Would you trade a researcher’s job at a prestigious university to become an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley?
Our Bay Area Innovator today is Elle Rustique, 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.
