Amy Wilkinson

Bio

Fascinated by how leaders and individuals alike must reinvent their approaches to excel in an entrepreneurial age, Amy is author of The Creator’s Code: The Six Essential Skills of Extraordinary Entrepreneurs _from Simon and Schuster. The book distills the six essential skills shared by 200 leading entrepreneurs who shape our future—skills that can be learned, practiced, and passed on. The book showcases counterintuitive insights from the founders of LinkedIn, SpaceX, Tesla Motors, PayPal, eBay, Spanx, Chipotle, Under Armour, JetBlue, Zipcar, Airbnb, Dropbox, and Theranos, among others. _The Creator’s Code is designed to offer a fast-track guide to outsmart, outpace, and create enduring companies in the rapidly changing global economy.

A strategic advisor, entrepreneur, and lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Wilkinson has spoken on innovation and entrepreneurship at the Wall Street Journal Women in the Economy conference, The Economist Innovation Summit, Federal Reserve Board of Governors, National Governor’s Association, and International Council of Small Business Summit, as well as national media outlets such as FoxNews and CNN.

Amy’s background is in international business and trade including serving in the White House as a Senior Policy Advisor and White House Fellow. Working with the cabinet-ranked U.S. Trade Representative, Amy outlined U.S.-China trade policy, coordinated congressional passage of the Central America Free Trade Agreement, and helped negotiate the Panama, Peru, and Colombia trade agreements. As an international business executive, she led strategy teams for McKinsey & Company in the firm’s London and San Francisco offices and cross-border mergers and acquisitions teams for JP Morgan in New York and Latin America. Amy spent five years living in Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil and is founder of Alegre, an international art-export company that provided indigenous artisans with access to the U.S. market. She began her career as the youngest ever Chief of Protocol for the United States Embassy in Mexico.

Amy was born in Hong Kong and has lived and traveled extensively overseas. She has studied at Oxford University and The University of Salamanca and received a Rotary International Scholarship to live in Spain and a 2015 Eisenhower Fellowship to travel in China and Singapore. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and an Ewing Marian Kauffman Foundation grantee for her research on high scale entrepreneurship.  Amy holds a BA, MA, and MBA from Stanford University. Her writing has been featured in The Economist, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Washington Post, USA Today, and_ Stanford Social Innovation Review,_ among other publications.

Academic Degrees

• BA, Stanford University
• MBA, Stanford GSB

Teaching

Degree Courses

2017-18

OB 547: Hacking Entrepreneurship

How do some people turn ideas into enterprises that endure? Why do some people succeed why so many others fail? Based on more than 200 interviews with leading entrepreneurs conducted over the past five years by Amy Wilkinson, this course will...

2016-17

OB 547: Hacking Entrepreneurship: The Six Essential Skills of Extraordinary Entrepreneurs

How do some people turn ideas into enterprises that endure? Why do some people succeed why so many others fail? Based on more than 200 interviews with leading entrepreneurs conducted over the past five years by Amy Wilkinson, this course will...

In the Media

In business, why kindness actually pays off

Fortune, February 19, 2015

Six essential skills to being a successful entrepreneur

Fox Business, February 17, 2015

Find the Gap: How Jack Ma and Elon Musk See What Others Miss

LinkedIn Pulse, February 14, 2015

Success Secrets: What 200 Leading Entrepreneurs Have in Common

Inc.com - Idea Lab, 2015

Insights by Stanford Business

videoHow Great Entrepreneurs See What Others Don’t

November 22, 2017

Turn life’s glitches into business opportunities.

videoWhat Successful Entrepreneurs Know

October 31, 2017

Founders at companies like Tesla, Paypal, and Airbnb all have traits in common. Learn what six skills they share.

writtenThe Skills That Make Entrepreneurs Extraordinary

April 9, 2015

An author finds what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur.