Leena
After graduating from Stanford OHS in 2010, Leena moved to London, earned her B.Sc. Honours Degree in Business Management from King’s College, and has now returned home to Silicon Valley to work for tech startup, Moxtra.
Leena reflects on how the global community at Stanford OHS has helped to shape her experiences while studying abroad, living in a fast-paced and cosmopolitan city, and developing technologies that help people connect and work collaboratively with shared content. While speaking about London, Leena conjures up memories of a bustling and inspiring city where she connected with students and faculty from Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa. She says, “virtually all the students were born and brought up in other countries and came to university with myriad different backgrounds and experiences,” a cultural dynamic that Leena equates to what she experienced at Stanford OHS. Leena describes the Business Management program at King’s college as “a practically oriented program” that focuses on helping students transition seamlessly to professional careers.
Leena talks about how professional career changed being exposed to different backgrounds and experiences has defined her vision for business. She explains that “business by nature is globally focused,” so if you are drawn to different perspectives and fortunate enough to attend schools that encourage and thrive off of diversity of thought, then you are better prepared to offer products that help a diversity of people connect and work together. Leena brings this insightful vision to Moxtra, where she now markets an app that she began developing mockups for within a year of graduating from Stanford OHS. Leena describes Moxtra as “a cloud based collaboration application built for the mobile lifestyle.” The app is group-centric and offers multiple layers of communication, including voice annotations and live meetings, which enables users to interact deeply with shared content. She says the app was inspired “in part by her Stanford OHS experience, where students from all over the world studied together virtually and had to collaborate with each other through a range of different tools.”
As you can see, connection and collaboration have been running themes in Leena’s life. She remains fascinated by how she and her fellow students at Stanford OHS were “united through the common experience of learning together, even though when we left Centra after class, all of us instantly returned to such different lives.” She now emphasizes that her exposure to different lives at Stanford OHS directly prepared her for life in London and her work at Moxtra. And so it is fitting that a student ever mindful of seeking out and bringing together different perspectives is now working to bring others together for work and growth. She says, “the Bay Area is home for me, and I’m really enjoying being back,” but she has also “become used to the high energy and activity” that comes with being in a new place. With that in mind, she plans to travel to Africa soon to visit several close friends that live in Nairobi. For now, though, she’s still waking up at absurd times to Skype with her friends from around the world. It seems some things haven’t changed much since high school.