stanford-symbolic-systems
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Aaron Sekhri
Aaron Sekhri is the co-founder and CEO of Le Walk, a New York startup that turns your headphones into a hands-free local tour guide. After product roles at Uber ATG's self-driving program and TikTok, where he built the mini-program developer platform, Sekhri left the infinite scroll behind to build something that makes people look up. Le Walk delivers GPS-triggered audio tours narrated by real expert guides in 22 languages, and launched publicly in September 2025 with a $4.1 million seed round co-led by Adverb Ventures and Lerer Hippeau.
Catherine Jiang
Catherine Jiang is the founder and CEO of Dill, a Y Combinator-backed (W23) software company that helps construction suppliers automate accounts receivable, online payments, credit applications, and lien rights management to get paid faster. A second-time founder, she previously co-founded SiteTrace (acquired by BuildCentrix) and was a product manager at Yelp. She holds a B.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford. Dill launched in 2023 serving foodservice distributors and later refocused on the construction supply chain, where late payments and paper-based invoicing choke cash flow.
Daniel Bardenstein
Daniel Bardenstein is the CEO and co-founder of Manifest, a cybersecurity company building the platform that tells organizations what is actually inside their software and AI systems. He started Manifest in the wake of the Log4Shell crisis, when the world's biggest institutions discovered they could not answer a simple question: what code are we running? Before Manifest, he was chief of technology strategy at CISA, ran cybersecurity programs at the Pentagon's Defense Digital Service including Hack the Pentagon, co-led cyber protection for Operation Warp Speed's COVID-19 vaccine effort, and built products at Palantir and Exabeam. He treats software like an ingredients list the public has a right to read.
Eric Ly
Eric Ly is a Vietnamese-American entrepreneur and software engineer best known as a founding member and the first CTO of LinkedIn. Born in Saigon and raised in Silicon Valley, he was an early Java engineer at Sun and a product builder at General Magic before helping Reid Hoffman launch LinkedIn in 2002. Today he is co-founder and CEO of KarmaCheck, an AI-forward background check and credentialing company that raised a $45M Series B in 2024, focused on speeding up hiring in healthcare and staffing. Across a 30-year career he has chased one recurring idea: building trust between people online.