Each year, the teaching team consists of 3 instructors, 2 TAs, and one volunteer mentor per LLP student team. Meet the instructors below.
Jim Hornthal
Lead Instructor
Jim Hornthal is a parallel entrepreneur, angel investor, and educator. His current portfolio of co-founded startups includes Zignal Labs, LaunchPad Central, M34 Capital, and Algorithm Engines. He is also a founding investor and board member of Revinate and serves on the board of an Indian online travel company, Via.com. His family investment fund has investments in over 50 startups including Lyft, Lending Club, KIND Snacks, Krave Jerky (Hershey), and Hipmunk. As an entrepreneur, Jim is best known as the Founder and Chairman of Preview Travel, the first publicly traded online travel agency, which had its IPO in 1997. The company merged with a division of Sabre Holdings to create Travelocity.com, where Jim served as Vice Chairman of the combined organization until its re-acquisition by Sabre Holdings in 2002. Jim has taught the Lean LaunchPad course every year since it started at Haas. He has also taught the course at Stanford, Berkeley, and Princeton as well as the National Science Foundation’s iCorps program at Stanford and UCSF. Jim has also led enterprise cohorts from The Mayo Clinic and WL Gore. Jim is the author of the TED Book A Haystack Full of Needles, and can be found on X @hornthal
Kim Polese
Instructor
Kim Polese is Chairman and co-founder of CrowdSmart, a data-driven startup investment prediction platform that harnesses human and machine intelligence to dramatically improve success rates of seed-stage investors while democratizing access to capital and expertise for the most promising entrepreneurs everywhere.
Kim has a successful background as a founder and CEO. At Sun Microsystems Kim led the launch of Java in 1995. She has co-founded multiple software companies including Internet cloud software pioneer Marimba, serving as Chairman and CEO and leading the company to profitability, an IPO and a successful acquisition by BMC. Kim advises numerous technology companies and serves on several boards, including TechNet, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, the Public Policy Institute of California, UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering Advisory Board and the Long Now Foundation. During the Obama Administration she served on the Congressionally-mandated Innovation Advisory Board.
Kim received her Bachelor’s degree in Biophysics from UC Berkeley, studied Computer Science at the University of Washington, and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Business and Economics from California State University. She is an Aspen Institute Henry Crown Fellow and the recipient of numerous awards including Forbes Top Women in Tech, Information Week’s Top Technology Executives and Time Magazine’s 25 Most Influential Americans.
Michael Chai
Instructor
With a track record of delivering award-winning products in multiple industries, Michael believes rapid change at the intersection of creativity, technology and business always creates new opportunities to innovate. Michael is presently SVP Product Technology for Savvas Learning LLC where he is responsible for development and operations of all customer facing platforms including the industry leading Realize™ ecosystem. Savvas Learning provides educational curriculum products to 40M+ students in over 10,000 school districts in over 125 countries. Michael also serves as Vice-Chairman of IMS Global Learning Consortium, the world-leading non-profit collaborative advancing edtech interoperability, innovation, and learning impact.
Previously, Michael was EVP Product Development and Engineering of LeapFrog Enterprises from 2005-2011, responsible for product strategy and delivering the entire product line of learning toys, mobile platforms and a large library of engaging, multi-platform content apps sold through online and mass retail channels worldwide. LeapFrog’s widely loved brand underwent a significant digital and financial transformation during his tenure there. At Electronics for Imaging, Michael helped grow the company from startup stage to a global leader in digital printing solutions from 1990-2005. EFI’s groundbreaking Fiery print controller product accelerated a digital transformation of the decades old global office equipment industry.
Michael started his career as a software engineer at the NYIT Computer Graphics Lab and a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories. He received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Yale University and an M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University.