Stanford Alumni Moves — Week of May 12, 2026

Stanford's defense-tech pipeline made headlines twice this week. A sitting alumna landed a White House board seat. A new AI research lab named its director. And Roblox's founder returned to campus to tell MBAs to trust their gut. Here is what moved in the Stanford alumni network, May 12–18, 2026.

Two independent events this week converged on the same point: Stanford's "Hacking for Defense" (H4D) program is functioning as a talent factory for the defense-tech gold rush.

Andrew Powell (Stanford GSB MBA ~2020) — co-founder and CEO of Ethos, an AI-powered military readiness platform — was profiled this week as the lead alumni success story in a sweeping Inc. Magazine feature on H4D 1. Powell enrolled in H4D as a first-year MBA student in 2019 and was matched with the Air Force's Air Combat Command to solve pilot training problems. By his second year he raised a $4 million seed round; after graduating in 2020 he took Ethos full-time. The company now counts all four branches of the U.S. military as clients and closed a Series A-II earlier this year 2.

The profile also spotlighted Steve Blank, the Stanford GSB adjunct professor and veteran-turned-entrepreneur who co-founded H4D. Blank told Inc. that H4D alumni have "populated the ecosystem — not just in startups but in venture and government." The program has since spread to nearly 70 universities. At a moment when defense tech is drawing record VC dollars and federal procurement is opening to non-traditional vendors, that pipeline is worth watching: a pattern of Stanford GSB students converting classroom H4D projects directly into funded defense startups now has a decade of track record.

Industry tag: Defense tech

On May 13, Melissa Valentine — HAI senior fellow and associate professor of management science and engineering at Stanford — was named director of the newly launched AI and Organizations Lab at Stanford HAI 3 4.

The lab's mandate is to study how AI actually changes jobs, team structures, and organizational outcomes — empirically, not theoretically. Valentine's earlier work, including the book Flash Teams: Leading the Future of AI-Enhanced, On-Demand Work, anticipated some of the questions the lab now sets out to answer systematically. The launch includes a global research competition to seed the field with outside investigators. Support comes from Google DeepMind.

Valentine's appointment is less a lateral move than a scope expansion: she goes from individual researcher to lab director with a mandate to coordinate field-wide empirical work on AI and the workplace.

Industry tag: AI / ML, Academia

On May 14, the White House appointed six new members to the Presidio Trust Board of Directors. Among them: Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen (Stanford GSB MBA '97; also holds an MA in Education, BA and MA in Art History from Stanford) 5 6.

Arrillaga-Andreessen is a Stanford educator who created and has long taught a course on strategic philanthropy at the GSB. She is also founder of the Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen Foundation (LAAF) and the Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund (SV2). The Presidio Trust governs the management of the Presidio of San Francisco, a national park site. Trump fired the previous full board before appointing this cohort; the new board includes James Burnham (General Counsel at xAI and X) and Lynne Benioff, among others.

The move puts a Stanford-trained philanthropist-educator in a federally governed national-heritage position — a category of public-sector appointment that has been receiving unusual attention this year.

Industry tag: Government / policy, philanthropy

Dr. DeAngela Burns-Wallace (Stanford '96, B.A. International Relations and African American Studies) described her appearance at the Stanford Black Alumni Summit in late April as "one of my last official acts as a Trustee of Stanford University" 7 8.

Burns-Wallace currently serves as President and CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, focused on equitable economic mobility and entrepreneurship support. She also spoke at the Stanford GSB Black Conference on May 16. Her trustee tenure coincided with a period of significant institutional scrutiny of higher-education governance; her departure from the board is voluntary at term end.

Industry tag: Philanthropy, entrepreneurship policy

David Baszucki (Stanford EE '85), co-founder and CEO of Roblox, appeared on Stanford GSB's flagship "View From The Top" series — the dean's premier speaker program — in a session published May 14 9. He discussed building an immersive online platform, staying competitive, and keeping young users safe. The talk's headline advice: trust your gut over conventional wisdom.

Baszucki's return to his undergraduate campus for a flagship talk is a periodic marker. Roblox went public in 2021 via direct listing at a $45 billion valuation; it continues to operate as one of the larger platforms for user-generated virtual content.

Industry tag: Consumer tech / gaming

Two consecutive weeks, the sharpest alumni signals cluster around defense tech and AI infrastructure. The defense-tech cluster this week has a distinctive Stanford flavor: H4D-born companies like Ethos are not peripheral experiments but scale-stage platforms with multi-branch military contracts. The pattern differs from last week's AI lab funding wave (RadixArk, Phia, Inception) — this week the story is about a decade-old academic program proving itself as a systematic talent pipeline, not a one-off founder story.

The AI Organizations Lab launch adds a quieter but structurally meaningful signal: Stanford is now institutionalizing the study of how AI reshapes work, at a moment when every industry is living through that transition in real time. For prospective applicants benchmarking Stanford's network value, the H4D-to-Ethos trajectory is a usable data point: GSB-connected defense founders are closing Series A-II rounds and counting all four military branches as clients six years out of school.