SiVNAP - People

	Professor Mark Granovetter
	Mark Granovetter is Joan Butler Ford Professor in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University. He came to Stanford in 1995 after holding positions on the faculties of Northwestern (1992-1995), SUNY Stony Brook (1977-1992), Harvard (1973-1977) and Johns Hopkins (1970-1973). He received his Ph. D. in Sociology from Harvard in 1970, his B.A. from Princeton in Modern History in 1965, and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Stockholm University in 1996.
	Curriculum Vitae (PDF)

	Donald Steiny
	About Me: I have a BA in linguistics from UC Santa Cruz. I spent a number of years as a software engineer and later manager in the software industry and have worked for HP, Sun, IBM, Bell Labs and the like. I got into startups and founded several companies including one of the first Web companies. In the late 90's I began to work with angel investors and have heard pitches from hundreds of companies. I am currently the board of advisers of 8 companies. I also teach about social networks in industry and at the University of Oulu, Finland. I am founder of the Institute for Social Network Analysis of the Economy whose mission it is to apply SNA to businesse and can often be found proselytizing about SNA. I am a PhD candidate at the University of Oulu in Information Systems. In my spare time I play swing and gypsy jazz guitar and hang out with my wife and cats. Research Interests: I am currently working on several projects. I am researching the "social construction" of the nanotechnology industry and developing methods for tracking networks in real time. I am driving an effort to develop a uniform data format for data that is used to create networks to help SiVNAP build on itself. I am interested in how social networks affect cognition with a hope to better understand organizations, products, industries and individuals with a goal of improving all of the above.

Sean Everton

About Me:
I am currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at Stanford University. I earned a B.S.C. in Accounting from Santa Clara University, an M.Div. from Vanderbilt University, an M.A. in Sociology from San Jose State University and an M.A. in Sociology from Stanford University. My professional experience includes a (brief) stint as a professional baseball player with the Toronto Blue Jays Professional Baseball organization, a certified public accountant with KPMG Peat Marwick, and as a co-pastor of a mainline Protestant church. I was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and have lived in Tennessee, Washington and Oregon. I am married (Deanne) and have two children (Brendan and Tara).

Research Interests:
Economic Sociology, Research Methods, Social Network Analysis and Sociology of Religion

Current Projects:
As part of the Silicon Valley Networks Project (and my doctoral dissertation), I am exploring the causes and consequences of status within the venture capital (VC) industry. Specifically, I am studying whether individual-level status derived from prior work experience flows "upward" to the firm level and provides VC firms with a competitive advantage over and above any expertise these individuals bring to their firms.

Jennifer Van Stelle

About Me:
I am a PhD. Candidate in Sociology and a San Francisco native. In an earlier life (read, before graduate school), I have been a training coordinator, a legal assistant, and was engaged in administrative work of various flavors in the fields of marketing, hospitality, human resources, software publishing, and others. In my current life, I am a research assistant on Mark Granovetter’s Silicon Valley Network Analysis Project (SiVNAP) as well as an assistant to Stanford’s Software Licensing Manager and Data Collections Specialists. In my spare time, I’m a consultant to the creative team of Dr. Clue Treasure Hunts, a corporate team-building company based in San Francisco.

Research Interests:
My dissertation focuses on the evolution of the venture capital industry and its networks, and the effects of regional versus extra-regional investing on the performance of venture capital syndicates. I also consider the emergence of investment cliques and their impact on venture firm performance.

Outside the dissertation realm, I am interested in understanding the role that social and organizational networks have on individual, team, and organizational performance. I’m also fascinated by the dynamics of small groups, particularly work teams.

In 2002 and 2003, I conducted research on entrepreneurship and the evolution of managerial control systems with the Study on Entrepreneurial Management Systems (SEMAS) at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

Current Projects:

Conducting network visualization and analysis of worldwide venture investment network
Reviewing the time-series method in preparation for its application to longitudinal venture investment data
Writing and revising dissertation chapters
Supervising development and testing of a teamwork assessment survey

	Chunlei Wang
	About Me: I am currently a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology Department at Stanford. I hold a B.A. degree in Philosophy from Peking University, and an M.A. in Sociology from Ohio State University. My academic interests include economic sociology, social network analysis, and organizational behavior. One of my current projects explores implications of competitive imitation for decision making of organizations. I try to find out whether and under what circumstances firms imitate their competitors' decisions. Another project is about tie formation and reproduction in the Venture Capital Industry. I would like to show that associations among organizations are predicated on both depersonalized embeddedness and rational calculations. Popularity of words or ideas is my newly discovered research topic. I want to understand the role of mass media organizations in diffusion of words or ideas and how our knowledge about ourselves and the society is socially constructed.

	Young-Choon Kim
	About Me: I lived in Seoul Korea for most part of my life before coming to Stanford as a sociology graduate student. I was an undergraduate and master's student in Seoul National University and worked in the Army for two years. Research Interests: Social construction of the economy; Institutional changes in university-industry Interface; Social network analysis of organizations Current Projects: The Rise of Organized Transfer: Technology Transfer Practices in American Research Universities, 1970-2002 (Dissertation topic) Regional Variations and Networks in U.S. Venture Capital Industry (with Chunlei Wang) The Effect of Co-inventorship Networks on Technology Commercialization: the Case of Stanford

	Yosem Companys
	About Me: I am currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Policy and Strategy at Stanford University. I graduated with a B.A. in Economics from Yale University, and an M.P.A. in International Development from Harvard University. My undergraduate thesis entitled "Institution-Building: Financial Reform in Cuba" was awarded the 1997 Best Undergraduate Economics Paper Award and was subsequently published by the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy. Adding to my academic background, my professional experience includes investment banking at Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs, brand management and business development at Procter & Gamble, and research on intelligent work systems at General Motors. I have lived throughout the United States, Spain and Latin America. Research Interests: In my Master’s dissertation, I explored the role of university-industry networks in promoting entrepreneurship, innovation and economic growth. While at Harvard, I also studied the emergence and development of private equity markets in Latin America. At General Motors, my research focused on applying concepts from complexity and evolutionary theory to enhance the understanding of the dynamics of organizational formation and strategic evolution. In particular, I explored the processes that drive the organization of work in society, emphasizing how rule set evolution and agent adaptation can lead to the emergence of nested intelligent work systems across multiple levels of analysis. At Stanford, my current theoretical interests are in political and economic sociology. In my doctoral dissertation, I am exploring how power and politics shapes the formation of emergent organizations. In a separate project, I am exploring the structuration of emergent industries by contrasting economic and sociological explanations of industry formation. Current Projects: Assisting in the data collection and analysis of the Silicon Valley Networks Project

	Denis Trapido
	About Me: I was born and lived most of my life in Estonia but I like to think of myself as a European. My work on post-communist economic transition and social stratification in the former Soviet Union has won awards from the Ministry of Education of Estonia and the Estonian Academy of Sciences. I have been a doctoral student in Sociology at Stanford since 2002. I enjoy traveling, learning languages, spending time with my friends and family, and reading. I am especailly fond of Russian fiction literature of the 1960s. Research Interests: I am interested in the ways that people, groups and organizations interact and build bonds with each other, in how this process is shaped by cultural norms and what outcomes it leads to. I also have a long-standing interest in post-communist transition in Eastern Europe. Current Projects: Transition from competition to cooperation in venture capital industry Relation between the stability of venture capital firms' syndication ties and the firms' performance Imputing missing investment amount data in the SiVNAP venture investment dataset