to store it, maybe how to use it, use it wisely, maybe how to manage the use of it, how to dispose of the waste products of energy. And the cool thing about School of Engineering, I think in recent years, is that the departments have kind of become accustomed to hiring people from outside their core discipline and bringing them into the department as experts that can interact with them, develop interdisciplinary research and take on projects that are much bigger than a single department's disciplines might suggest. And that's just a cool thing about Stanford. On one example of that, my degrees are all in physics. They hired me in mechanical engineering. On paper, I wasn't technically qualified to be hired. So it's, but it's one of these things we do here. We're very open-minded about mixing ideas, mixing backgrounds and expertise. And one thing I think you'll find as you spend your time here at Stanford that you belong to a department, maybe you'll eventually be affiliated with a center, but you have a hall pass. You can go to any part of Stanford, talk to any of the 2000 faculty members about ideas, opportunities, their experiences, resources that might help you do things that are exciting. You can merge things from the School of Engineering with Humanities and Science and the Business School, the Law School, the Med School and form teams and take on challenges that would require that whole range of expertise to make progress. I think Stanford is especially well set up for that. If you're in a PhD program, you can have any advisor from anywhere on campus be your PhD advisor. There's no rule at Stanford that restricts your choice of your PhD advisor. It's just, you have to find someone who wants to advise you, of course. It's a mutual thing. But if you're in engineering, you could have an advisor in the Business School or in Humanities and Science or in the Med School. They could be your principal advisor and they can guide your research. And it's a little bit your job to establish the networks and develop the perspectives that will help you make those choices. So I think one thing that's really important about this event and this week is that you're meeting your future collaborators here in this room. There's people that you'll work with, people you might do PhD research with. You might end up with groups in research groups with people here that are not your obvious partners. You might start companies with people in the room here. So make connections this week, try to build up that Rolodex. 10 years from now, I bet most of you will still have relationships with people you met here this week. And those will be very important relationships for your career and your future. So this is what Stanford is all about. And I wish you all the success that you'll have. Okay, well, terrific. So that actually introduced this subject. I talked to lots of prospective students who are considering coming to Stanford or MIT or Caltech or Harvard or Princeton. And they always say, well, you know, what's different about Stanford? And I think there are a number of things that are different about it. One, at least for me, was that a real appreciation, as Cam said, for both the foundational science as well as applied problem solving. And that I don't know that anybody does this better in terms of working together with industry or nonprofits or government institutes to really get ideas out of the university. So that's one thing that I think that is really important. And also sort of the very broad perspective that we hope you get. And so what I was hoping that each of you could do is thinking about both the two groups of students. One, the students in your school and then the students who are not in your school but who might be interested in some of the things you're interested in. One might be some specific ways, for example, with the GSB that students who are in school of engineering or in the natural sciences, how could they engage with you specifically? Yeah, that's it. So I think one of the ways students can engage at the business schools is through classes. So we offer a range of classes that are project based team classes, experiential classes, that often based on entrepreneurship of one sort or another, but they put together teams of students who come from different backgrounds. So I'll give you two examples of classes like this. One is a class that we offer called Design for Extreme Affordability. That was one of the original D school classes at Stanford. And that's a class where the project, we source the projects in that class. They come from nonprofits and they're typically projects from the developing world where there's a specific problem which can often be energy related, like build a refrigerator that will cost less than $150 that can be used in the developing world or that will work even if there's intermittent power supply. That was one of the projects last year. And then the teams will coalesce around a project typically involving a business school student or two and then engineers or it could be medical or whatever the background is. And they work for two quarters on a project to try to come up with a solution with the partner and they often go off to Bangladesh or Morocco or wherever the project comes from. And a significant fraction of those projects either they get implemented in the world or become companies. Probably last year there were 10 projects and I think at least five of them continued over the summer and probably end up launching a lot of social ventures and nonprofits out of that class. With another class that has a similar in terms of its interdisciplinary teams called Startup Garage, that's a class. Again, students come together in teams of four often interdisciplinary and the students come with their own in those classes come with their own project. So it's a different model. And we have lots of energy projects in that class. You develop a business plan. If it works, you can go into a second quarter and that's a class that launches lots and lots of companies often with students from around the university and companies that you've heard of have come out of that class. I can't think off the top of my head any recent energy sun run maybe came out of that class. But there's a bunch of energy companies come out of have come out of that class. So that's one area. I would say the other area is we have a very active energy club that is there's a GSB energy club and then there's a university energy club and they're tightly connected. And so that's another point of intersection which brings in speakers and does events and so forth. And that's a great way to just get engaged school. And then the last is through the faculty and just particularly for your PhD students coming over to talk to our faculty, we've got a whole set who are interested in energy issues. And like Tom said really well, the barriers at Stanford between the schools are really, really low. That's one of the beauties of being here. You can just and the physical, but by the way, the barriers are that the physical barriers are low. So that's about a 10 minute walk over to the business school and the intellectual barriers are low. So people are excited to talk to students from other schools. So that's the, that's the third way. They were at dinner at the GSB last night. So they've been, they've walked across that divide. We also have excellent food in the cafeteria. So you're always welcome to come for lunch. So in natural sciences, we also have classes and fundamentals of energy technology. And in Dean of research, there's just a ton of programming that signs and woods and pre-court offer and you're all welcome to come to any of it. And most likely a lot of times you wouldn't even notice whether the content or activity that's being offered is branded by one of those institutes or by someone in the school of engineering or the school of humanities and sciences or the school of business. Just take advantage of all the great content that there is here. Of course, the research opportunities are wonderful. And then I do wanna actually put in a plug for some of the business school and other entrepreneurship programs. I have known a number of students, not only in engineering, but also in natural sciences who even were doing very foundational, very theoretical, seemingly completely irrelevant PhDs who never the less never the less take advantage of some of the entrepreneurship opportunities. And therefore went to their academic jobs with a greater understanding of the world outside of academia and what the end point of some of their research might eventually be. Or in some cases decided to start really interesting, very socially relevant companies as they finish their PhD. So I wanna encourage you to think about that and to get educated with some of these entrepreneurship programs that we have here. Yes, those are all great. Actually, maybe before you go on. So don't you have something called the Ignite program? Oh yes. I'll say a little bit about that because I know that that's quite attractive to some students. That's a great point. So we run a program, this is a program called Ignite that was set up. It's been running for more than 10 years. It's basically a mini MBA for PhD students and postdocs and sometimes faculty members from around the university aimed at people who have a technical background but who think that at some point in their careers, whether immediately or later on, they might be interested in trying to say commercialize some of the technology they're developing. And you can enroll in that over the summer and there's also a through the year part time program and it's called Ignite. We offer it over at the business school. So. And how do you apply? And when do you apply? Not to bring you on the spot. Uh. Check the website. That's a really good question. I don't know the answer. There's the summer program and the part time program and they have different application days. The summer one, it'll be sometime in the next, I don't know, six months. Well. Not that that's that helpful. So several of my students have taken the Ignite, the summer version and they've really enjoyed it a lot. So thank you for bringing it up. Yeah, great to bring that up. If we have time, I can tell you a vignette later if you wanna hear about a concrete example. Yeah, so those are great examples. And I think the Ignite program and the D school are maybe sort of hallmarks of what is really great about Stanford. And D school especially, I'm in mechanical engineering and it sort of grew up out of some faculty in mechanical engineering. We call it the D school. I should say they call it the D school. It's not really a school. Doesn't admit students, doesn't grant degrees, doesn't really have a budget process that connects to the budget group. They've kind of constructed this magic thing where they have all of the fun parts of being an academic. They get to create classes and engage with students and do really cool projects. And they've somehow managed to not have any of the onerous administrative things attached to them. Like they don't have to hire any, they don't hire faculty, they don't deal with promotions. They don't, it's just, it's kind of a miracle. And I think there's a lot of institutions that would be really sort of instinctively opposed to such a thing that would try really hard to stamp it out or corral it or turn it into a more disciplined and orderly enterprise. And the D school, it's, you should engage with it. It's the extent it exists. It's not really, there's sort of a place where they hang out, but they don't have a building. Like I say, there's no place where you apply or you just show up. They figure out what classes they're going to teach in any particular quarter through a process called pitch night, which is usually three or four weeks before the quarter starts where they get up and faculty basically pitched their classes to a crowd of students and students vote on whether or not they think that should happen or not. And at the end of the night, they say, okay, I guess we're going to do this and we're not going to do that. And then three weeks later, those courses happen. Departments have curriculum committees and procedures and schedule. This stuff takes maybe more than a year to launch a class. Not an applied physics, kind of light touch with the curriculum. All right, all right, all right. I've engaged with some of the faculty in applied physics and no change is a little hard sometimes. And these are just examples. What goes on is there'll be a thing like the D school that's created while you're here. I don't know who's going to do it or what it's called or what they'll do but it'll be some crazy thing and they'll go out and raise some money and they'll start doing stuff and then they'll come and see the dean of research and ask if it's okay. Cam will have to decide whether or not to shut them down or not. But at Stanford- They probably won't ask me, they'll probably just do it. They probably won't ask me Someone sort of rejects a reimbursement request to some kind or some sort of thing gets in their way. So I really encourage you to explore all of these things. The classes, particularly these interdisciplinary project classes, they're great opportunities to meet people that are outside your department, outside of your sort of normal path across campus and sort of build relationships and see bigger problems than you might see in a disciplinaryly focused enterprise. You're in a great place. I've been here 25-odd years and every day I'm surprised about something that's going on here that I think would be hard to do at another place. So maybe could you say something about prerequisites for these classes that tend to attract people from across campus? Are there a lot of prerequisites or so do you have to be very deliberate about planning your time here or are they sort of come one, come all? The classes I just mentioned are out, you have to apply for those classes. So there's an application process you have to be selected into them and the sort of balance between demand and supply varies from year to year. So that's, and depends on exactly the nature of the projects and so forth. But anyone can apply. So they're open in that sense to everyone. I could just add to that too. So a lot of the structures around these kinds of programs teach little pop-up classes or kind of just in time information capture events for you. So, and this maybe reflects the world that you're all growing up in where if you need to learn something, you can go learn it. There's a million ways through the internet to get access to some bit of content that you need at the moment can pack it in, go do a project and then move on and do something else. So I think if I think about like prerequisites for a course like design for extreme affordability, I don't think there are any prerequisites for that class. You have to apply. You get selected by a group of people that are trying to form teams that can address their problems. But it's not like you have to have taken three computer science classes and seven math classes or something. There's just nothing like that that's explicit. I'll just give you an example of that class. I mentioned that the project on the refrigerator. So that project had a mechanical engineer on it. It had a business school student and the person who turned out to play a key role in that project was actually one of Stanford's groundskeepers who the students had met during an initial project when they were just going around and I think they were trying to figure out a little tweak improvement in one of the groundskeeping processes. And one of the people in Stanford's facilities crews, he's just an amazing handyman. And it turned out that he was the one who solved like all of the key technical problems in this project. That's fun. Okay, so we've kind of talked about what's here now and I'd like now to look to the future. And as you know, we have a new president and a new provost and actually in many ways a very new leadership team here at the university. And I was wondering if you could look forward and say some of the things that you're most excited about that might changes that may be coming or areas where you think that there'll be a lot more attention focused on and then perhaps their intersection with energy environment security and so forth. So I think the long range planning process has been, it's been a bit of a long process here at Stanford. And what's happening this year is that the president has identified, the president and the executive cabinet have identified a number of topics as being important topics. And this is now the year of the design team. So there will be design teams who are looking at sustainability. Design teams are looking at the natural world broadly defined. And so both of those design teams, I'm sure will be considering energy as a major part of the research portfolio that we want to accelerate through whatever it is that we do at the end of the long range planning. So I think that'll be quite important. Another thing that's happening is that there will also be some look at flexible funding. How can the university, the university's efforts obviously can't replace external funding and will never come close to replacing government funding or funding from private individuals and foundations. But there are places where we can look for gaps, we can help to identify those gaps, we can help to get people who are working in that gap, the seed funding that they need and in rare cases, perhaps more than seed funding. So that's something that'll also come out with a long range planning. Yeah, baby, could you say a little bit about, I might be using the wrong words, translational social science. Right, absolutely, yes. And then maybe a little bit about AI and machine learning, all that stuff. Sure, so those are also research initiatives that could be relevant to energy. So translational social science or I think accelerating applications, social problem solving is what it's being called in the new design teams. So I think that's a very exciting opportunity for making progress on energy. I think it's very frustrating to work on things that are technological solutions to a problem that seems like a technologically perhaps solvable problem and to realize the extent to which the major gaps are our social gaps. And then of course, AI and data science have huge roles to play in all aspects of intellectual and social progress over the next decade. And there'll be a research initiative on the digital future, which includes components of both of those. I'll mention one thing. So as you already heard about, we had this long range planning process and I would say part of that process was just to identify what were the big opportunities in the world, some of which have come about because of changes in technology, like the availability of data everywhere that's enabling technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning and data science and so forth. Some of them are things like the energy transformation that's going on. Some are social, the biomedical revolution that are technical, logical change that's enabling a lot of innovation in the life sciences. Some are social changes like the decline in economic mobility in the United States, the changes in globalization and so forth. And thinking about what is the role of Stanford in coming to terms and doing something positive about these big issues in the world. And I would say that one of the, there were two themes that to me were very resonant during this process. One was the idea that universities need to go from the most basic fundamental discovery, which as Sally already said, all the way to applied translation and application entrepreneurship, commercialization of technologies. And or in the case of social sciences, just getting ideas and solutions out into policy out into the general discussion. And how can Stanford better do that? That all the way from the most fundamental discovery like banging particles into each other at Slack all the way up to the most applied. And of course in the business school we're mostly at the applied end, although we do have faculty doing more discovery based research. And then secondly, to address lots of problems in the energy, any energy issue falls in this category. You wanna have people who span the whole range from science to the social sciences and often to humanities where there's ethical issues or thinking about effects on humans or humanity and lawyers and Stanford is very, very effective at bringing together people from different disciplines. That's one of the real hallmarks of the university. And so almost everything that came out of the long range plan is sort of predicated on let's try to bring together people from all around the university to work on problems. And let's try to think about problems from the very fundamentals all the way to the most applied. And I think all the energy issues that were discussed was an initiative around sustainability that Steve Graham probably talked about falls in this category, sort of have those features. Yeah, to me it feels a bit like Stanford is kind of organizing itself to be a much bigger leader in the world right now than it's been over the last 15 or 20 years. We went through the economic downturn and there were various threats to the health of higher education and Stanford I think turned inward a little bit focused on generating resources and taking care of business inside. The last president, the last provost, I think we're really good at that and we survived what was a pretty rough time in the external world for higher education. Lots of other institutions were cutting back and killing off things that were valuable. Stanford really sustained a lot of things that were really important, built up our endowment and sort of like the buildings you're in here, this squad is roughly a billion dollars worth of infrastructure that went up starting 2008 right at the worst part of the economy. So the institution I think spent the last decade kind of making sure it was gonna be strong and healthy. And now at least what I hear from leadership is that if you look outside of Stanford, there's a little bit of a shortage of external thoughtful leadership on important topics. And it's maybe becoming more important for Stanford to make some statements about what's important and where problems that need to be solved should get started and what kind of resources can be brought to that. And maybe unique among academic institutions there were maybe just a very few exceptions. We have the resources to go and do some big, bold, risky things that other institutions just couldn't afford to start. We're not as dependent on quarterly budget processes in DC as a lot of other institutions. We can afford to get out a little bit and say some things that might seem a bit risky and stake out a leadership position in certain areas, things like energy, the climate, the planet, health, the economy, diversity, topics that maybe the positions we take are gonna be a little bit at sort of contrast with some of the positions being taken in leadership in Washington right now. So I think with our leadership and this long-range planning process and a lot of kind of reorganization within the institution, it sort of feels like Stanford is getting ready to jump out and do some big, bold things. And I don't know exactly what all those are gonna be. Long-range planning is producing some catchphrases and titles that I think are giving us clues as to what those might be, but the leadership and people involved all the way from faculty down to students are going to be defining exactly what those are. And I'd encourage you to be involved in that. When there are calls for ideas for engagement, you have a chance to jump in and be part of those conversations and talk about what parts of the future are important for you. Stanford, the resources that are here, including on-campus and the surrounding communities, the venture capital community, other things like that, we have access to enormous resources to do important things and do them well. And you get to be part of that. I just wanna make a quick comment about boldness and risk in the context of the fact that we are a nonprofit organization whose mission is to do research and education. And I think it is a real hallmark of Stanford that we have this ecosystem where foundational new understanding and things that have impact flourish side by side. And part of that impact is that we do have to be very aware of this boundary, that we are an institution that does research and education, we're not an advocacy organization, right? We're not allowed to be advocates for most political positions that are not directly relevant to our research and education mission. And I think that's entirely appropriate. We need to be a place where ideas can flourish. And we are also not a company. And so as, you know, my guess is that since you're here in this room, you're probably interested in having an impact and whether your interests take you towards advocacy or take you towards companies. If you have questions about what's allowed, questions about IP, questions about am I talking about a research result or am I crossing the line in advocacy? We have an awesome research policy handbook. So you can read it. And I'm just, it's my second week in the job so I'm not sure if there's an email at the bottom to send notes to in case something's not clear. If something's not clear in the research policy handbook you can email me. kmoellerstafford.edu. I've got to hear about it before it happens, yeah. And our goal is to try to facilitate your work. So thinking about this group here, I'm guessing that there's a certain fraction of them that may eventually be interested in having academic jobs and so forth. And I was wondering if you could just say a little bit about looking over the past couple of years and maybe forecasting out over the next year. So what are some of those areas where we're looking for a new faculty and what are sort of the hot topics or areas where the existing faculty are leaving and we need to replace them. What are those exciting opportunities? And then maybe how might they interact with energy as well? But just broadly thinking about from a disciplinary perspective for a minute. So the School of Engineering had an internal long range planning process a couple of years ago called SOE Future. And it produced a set of 10 thrust areas that we think are important for the school to pay attention to. They're all interdisciplinary. They cover things like energy, health, the planet, how to make materials from the atomic scale and up. To the extent that that's being used to guide faculty hiring and new directions in the school, it's guiding us towards being more interdisciplinary. Thinking less about preserving the legacy of the thing that got a certain department to be number one in its field and thinking more about what are the future opportunities and exciting activities for those disciplines. We've been, a lot of our searches for faculty recently have been in this category of very broad searches. So instead of a replacement search for the professor of making a left-footed shoes or something, a really narrow thing that was excellent and very important, we don't necessarily wanna replace exactly that left-footed shoe. So we've had searches in things like robotics, which could touch seven or eight departments in the School of Engineering. And a committee of faculty from all those departments comes together and candidates from all those disciplines apply. And we hired multiple candidates out of those kinds of searches. So I think this is a trend that we've had a lot of success with. You, when you have these broad searches, you get much bigger applicant pools. You have a much bigger sense of what the opportunities might be. And it's a little easier to hire riskier candidates instead of recognizing that someone needs to make left-footed shoes and we better find the best person at that. If we're gonna hire six people in robotics, we can hire six really interesting people that are gonna do brand new things. And it's been exciting. So that's the trend I've seen is, get away from the narrow kind of topical replacements and think more broadly about things that cross disciplines and can impact bigger problems. Yeah, I would say for those of you who are PhD students and are start to, let me, as you get a little farther and you start to think about your dissertation topics. I mean, my advice, which you should value at what you're paying for it, is not to be too strategic about what will get you a job. The thing that you see with you, if you look at Stanford faculty is, people's careers evolve a tremendous amount. People can move in all different directions over the course of their career. When we hire people at the business school, we hire people into different groups from different disciplines. We almost never, and in fact, we should never, although it has occasionally happened, try to hire people just to say, because we need someone to teach a particular course or to fill a particular thing. You always wanna hire people just, who's just super excited? Who's doing amazing, interesting research and is energetic and is ambitious? They're gonna go in some direction. You don't even know what it's gonna be when you hire them. And that's gonna be fabulous. And then if it turns out that a big area opens up, if you hire people who are ambitious and excited and bright, they'll go there. In fact, they'll go there before you even figured out it was a big area. So that's always, our theory in hiring is you just try to pick people who are gonna be fabulous and then sort of let them loose, basically. And I think that broadly, that's worked out really, really, really well at Stanford. That's a great, great, great strategy. I think that was really well said. I think you're here to get an advanced degree and the best way to prepare yourself for academic work is to really just make the most of your advanced degree. Yeah, people are looking for bold and deep thinkers and the best way to look like a bold and deep thinker is to be a bold and deep thinker. So. That's my idea. Okay, all right. So I'm gonna ask you one more question and these could be brief answers and then we'll open it up to everybody here. So put yourself back in the mindset of where you were the week before your graduate studies started. That's where we've got it here. And think about, with all you've learned, what would be some advice that you would give this group of people that might be helpful? Whoever wants to go first. Wow. It really matters who you work with. Trust your gut. I think that's right. I mean, you're gonna make decisions and judgments your whole life about what to do, what not to do. You're gonna have tons of options always. So you need to start practicing the process of making decisions and trusting your instincts is a big part of that. But first you have to develop them and you develop them by looking at choices and thinking about what you wanna do and going forward and then seeing what happens. So develop that instinct and then trust it. About what's right for you. It's not to say that that opportunity is not a good opportunity. It'll be great for someone else. What's the best opportunity for you? I think the piece of advice I wish I had in going to graduate school was going to, and I did a PhD was it can be really, really hard. And writing a PhD thesis is just tough. I mean, for me it was hard to find a dissertation topic. I struggled to do that. I felt super depressed for part of graduate school even though everyone thought I was like doing great because it just, it was hard. And what I realized later as I went on my career was I'm first of all that feeling didn't go away. I always sort of felt anxious about was I doing enough in every different dimensions? And it took me a while to realize that everyone else felt exactly the same way. And I kind of wish I'd known that at the start when it looked like everyone else was sort of killing it. And I was maybe not killing it quite at the same level that some of my peers were. So even if they told me I probably wouldn't have believed it, but I kind of wish they'd told me at the beginning. Yeah, yeah, maybe I'll just offer one thing. When I was an undergraduate, I was a fine student, good enough, but when I went to graduate school I think the real difference for me was I cultivated a love for learning. And I really, I did more, I wanted to understand more than was being offered to me. And I really worked hard, but I just loved it. And that has stuck with me my whole life. So that love of learning. So when you're going through those rough patches, which there'll be plenty, just, you know, if you just say, I'm learning, this is fantastic. Okay, so now we're gonna open it up to everyone. And this is your chance to ask questions. And yeah, so please. Thank you so much for this, my friend. My question is about figuring resources. So there was a lot of talk about how to think about your video and things you can do at Stanford. What are some of the resources that you rely on in your school, you know, and not only that can help, but also be helpful? So there's a career counseling center whose acronym is BEAM, bonus award for anyone who knows what the acronym stands for. Something, something meaningful. And so it's called BEAM. And there's also, there's a Vice Provost for Graduate Education who has a lot of really terrific programming. So I would look at the VPGE website and there's just, there's great programming there. Thesis Boot Camp is something that's been helpful to a lot of students. Yes, over there. Yeah, maybe just to add to that. So the School of Engineering has a group called the Technical Communication Program. They're really good at helping you write resumes and prepare for interviews, write manuscripts, thesis drafts, things like that. That's very hands-on, one-on-one sort of peer writing and coaching. And then the other group, the other thing I'd mention is there's a huge number of student organizations at Stanford, there's 700 of them. There's the CS for Social Good Organization, there's the Solar Car Team. These organizations have networks of alumni that have gone out and gotten jobs and they really engage closely with them in some ways that's a lot more tangible and useful than our alumni associations or other organizations. So if you get sort of, if you find a student organization that's doing things you're excited about, that might be a really useful channel towards career opportunities and pathways. Thank you so much for the engaging discussion on your advice and suggestions. My question goes to Jonathan. So you mentioned about a couple of programs that the GSP offers like the startup garage and so how does the intellectual property work? Does that get associated with Stanford? Could you talk a bit about that? And also, like once you complete your degree, is there any incubator programs that GSP or any other programs where you can sort of start working on your idea and take it forward and get some funding and so on from Stanford? Yeah. Okay, so two questions. One was about intellectual property. One was about sort of post-graduation. How can you continue to work on projects? Intellectual property. I would say, the classes that I've been talking about, most of them don't involve intellectual property that would be where as part of the class you would develop something that was patentable. And if you did, it would fall under Stanford's general policy about intellectual property development, which is you file through the office technology licensing and then there's rules about exactly how the rights and revenue streams and so forth are allocated. But most of the projects don't have that level. They might draw on someone else's intellectual property and develop them in a lab around campus, but it wouldn't, as part of the project you wouldn't, in general I can't think of any that have developed IP. Second question about afterward. So the design for stream affordability actually has a summer extension that people stay over the summer and work in the, we have a lab at the business school people continue in that class. We don't have an incubator at the business school. We have about, probably about 40 companies that start every year out of the business school, but we don't have our own incubator. Stanford has an incubator called StartX which students can apply to be part of. That's a university wide. And then just the general ecosystem in Silicon Valley is that if you have a good idea, you're likely to be able to find funding and space for it. So we've never felt there was a shortage of venture capitalists within a three mile radius that we needed to get into the venture capital business. But the social ventures piece is an exception. That's why with the design for stream affordability we support people after graduation. Okay, more questions. I have a question for Dean Kenny about SOE Future. You mentioned faculty determine maybe roughly 10 thrust areas. Can you give some insight on any, which ones are relevant for energy in the School of Engineering? So I'm not going to attempt to recite the 10 questions. I've mostly forgotten them. But so I remember of them, there was one that was about energy, sort of energy for all applications. There were among the 10 questions, there was questions relating to sustainable cities. Energy is a huge factor in there. There was one that had to do with the earth and the health of the earth. And they're of course extracting, using and discarding the resource, the residual use of energy is at the core of the health of the planet. So those 10 questions aren't being used specifically to do any highly focused, top-down kind of thing. Stanford doesn't do top-down very often. So it's more that we've agreed that we have a lot of faculty that are interested in these topics that we think there's resources that we can get our hands on to go after them. And that we'll be looking to attract students and faculty in the areas that are around those questions and try to push them forward. So I guess I'm not giving you a good answer to your question that's immediately actionable, but there's gonna be great things around those topics that I'm sure you'll have a chance to engage with. So is that report on the web? Yes. So I think you can, on the School of Engineering, you can find your... Yeah, SOE Future, I think, and a few keystrokes on Google, and you'll all find it pretty quickly. Okay, more questions. We've got one up here. Do you have any examples of successful companies, startups that come out of startups using? I have Stardex. I actually, I don't know, because I haven't been that involved with Stardex. I... You have an interesting example. I'm just thinking of Stardex companies. People, I know. So there's a former student of mine that started a Gene Splicing company and they went to Stardex. It was basically two former PhD students and a friend of theirs who was their kind of CFO, starter person, kind of amateur CFO, and they did the Stardex program. And everyone else, them, and everyone else I've talked to have been through it, said it was enormously helpful at getting them to think carefully and properly about the important issues that investors are gonna ask them. If you're technologists or you're just not experienced, the questions they're gonna ask are not questions you would think of. And they're really judging you on your answers to those questions right at the start. Now, what is your plan? What is your market? How are you gonna get to revenue? What's the margin? Who's gonna make the thing? What are the risks around that? Is it onshore or offshore? So Stardex is really good at taking a small team through kind of a tactical boot camp and getting them ready to stand up in front of investors and make those pitches. And so this team and others I know come out of it and they tell everyone, it's like, if you're gonna start a company, go do that first. And you'll find out through that process whether you should start it and how to go about doing it. And then the comment about venture capitalists. I mean, you couldn't be in a better position to have access to the venture capital community than right here. I mean, it's literally a 10 minute bike ride to the top 10 venture firms that each spend a few billion dollars a year on startups. I know a lot of VCs, I'll say they have a great job. They don't work Fridays, they don't work August or December or much of January. They don't tend to work in the evenings, they travel some, but they actually prefer to stay home. And so they love to spend their money on startup companies that are here because they like to go to board meetings that they can drive to or you can ride their bike to. So, and because of that resource, there's this huge infusion of capital into the local economy that is just an advantage for people trying to start companies here. They're gonna spend $10 billion in the next year on startups here in Silicon Valley. They don't know what they're gonna spend it on. They're still figuring it out, but you can almost guarantee that that much money is gonna go into ideas right around the Bay Area. And you're in the best place to find those people and pitch your ideas to them. Two useful resources on campus that are sort of accessible to students are at the Business School, the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, which sponsors, I think we've got, last year we had 58 entrepreneurship classes that we offered center, and then the Stanford Technology Venture Partners, which is in the School of Engineering, which also runs a whole lot of entrepreneurship classes, and both of those centers have sort of just a constant, they have space for projects, and they also just have a constant flow of people coming in from entrepreneurs and venture capitalists and different sort of interesting people. And so those are both terrific resources. So I'm gonna do a quick poll just for interest. So you'll get a choice, entrepreneurship, academic career, policy, government, and then maybe corporate. So at this moment in time, which of those sort of do you imagine, and not to say that that's what will happen, but what do you imagine? So how many of you are interested in entrepreneurial kind of careers? Okay, a lot of you, okay. All right, how many imagine you might be an academic? Oh, a lot of you as well. Okay, how many are interested in policy, government, think time kind of stuff? Yeah, okay, not so many of you. We need to do a better job recruiting students in that area. And gosh, what was the last one? Corporate, yeah, corporate, who's interested in that? Okay, all right. So academic and entrepreneurial seem to be the dominant. Anyway, so do we have a final question? Actually, can I put in a final plug for the Office of Technology Licensing because IP has come up a couple of times. We have our Office of Technology Licensing as a model for all of our peer institutions. If you're not familiar with the process of patenting something, and you wanna know, is this an idea? Is this IP, should I be protecting this? Just they have a super easy web interface. They'll be happy to talk to you there on your side. Yeah, OTL. Yeah, I would add to that. I mean, it's a tremendous resource. If you have an idea and you wanna file for a patent and you wanna do it yourself, I mean, I would say that's a bad idea. Costs a lot of money, you don't know what you're doing. It's probably, and you can't defend it. I mean, if someone thinks you have a great idea and they decide to infringe your patent, you have to sue them. You need to hire lawyers and spend a lot of money before you might win that outcome. Stanford vigorously prosecutes and defends its patents. We get great attorneys to write great IP. And if anyone comes after your idea and tries to use it without getting a license, Stanford will attack them. And Stanford wins. I mean, the world knows. Don't mess with Stanford IP. License it, deal with it properly. And you want that on your side. Yeah, we also, we won't just defend it. We'll also vigorously shop it if we think it's shoppable. Yeah, so OTL's here to help you. Yeah, one related question. Now when it comes to OTL, you know, filing patents goes from filing, all the way through to getting a grant that they've been writing for three, four years. So how does it work after two costs if someone has 30 jobs after it's written? So if you file a Stanford, Stanford covers all those costs. If eventually it's licensed out, they'll retain some of the costs as part of the first payouts from the license. And then after that, a third goes to the investors. I'm sorry, a third goes to the inventors. The third goes to the departments and Stanford keeps a third of the revenue after that from licensing. And if there's any follow on patents, the Stanford will work with you on how to take care of those property. It's not a big profit maker for the university, actually. It's more about making sure that the ideas get the protection impact that they deserve. Can I put in one quick plug for policy just for my economics background, which is even if you're not interested in policy per se, energy is a hugely regulated sector. And if you get the opportunity at some point at Stanford to take a class in policy, there's great energy policy classes and the economics department. We have a few in the business school, law school, and management science and engineering has a bunch of people who do a lot of energy policy. There's people who do climate policies in the earth's school. The government can do things that no company can do. And this was brought home to me last week. I was in Beijing. They had the Africa summit in Beijing last week. And when I showed up in Beijing, the sky looked like this, like Silicon Valley. I'd never seen that. You look like that for three days. Then the government let the factories go back on. And you could barely see from the hotel to the building a quarter mile away. It just reminds you that government is nothing like the state has control that is in a way. China is of course a special case, but it really is a powerful force. And so understanding that's really important, even if you want to be a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. So just put in a small plug while the opportunity at Stanford to learn about that. Well, I think we'll let that be the last word. Anyway, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.