The Zhou & Eesley Family Foundation supports computer science and entrepreneurship education in communities that mainstream programs overlook,across the Pacific, Southeast Asia, East Africa, and the Middle East.
We work directly with teachers, university faculty, and community leaders to bring computer science and entrepreneurship training to students and founders who don't typically have access to it, with particular focus on women, underrepresented founders, and ventures advancing the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
We are small. We move slowly on purpose. We build long-term relationships with the people doing the work on the ground, and we follow their lead.
A four-month cohort program that helps Malaysian non-profits put AI to work in their day-to-day operations.
Foundation co-founder Lijie Zhou designed and taught the program, which MySDG Academy runs with the All-Party Parliamentary Group Malaysia on the SDGs as part of the Mainstreaming the 3rd Sector for Social Economy initiative under Malaysia's 13th Malaysia Plan. Its four live modules cover responsible use and prompting, operations and productivity, communications and fundraising, and earned income. In the end-of-program survey every respondent rated their confidence using AI 4 or 5 out of 5, satisfaction averaged 4.57 out of 5, and 9 of the 14 respondents now have an AI-use policy in their organization. A second cohort is planned for April 2027.
Read about ASPIRAS AI →We filed the paperwork in January 2021. Five years on, the Foundation has worked in ten communities, made eleven mission-related and program-related investments, and built the kind of long, slow partnerships we hoped we would.
We're marking the anniversary with paired reflections from our co-founders, on what we set out to do, what we've actually done, what surprised us, and what we'd skip if we started over. Both pieces appear in the founders' writing below as they go live.
See the five-year impact →
Working with teachers on Molokai to bring AI and computer science curriculum into local classrooms, designed around place-based pedagogy and the island's own context.
Volunteer teaching at two middle schools in rural Hsinchu, organized in partnership with ITRI, bringing AI and entrepreneurship education to students an hour outside Taiwan's high-tech capital.
In December 2024, the Foundation ran programming in Vietnam, inspired and co-taught by Bao Phan, a former student of co-founder Chuck Eesley, in partnership with Fulbright University Vietnam, UEH University, and an HKU/AWS workshop on AI Innovation & Trends.
AI literacy and design thinking workshops for educators and students in partnership with the Penang Science Cluster, leading Malaysian universities, the U.S. Embassy in Kuala Lumpur, and the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the SDGs. The 2025 Penang program trained ~25 teachers reaching ~2,500 students. Project ASPIRAS AI, Lijie's four-month cohort program that helps Malaysian non-profits put AI to work in their operations, finished its first cohort in October 2026. Every survey respondent now rates their AI confidence 4 or 5 out of 5, and 9 of 14 have an AI-use policy in their organization. A second cohort is planned for April 2027.
In June 2023, the Foundation taught at the LOHADA orphanage in Tanzania alongside James Juma, a former student of co-founder Chuck Eesley who built the connection, and Abisola, a former Stanford PhD student who co-taught. The Foundation also raised funds for a tractor for the orphanage.
In December 2022, Lijie and Chuck taught a full-day workshop at MEETConf, MIT MEET's annual conference for current students and alumni. A single-engagement contribution to a program the Foundation believes in: bringing Israeli and Palestinian high school students together for advanced computer science and entrepreneurship education.
Funding microloans for refugee entrepreneurs in Uganda alongside research on what makes entrepreneurship training work for displaced founders. Delivered in partnership with Challenges Uganda (microlending pilot and mentorship) and Makerere University Business School (curriculum and research).
The Foundation's first university partnership. Launched during the pandemic, the SFSU Mentorship Program connected Computer Science majors with SFSU alumni for mock technical interviews and career guidance. The Foundation's direct involvement has since wound down, but the program continues today within the SFSU CS department and its alumni network, sustained by the relationships the partnership helped activate.
In July 2025, the Foundation supported the Improbable Chair at ESCP Business School and its partner L'Ascenseur, Prof. Sylvain Bureau's art-thinking framework applied to non-profit leaders and to organizations working on equal opportunity in France. Chuck taught pro bono across two days of seminars and joined the closing panel at the Musée Postal.
Ten days of entrepreneurship teaching in Bangkok, December 14–23, 2026, for high school and college students from underprivileged backgrounds. Lijie and Chuck are both teaching. The trip is coordinated by Pear Chotbunwong, who grew up in Bangkok and took Chuck's MS&E 272 Entrepreneurship Without Borders at Stanford, which is the pattern behind most of the Foundation's durable partnerships.
In July 2026, the Foundation contributed Problem Statement 9, Accelerating AI Adoption for SMEs, to the NUS Enterprise Summer Programme in Entrepreneurship. Over 200 students from 20 countries built 40 ventures across the programme's briefs; the team that won ours took a coaching session with Chuck as their prize. A remote contribution of a brief and an hour.
Every program is shaped by the educator, farmer, or faculty member on the ground. We don't drop in curriculum and leave.
Our role is to fund, connect, and occasionally teach, not to brand the work or take credit for it.
Alongside grants, the Foundation makes mission-related investments in entrepreneurs and funds whose work expands education access.
A short reflection from a May 2026 executive session on agentic AI, and the practical questions it raises for the educators and entrepreneurs the Foundation works with.
After almost every talk I give these days someone comes up afterward and asks me some version of the same question, which is how anyone is supposed to keep up with AI while also running a company or…
On Tuesday I spoke to a room of senior technology executives in Laguna Beach about trust in what people have started calling the agentic enterprise, and I have been turning the argument over since,…
This past weekend at Stanford, I watched another cohort of doctoral students hood. One of them was mine, and standing at the front while the chair read her name, I found myself thinking about my own…
Foundation programming reached approximately 2,500 students in Penang alone in 2025, through roughly 25 teachers we trained, a 100:1 multiplier per teacher. Across the courses Chuck has taught at Stanford and online, our co-founders have together reached more than 200,000 students globally. See the full impact report →
Aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals on Quality Education (SDG 4), Decent Work and Economic Growth (SDG 8), and Reduced Inequalities (SDG 10). The $2.7T figure reflects Stanford-wide alumni research, not Foundation programming, included as context for the bet that education compounds.
We don't run an open RFP. But we read every email, and we follow up when there's a fit.
