social-entrepreneurship
(14)
Hayes Barnard and the Mathematics of Enough
He learned to sell software, mortgages and solar. Then a school-building trip to Mali changed what he thought all that machinery was for.
Nancy Gruver Gave Girls the Editor’s Chair - Then Got Out of the Way
A rejected fellowship sent Nancy Gruver looking for another future. She found it at her kitchen table, where girls became editors and adults learned the useful discipline of listening.
Meghan Easley-Park Makes the Messy Middle Work
Before edge AI and e-ink glasses, there were pencils taped into a prototype. Meghan Easley-Park has built a career around the same practical instinct: take an ambitious idea, ask what it is for, then make it work in the real world.
Kevin Long Put the Campground Notebook on the Internet
A frustrating weekend ritual became a national camping platform. Kevin Long's route to The Dyrt runs through Deaf education, two tech exits, a Portland meetup, and years of taking the product camping.
Roberto Milk Built a Marketplace Where the Maker Keeps the Story
A Stanford dorm-room idea became a global experiment in fairer commerce. Roberto Milk’s enduring insight was simple: let artisans set the price, sign the work and remain visible in the sale.
Andrew Vrbas Put a Soap Factory Inside an Argument About Business
A bus ride in Peru gave Andrew Vrbas an idea. A borrowed crockpot made it tangible. The more interesting work came later: turning a college experiment into a national brand without reducing purpose to a slogan.
Jaspal Sandhu
Jaspal Sandhu is a designer, educator, and social entrepreneur who became President and CEO of Hopelab, a social innovation lab and impact investor focused on the mental well-being of young people ages 10 to 25, on January 1, 2026. Trained as an engineer at MIT and as a designer at UC Berkeley, he built his career around human-centered design in global health, co-founding the pioneering social impact design firm Gobee Group and teaching public health innovation at Berkeley since 2010. At Hopelab he has led investments in youth-focused mental health startups, raised millions for youth-led technology work, and built research and fellowship programs centered on Black, Brown, and Queer young people.
Alexei Dunaway
Alexei Dunaway is the founder and CEO of Pinnacle, a New York and Palo Alto based startup building Pascal, an AI performance and career coach that lives inside Slack, Teams, and Zoom. A Stanford GSB graduate and Fulbright Scholar, he spent five years building an entrepreneur accelerator in Kenya before running an executive coaching practice for venture-backed founders. He now wants to give every worker the kind of coaching that used to be reserved for the C-suite. Pinnacle raised a $2.5M seed round in March 2025 led by eLab Ventures.
Dawn Androphy
Dawn Androphy is the co-founder and CEO of Allswell, a venture-backed telehealth startup delivering identity-centered, evidence-based mental health care to LGBTQ+ adults. A Stanford MBA and former Microsoft and BCG operator, she has spent more than a decade organizing with queer community groups before turning that experience into a company that pairs licensed affirming therapists with affordable group and individual care. Allswell raised $1.3M in pre-seed funding, is live in Maryland and in-network with Medicaid and major insurers, and is expanding across the DC-Maryland-Virginia region.
Heather Hochrein
Heather Hochrein is the founder and CEO of EVmatch, a peer-to-peer electric vehicle charging network she likens to Airbnb for chargers. What began as a master's thesis project at UC Santa Barbara's Bren School became a venture aimed at the least glamorous corner of the EV revolution: helping renters and apartment dwellers find a place to plug in. A self-described accidental business owner with roots in energy efficiency and workforce development, she has spent over a decade arguing that the clean energy economy only works if it is also a just and equitable one.
Will Morris
Will Morris is the founder and CEO of EdConnective, a Richmond, Virginia company that delivers one-to-one virtual instructional coaching to teachers, instructional coaches, and K-12 leaders. After a year mentoring African American freshmen in a Chicago charter school and graduate research at the University of Pennsylvania on coaching as a lever of teacher quality, he built a platform that pairs educators with coaches the way a dating site pairs partners, then feeds them timely, non-evaluative video feedback. EdConnective operates across more than a dozen states, has delivered thousands of coaching sessions, and reports double-digit gains in student engagement and mastery.
Ben Rattray
Ben Rattray is the founder and Executive Chair of Change.org, the world's largest platform for social change. He started it in 2007 with a borrowed $1,000 after his brother's coming-out reframed how he thought about bystanders and responsibility. What began as a social network for activists became a petition engine that has grown to hundreds of millions of users worldwide, turning ordinary signatures into pressure on corporations and governments. Named to TIME's 100 Most Influential People and Fortune's 40 Under 40, Rattray has spent his career trying to shift the balance of power between individuals and large institutions.
Kevin Song
Kevin Song is the founder and CEO of withco, a New York-based company helping small business owners buy the buildings they rent through a lease-to-own model. The son of Korean immigrants whose Brooklyn grocery store was lost when a landlord doubled the rent, Song turned that family loss into a venture-backed mission: turn tenants into owners. A Cornell economics graduate and former J.P. Morgan analyst named to Forbes 30 Under 30 for social entrepreneurship, he raised more than $30 million from Founders Fund, Canaan, NFX and Initialized, plus backers including Venus Williams, Kevin Durant, Will Smith's Dreamers VC and former HUD Secretary Julian Castro.
Lesley Marincola
Lesley Silverthorn Marincola is the founder and CEO of Angaza, a San Francisco-based B2B software company that powers pay-as-you-go financing for solar home systems and other off-grid products across emerging markets. A Stanford-trained product designer and mechanical engineer, she launched Angaza in 2010 after a course called 'Designing for Extreme Poverty' lit a fire she hasn't put out since. Today, Angaza's platform reaches over 5 million people across 50 countries, enabling low-income households to pay for life-changing energy products through weekly micropayments via mobile money — replacing kerosene lamps one $1 payment at a time. Her work earned Angaza the 2018 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship and a TED stage appearance. She is a Forbes '30 Under 30' alum, Echoing Green Fellow, and World Economic Forum Young Global Shaper.