Fern Mandelbaum is a venture capital investor at Emerson Collective who combines hands-on company-building experience as a former CEO and cofounder with a rigorous, experiment-driven coaching approach that pushes founders to test their assumptions through lightweight experiments before scaling. She has pioneered teaching entrepreneurship from diverse perspectives at Stanford GSB and developed the concept of small acts of inclusion as a practical playbook for culture change, explicitly tying diversity and inclusion work to measurable business performance rather than treating it as abstract corporate responsibility. Fern Mandelbaum is a venture capital investor at Emerson Collective who combines hands-on company-building experience as a former CEO and cofounder with a rigorous, experiment-driven coaching approach that pushes founders to test their assumptions through lightweight experiments before scaling. She has pioneered teaching entrepreneurship from diverse perspectives at Stanford GSB and developed the concept of small acts of inclusion as a practical playbook for culture change, explicitly tying diversity and inclusion work to measurable business performance rather than treating it as abstract corporate responsibility.