Recent writing from the founders.
Chuck publishes on Substack about institutions, AI, and the political economy of entrepreneurship. Lijie writes about engineering practice, the Foundation's work, and AI infrastructure — cross-posted to Medium and Substack. Posts refresh automatically from both writers' feeds.
- Chuck EesleyJune 2026 · Substack
A Brilliant Intern With No Skin in the Game ↗
This spring I treated my own course as a field experiment. MS&E 272, Entrepreneurship Without Borders, has always asked students to do the unglamorous core work of starting a company: find a real…
- Chuck EesleyJune 2026 · Substack
We weren't ready. We started anyway. ↗
Five years ago this past January, Lijie and I filed the paperwork for the Zhou & Eesley Family Foundation. We were still in the middle of the pandemic. We were both working full-time jobs. We had…
- Lijie ZhouJune 2026 · Substack
What five years of running a small foundation taught me ↗
In January 2021, I was working from home in the Bay Area, one of thousands of engineers on Zoom calls while the world tried to figure out what came next. The company I worked at had just gone through…
- Lijie ZhouMay 2026 · Substack
Getting Started with Reachy Mini ↗
Welcome to Reachy Mini This is part 1 of a series on building and running a Reachy Mini Lite. By the end of this post, you’ll have a fully assembled robot sitting on your desk, ready for software…
- Chuck EesleyMay 2026 · Substack
Theo Baker’s Stanford Is Real. It Just Isn’t Most of Stanford. ↗
My wife Lijie published a piece this week reacting to Theo Baker’s new book about Stanford. She made a point I won’t try to remake: that elite access is real, and the more important question is what…
- Lijie ZhouMay 2026 · Substack
How to rule the world? ↗
Theo Baker’s recent book about his Stanford undergrad years asks a question that people outside Silicon Valley have been wondering about for a long time: is elite education really about learning, or…
- Chuck EesleyMay 2026 · Substack
Why we're betting more on teachers ↗
This past December, the Zhou & Eesley Family Foundation ran a program at the Penang Science Cluster in Malaysia. Roughly twenty-five teachers came in for training in AI literacy and design thinking.…
- Chuck EesleyMay 2026 · Substack
ARR Is Not the Problem. The Institutional Vacuum Around It Is. ↗
Last month, Cluely co-founder Roy Lee admitted on X that the $7 million in annual recurring revenue he had given a TechCrunch reporter was, in his own words, “BS.” The actual figure was $5.2 million…
- Chuck EesleyMarch 2026 · Substack
The “In-Box Congestion” Crisis: Why AI Entrepreneurship Needs a Mechanism Design Overhaul ↗
After Gautam Ahuja’s talk on signaling theory, a conversation with Itai Ashlagi, and Tom Mitchell’s presentation on AI history at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, something crystallized: we are…
- Chuck EesleyFebruary 2025 · Substack
The Role of Institutional Trust in Shaping Entrepreneurial Intent ↗
Institutional trust plays a crucial role in shaping economic and entrepreneurial outcomes, yet its effects are often overlooked in discussions about startup ecosystems and policy interventions. Our…
- Lijie ZhouJanuary 2025 · Medium
My first AI RAG with Milvus and Twelve-Lab ↗
This past weekend, I participated “𝗪𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗻 𝗶𝗻 𝗔𝗜 𝗥𝗔𝗚 𝗛𝗮𝗰𝗸𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗼𝗻” organized by Women and AI . In less than 5 hours, a group of amazing women came up ideas, learned tools sponsored by…
- Lijie ZhouJanuary 2021 · Medium
Spinnaker green/blue deployment cleanup solution ↗
Earlier this year, we adopted Spinnaker as our deployment tool at Gusto. By enabling the green/blue deployment on top of the core Kubernetes infrastructure, we have seen a big improvement in terms of…
- Lijie ZhouNovember 2020 · Medium
Two Years As A SRE ↗
Last month, I passed my two year anniversary working as a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) at Gusto . Several people asked me on Quora what do SREs do and why do people want to become a SRE instead of…
- Lijie ZhouApril 2018 · Medium
Women in Cybersecurity 2018 Recap ↗
2018 Women in Cybersecurity (WiCyS) Chicago I had an amazing experience last month in Chicago to attend 2018 Women in Cybersecurity conference . I got to meet more women and learn about their work. I…
- Lijie ZhouMarch 2018 · Medium
WordPress Blog Got Hacked ↗
I have been running a WordPress (WP) site as a side project for a while. This week, when I opened my site, I found that the site has several blogs that I have never posted. I realized I may have been…
- Lijie ZhouFebruary 2018 · Medium
Virtual credit card number and Google voice ↗
This is the second post of the personal digital privacy series. This post, I am going to share some tools I use to manage my personal digital privacy. Virtual Credit Card Number We are more and more…
- Lijie ZhouSeptember 2017 · Medium
Google knows you better than yourself and what could you do about it? ↗
Many people know that big tech companies know a lot about you, but few understand what it exactly means and what to do about it. As a security professional, I was asked by friends/family about this…
- Lijie ZhouFebruary 2016 · Medium
Why do I choose to get a computer science degree? ↗
A friend of mine at Hackbright asked about career/further study options. She comes from a biology background and is currently working as a junior C# developer. I met her at Hackbright when we both…