Why this Foundation exists.

Lijie Zhou

Lijie leads the Foundation as Chief Executive Officer, including the Molokai school partnership and the Malaysia educator workshops. She is currently a Senior Platform Engineer at Inworld AI, where she works on GPU and AI infrastructure, and an active angel investor.

Lijie's path to Silicon Valley engineering ran through teaching and education policy first. She grew up in China and earned a Bachelor's in Chinese Language from Qingdao University, then came to the U.S. for a Master's in Linguistics from the University of Toledo. She joined Vassar College as Lecturer in Chinese immediately after completing her Toledo master's, then returned to China — where she co-founded an education startup, served as a program manager at China's Ministry of Education, and held a program manager role at TAL Education Group, one of China's largest education companies. The combination of national education policy, private-sector ed-tech at scale, and hands-on teacher-training-startup work gave her a particular vantage on the institutional access gap the Foundation now exists to address. She later moved back to the U.S. and pivoted into computer science at San Francisco State University, earning a second Master's there and seeding what became the Foundation's first university partnership. After SFSU she spent six and a half years as a Site Reliability Engineer at Gusto, with earlier security engineering work at Facebook and McAfee.

Outside her engineering work, Lijie has served on the leadership team of Women Who Code's Silicon Valley chapter for nearly a decade and mentors with Code2040 — commitments that long predate the Foundation and that shape how it thinks about access for women and underrepresented founders.

Her perspective on the Foundation comes from watching how technical literacy gets distributed — in the U.S. and in China, in elite-private classrooms and in rural ones — and a conviction that the same inputs can reach further if the partnerships are built carefully.

Chuck Eesley

Chuck is a full Professor of Management Science & Engineering at Stanford University, co-director for international entrepreneurship at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), and the W.M. Keck Foundation Faculty Scholar. His research examines how institutional environments — policy, universities, capital — shape entrepreneurship and technology commercialization, and has been published in Nature (on the algorithmic financing of online misinformation), the Strategic Management Journal, and Organization Science.

He serves on the steering committee of the Stanford King Center on Global Development, which supports the Foundation's refugee entrepreneurship research in Uganda. A six-year Stanford KATALYST research collaboration with KBANK and AIS in Thailand similarly informs the Foundation's thinking on entrepreneurship in emerging markets. He co-founded NovoEd (acquired by Devonshire Investors / Fidelity), serves as an independent non-executive director at Vobile Group (HKEX: 3738), and has taught entrepreneurship to more than 200,000 students across six continents. He has advised the United Nations World Food Programme (engagement managed by a Big Four advisory firm) on the evaluation and benchmarking of accelerator programs in fragile and emerging-market contexts. He holds a PhD from MIT Sloan and a BS in neuroscience from Duke.