Tom Byers is a professor at Stanford University where he focuses on high-technology entrepreneurship education. He is founder and a faculty director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), which serves as the entrepreneurship center for the engineering school. STVP includes the Mayfield Fellows work/study program, Educators Corner website of teaching resources, and global Roundtable on Entrepreneurship Education conferences. Tom is also a faculty director of the AEA/Stanford Executive Institute, a general management program for technology executives. Tom is co-author of the textbook called “Technology Ventures: From Idea to Enterprise” (McGraw-Hill). Tom also holds a visiting professor appointment at the London Business School and University College London.
Tom currently serves as a director on the boards of Reactivity, MyThings, and Flywheel Ventures. In addition, he serves on advisory boards or committees of the American Society for Engineering Education’s Entrepreneurship Division, Harvard Business School’s California Research Center, and the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) for inner-city youth. Previously, Tom lectured at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. Tom has a range of business experience including executive vice president of Symantec Corporation and founder/president of Slate Corporation. Tom started his professional career at Accenture.
For his efforts at Stanford, Tom holds an endowed chair known as the McCoy University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. Tom was given the 2005 Gores Award for excellence in teaching (the university’s highest award) and the 2002 Tau Beta Pi Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching (the engineering school’s highest award). He is a recipient of three recent national teaching awards: the 2005 ASEE Kauffman Award for excellence in engineering and technology entrepreneurship education, the 2005 USASBE Entrepreneurship Educator of the Year Award, and the 2003 Leavey Award for excellence in private enterprise education. In 2004, STVP was named the NASDAQ Entrepreneurship Center of the Year. In the past, Tom was named Northern California Entrepreneur of the Year in Ernst & Young’s competition and was given the Academy of Management’s Innovation in Entrepreneurship Teaching Award and Price-Babson’s Appel Prize for bringing entrepreneurial vitality to academia.
Tom holds a BS in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research and an MBA from UC Berkeley. He also earned a PhD in Business Administration (Management Science) at UC Berkeley.
