Sanjay Dastoor met pals John Ulmen and Matthew Tran while studying engineering at Stanford University, where the three often found themselves talking about the need for a better way to get around campus. So they created one -- an electric longboard which they call Boosted Boards. The CEO of this Silicon Valley startup, which raised nearly a half million in crowdsourced funding through Kickstarter, Dastoor hopes to provide a new way to commute for those who live within a six-mile radius of work.

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With his co-founders at Boosted, Dastoor participated in the Y Combinator and StartX incubator programs. He is finishing his PhD on bio-inspired robotics at Stanford, and he holds a MS from Stanford and a BS from UC Berkeley. He has also worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab and SRI International.