From #Stanford to #SiliconValley CEO: How Elle's Digital Tipping Honors Her Housekeeping Mom

Would you trade a researcher's job at a prestigious #university to become an #entrepreneur in Silicon Valley?

Our Bay Area Innovator today is #ElleRustique, who was once a social scientist at Stanford and is now the CEO of TipBrightly.

"To be perfectly honest, I was rethinking whether writing papers and publishing was really the way to create change," Ms. Rustique said. In 2015, she created TipBrightly, a company providing digital cashless tipping services.

"What I saw was really a missing piece, what I saw this as was just simply a lack of connection," Ms. Rustique said. "My mother was a housekeeper. When I was growing up, she would take us to McDonald's with her tips, and that made a difference."

Today, Ms. Rustique discusses why tipping matters, what motivated her to embark on a journey of entrepreneurship, and why it's essential to maintain a humanizing factor in technology to preserve our values.