TiEcon Speakers
TiEcon 2022 speakers are global thought leaders, with primary spheres of influence in technology and entrepreneurship. Our grand keynotes, keynotes, and speakers are visionaries, who will talk about technology, entrepreneurship, and business trends, and the current solutions that impact the world at large.
- Grand KeynoteAs Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Albert Bourla leads Pfizer in its purpose, Breakthroughs that change patients’ lives, with a focus on driving the scientific and commercial innovation needed to have a transformational impact on human health.
During his more than 25 years at Pfizer, Albert has built a diverse and successful career, holding several senior positions across a range of markets and disciplines. The global nature of his work – having lived and worked in eight different cities and led teams across five continents – has informed his understanding of the needs of patients and healthcare systems around the world and deepened his commitment to helping ensure equitable access to medicines and vaccines.
When he took the reins as CEO in January 2019, Albert accelerated Pfizer’s transformation to become a more science-driven, innovative company – divesting its consumer and off-patent products businesses and dramatically increasing its R&D budget. To create a culture in which the company’s people and science could thrive, Albert and his leadership team established Pfizer’s Purpose Blueprint, which included four core values: courage, excellence, equity and joy.
A powerful example of Pfizer’s capabilities and culture was seen in the company’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Investing more than $2 billion dollars at-risk, Albert inspired colleagues to deliver a safe and effective vaccine in just eight months – a process that typically take 8-10 years – without compromising quality or integrity. A year later, continuing to move at the speed of science, Pfizer delivered the first FDA-authorized oral antiviral treatment for COVID-19 by implementing the same sense of urgency and new ways of working that had made the vaccine program so successful. The company is now applying many of these “lightspeed” principles to projects across a wide range of therapeutic areas, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, inflammatory conditions and more.
Under Albert’s leadership, Pfizer also has further strengthened its commitment to Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) principles. This includes issuing the biopharmaceutical industry’s first Sustainability Bond addressing capital investments in both environmental and social initiatives; launching the company’s first ESG report; and completing an extensive priority issue assessment to confirm where and how Pfizer can have the greatest long-term impact.
Albert is a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine and holds a Ph.D. in the Biotechnology of Reproduction from the Veterinary School of Aristotle University. In January 2022, he was named the 2022 Genesis Prize Laureate in recognition of his leadership during the pandemic. In 2021, he was named CEO of the Year by CNN Business, included in Insider Magazine’s Most Transformative CEOs list, and inducted into the Crain’s New York Business 2021 Hall of Fame. That same year, he received the Appeal of Conscience Award in recognition of his extraordinary leadership in service of the global community and The Atlantic Council’s Distinguished Business Leadership Award for his and Pfizer’s work on the COVID-19 vaccine. He is on the executive committee of The Partnership for New York City, a vice president of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations, a director on multiple boards – Pfizer Inc., The Pfizer Foundation, PhRMA and Catalyst – and a Trustee of the United States Council for International Business. In addition, Albert is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Business Roundtable, the Business Council and the New York City Mayor’s Corporate Council.Cristiano Amon is president and chief executive officer of Qualcomm Incorporated, and also serves on the Company’s board of directors. Amon assumed the role of CEO on June 30, 2021. Amon began his Qualcomm career in 1995 as an engineer, and during his tenure, has helped shape the strategic direction for the Company in several leadership roles. Prior to becoming CEO, Amon served as president of Qualcomm. In that role, he steered development of a leading and differentiated product roadmap, spearheaded Qualcomm’s 5G strategy – as well as its acceleration and global roll out – and drove the expansion and diversification of the business to serve multiple industries. Additionally, he has overseen the successful execution of M&A to augment Qualcomm’s capabilities and accelerate growth in key areas, including RF Front End, Connectivity and Networking. Previously, Amon led Qualcomm’s semiconductor business as president of QCT. He also held several technical and business leadership positions, which included having overall responsibility for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platforms. Prior to Qualcomm, Amon served as chief technical officer for Vésper, a wireless operator in Brazil, and held leadership positions at NEC, Ericsson and Velocom. Amon holds a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and an honorary doctorate from UNICAMP – Universidade Estadual de Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil. He is a member of the USPTO Council for Inclusive Innovation.Dr. Bratin Saha is the Vice President of Machine Learning Services in Amazon AI. He is responsible for the ML and AI services (e.g., Amazon SageMaker, ML Engines, Personalize, Forecast, Health AI, Panorama, Edge Manager, CodeGuru and others) that power AWS Machine Learning, and built one of the fastest growing services in AWS history. He is an alumnus of Harvard Business School (General Management Program), Yale University (PhD Computer Science), and Indian Institute of Technology (BS Computer Science). He has more than 70 patents granted (with another 50+ pending) and more than 30 papers in conferences/journals. Prior to Amazon he worked at Nvidia and Intel leading different product groups spanning imaging, analytics, media processing, high performance computing, machine learning, and software infrastructure.Armon Dadgar is one of the Co-founders and CTO of HashiCorp. He has a passion for security and distributed systems and applies those to the world of DevOps tooling and cloud infrastructure. As a former engineer, he has worked on the design and implementation of many of the core HashiCorp products. He has been named to the Forbes and Inc 30-under-30 lists for transforming enterprise technology. He studied computer science at the University of Washington, where he met his Co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto. Together they launched Hashicorp to realize their vision which went public in 9 years since it’s foundingLynn Martin is President of NYSE Group, which includes the New York Stock Exchange, the world’s largest stock market. Martin is the 68th President of the New York Stock Exchange and the second woman to lead the exchange in its 229-year history. The NYSE, the premier venue for capital raising, is the listing home to 2,400 of the world’s most influential and innovative companies. In addition to the exchange, NYSE Group includes four fully electronic equity markets, including NYSE Arca, the industry leader in ETFs, and two options exchanges. Martin is also Chair of Fixed Income and Data Services at Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. (NYSE: ICE), the parent of NYSE Group. Most recently, she was President of that business, responsible for ICE Bonds execution venues, securities pricing and analytics, reference data, indices, desktop solutions, consolidated feeds and connectivity services that cover all major asset classes. She previously served as President of ICE Data Services, COO of ICE Clear U.S., and in a number of leadership roles including CEO of NYSE Liffe U.S. and CEO of New York Portfolio Clearing. Martin began her career at IBM in its Global Services organization. Martin holds a BS in Computer Science from Manhattan College and an MA in Statistics from Columbia University. She serves on the Manhattan College Board of Trustees as well as the Advisory Board of the School of Science and is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa National Honor Society.Arianna Huffington is the founder and CEO of Thrive, the founder of The Huffington Post, and the author of 15 books, including Thrive and The Sleep Revolution. In 2016, she launched Thrive, a leading behavior change tech company with the mission of changing the way we work and live by ending the collective delusion that burnout is the price we must pay for success. She has been named to Time Magazine's list of the world’s 100 most influential people and the Forbes Most Powerful Women list. Originally from Greece, she moved to England when she was 16 and graduated from Cambridge University with an M.A. in economics. At 21, she became president of the famed debating society, the Cambridge Union. She serves on numerous boards, including Onex and The B Team. Her last two books, Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder and The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night At A Time, both became instant international bestsellers. Most recently, she wrote the foreword to Thrive's first book Your Time to Thrive: End Burnout, Increase Well-being, and Unlock Your Full Potential with the New Science of Microsteps.Vivek Ranadive is an entrepreneur, investor, tech visionary, author, philanthropist, and sports team owner recognized for his outside-the-box thinking. He has led the advancement and use of real-time technology in business operations and decision-making, earning him the nickname "Mr. Real Time" in technology circles. Mr. Ranadivé is dedicated to the vision that if you get the right information to the right place at the right time and in the right context, you can make the world a better place. In 1986, Mr. Ranadivé founded Teknekron Software Systems, which focused on creating the stock trading floor of the future. Teknekron went on to automate Wall Street and that technology became the engine for most of the world's capital markets. In 1997, he founded TIBCO Software Inc. in Palo Alto, California with the mission of bringing real-time computing into the mainstream and eventually powered technology behind everything from the web to airlines, financial services, utilities, communications providers, manufacturers and governments. TIBCO was sold in 2014 for $4.3bn. In 2016, Mr. Ranadive founded Bow Capital, a venture capital firm in partnership with the University of California Regents. In 2021, he took WeWork public with his SPAC, injecting $1.5bn into the company and joined the Board of Directors of the company. Mr. Ranadive has authored three books that are New York Times and global best sellers, both widely read in business and academia. His most recent book is titled “The Two-Second Advantage: How We Succeed by Anticipating the Future – Just Enough.” His previous book, “The Power to Predict,” explores how companies can break new ground in their quest to anticipate customers' needs, capture new opportunities, and predict and avoid problems. “The Power of Now” covers how winning companies sense and respond to change using real-time technology. A native of Bombay, India, Mr. Ranadive watched a documentary on MIT and was inspired at the age of 16 to leave India for Cambridge, Massachusetts, arriving with only $50 in his pocket. After earning both a Master's and Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he obtained an MBA at Harvard, where he was a Baker Scholar. Mr. Ranadive is a huge basketball fan, which started when he coached his daughter's middle school team. Mr. Ranadivé's coaching success was highlighted in a New Yorker magazine article by Malcolm Gladwell, as an example of innovators who win big by doing the unexpected and breaking the rules – the ultimate “David beats Goliath.” He started his foray into the professional side of basketball when he became the co-owner and vice chairman of the Golden State Warriors NBA franchise. In 2013, he became the first Indian majority owner of an NBA team when he purchased the Sacramento Kings, and in 2019 he realized his dream by bringing NBA basketball to India, with games played in his hometown of Bombay.Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar is a global humanitarian, spiritual leader and peace envoy. Gurudev has been teaching breath- based meditation techniques for health and well-being for more than 40 years. His approach blends ancient Vedic wisdom with modern sensibility for a new paradigm of leadership and living – a stress-free, violence- free society.
Millions of individuals worldwide have experienced calm, found peace, and inner resilience in the face of adversity through his programs. Research on Gurudev’s SKY Breath Meditation technique finds that it benefits mental health and well-being while reducing stress, anxiety, depression and trauma. Transformed individuals not only excel in their own life, but become powerful agents for social change. Gurudev has thus inspired a wave of volunteerism and service for a better society. More than 30,000 active teachers and over one million volunteers are engaged in building conscious and caring communities in a range of sectors across 156 countries.
Gurudev believes inner peace is the key to peace in the world outside. He has sought to build bridges between beliefs and religions to universalize wisdom and foster greater compassion, love and mutual understanding for a stress-free, violence-free society. Standing for Gandhian values of non-violence, Gurudev has progressed peace in conflict stricken areas such as Sri Lanka, Iraq, Venezuela and Colombia.
Navin is Managing Director at Mayfield. He has been named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and has ranked on the Forbes Midas List of Top 100 Tech Investors thirteen times, including being named in the Top Five in 2020. His investments have created over $60 billion in equity value and over 40,000 jobs. During his venture capital career, Navin has invested in over 60 companies, of which 18 have gone public and 25 have been acquired. As an entrepreneur, Navin has co-founded or led three startups, of which one went public and 2 were acquired. Navin holds an MS degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University and a B.Tech. degree in electrical engineering from IIT Delhi, where he was honored with the distinguished IIT Alumni Award.Award-winning entrepreneur-turned-publisher, columnist, author, television commentator, private investor and board director, Rich Karlgaard has a unique vantage point on the trends driving the business and economic climates. Karlgaard is the publisher of Forbes magazine and writes a biweekly column, Innovation Rules, known for its witty and honest assessment of current business issues, and serves as a regular panelist on cable news’ most popular business show, Forbes on FOX.BV Jagadeesh is a successful serial entrepreneur, Angel Investor, and a Philanthropist. BV Jagadeesh is Managing Partner at KAAJ Ventures. He has successfully invested and guided companies such as Nutanix, Yodlee, Arkin, NetMagic Solutions, to name a few. Before founding KAAJ, BV Jagadeesh served as a founding investor and CEO of NetScaler. NetScaler pioneered the concept of Application Delivery and was successfully sold to Citrix for $325M and served as Group VP and GM for Citrix Application Networking division. Prior to NetScaler, he co-founded and served as CTO of Exodus communications in 1993 that pioneered the concept of Internet data centers. He was instrumental in the successful IPO of Exodus in 1998. Currently Jagadeesh is an active investor and serves on the board of several Silicon Valley Startups. He was also an adjunct faculty at the Leavey School of Business, SCU and currently teaches at many universities in India. Jagadeesh is also very actively involved with several nonprofits such as UVCE Foundation - providing scholarships to deserving students, One School At A Time - Constructing School buildings and Digital infrastructure for the under privileged, Akshaya Patra - providing mid-day meals to 1.8 Million children every day.Diane Brady has interviewed many of the world's leading business and political figures throughout her career, along with managing far-flung teams and building groundbreaking editorial franchises. She is currently an assistant managing editor at Forbes, overseeing the editorial teams that run C-suite coverage, ForbesWomen, For(bes) the Culture, the 30 Under 30 franchise, and coverage of creators and startups. Prior to joining Forbes, she worked at McKinsey, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Wall Street Journal and Maclean’s, along with running her own company. Her book, Fraternity, was named one of Amazon’s best books of the year.Martin Giles is a senior editor at Forbes, where he covers corporate tech executives and their strategic use of technology. He also chairs its market-leading summits and other gatherings for the tech community. Prior to joining Forbes, he was the San Francisco bureau chief of MIT Technology Review and before that he was a partner at a Silicon Valley venture firm investing in early-stage startups. Martin began his career at The Economist and spent more than a quarter century working in various editorial and business roles at the publication, including a period leading its coverage of America’s top technology companies. He is a graduate of Oxford University and has an executive MBA from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.Soma Capital was founded by Aneel Ranadive, who has over 15 years of experience building and investing in startups. Soma invests in software to automate the economy across any sector or geography. Since March 2015 founding, Soma Cap has invested seed in 17 unicorns, and over 300 startups valued over $50 billion combined including Cruise, Rappi, Rippling, Ironclad, Ramp, Razorpay, among others. Aneel also works closely with his father Vivek Ranadive, who founded TIBCO Software ($4.3b exit). TIBCO Software’s pioneering products include big data, analytics, event processing and cloud services, making Vivek a key expert in enterprise software. Through this relationship, Soma Capital has access to Vivek’s deep rolodex of CEO-level relationships with some of the biggest brands in the world, who can help make strategic introductions for portfolio companies. In 2013, Vivek Ranadive purchased the NBA’s Sacramento Kings, becoming the first Indian-born majority owner in the league.Anjali Ranadive is a Coordinator for the Sacramento Kings and the founder/director of Jaws & Paws wildlife sanctuary in California. A philanthropist and Billboard charting singer/songwriter, Anjali represented the Sacramento Kings in the 2014 Draft Lottery after graduating from U.C. Berkeley. - Track KeynotesAlisdair has a passion for social equitability and is living out his vision to make the digital world safe, fair and accessible to everyone in society with the creation of Darwinium.
Darwinium is the next evolution in digital risk, sitting at the intersection between fraud and abuse prevention. Unlike Charles Darwin’s legacy, Darwinium’s motto is ‘Survival of the Unfittest’; protecting those least able to protect themselves and ensuring everyone has access to the best defenses we can build.Kevin Gosschalk is the founder and CEO of Arkose Labs. Since launching the company in 2016, he has been instrumental in building a suite of fraud and abuse deterrence solutions that deliver long- term remediation from attacks by breaking the underlying economics behind online fraud. Under Kevin’s leadership, Arkose Labs has raised more than $114 million in venture fundingLior Ron has been at the helm of some of the most exciting technological developments of the past decade. He began his career as the CTO for Israeli Army Intelligence before joining Google in 2007. There he became the product lead for Google Maps, helping to scale the business from 10 million to 1 billion users, as well as launch products including My Maps, Google Map Maker and Google Local. After Google acquired Motorola in 2011, Lior was the first Google employee recruited to transform Motorola products, launching the award-winning Moto X and Moto 360 product lines. In 2016, Lior co-founded Otto, a self-driving truck company that was later acquired by Uber. Today, Lior is the Co-founder and Head of Uber Freight, Uber logistics business with a digital network of over 1 million drivers and thousands of shippers as customers across North America.Nandan was the Founding Chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), a Cabinet Minister rank, from 2009 to 2014. Most recently, Nandan has co-founded and is Chairman of EkStep, a not-for-profit effort to create a learner-centric, technology-based platform to improve basic literacy and numeracy for millions of children. In 2006, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan and named Businessman of the year by Forbes Asia. He is the author of Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century. In addition, he co-authored with Tanuj Bhojwani, The Art of Bitfulness and Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations with Viral Shah.Since joining Insight in 2000, Deven has made more than 130 investments in enterprise software, data, and consumer internet businesses globally, including North America, Europe, India, Israel, China, Africa, Latin America, and Australia. Deven’s recent investments include Fanatics, Chargebee, Checkout.com, Parachute Health, Diligent, Bullhorn, Pollinate, Apna, TetraScience, and Mynt. Some previous investments include Twitter (IPO), eVestment (sale to NASDAQ), Alibaba (IPO), and JD.com (IPO). Deven currently serves as a Board Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, NYU Langone, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Tisch New York MS Research Center. He was also confirmed by the United States Senate to serve on the Board of Directors of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation. Deven has a B.S. in Economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.Yossi is also the Founding Managing Director of Google Center in Israel. He is a world-renowned expert in AI and in the leadership of Global-scale product and technology innovation leadership. Yossi is the Global Lead of Google’s Health AI. He is also the Global Lead of Google’s Crisis Response initiative, providing AI-based actionable information. Yossi is the Head of Google's Center in Israel, which he established. In addition, he is the Founding Exec Lead of Google for Startups Accelerator, which supports thousands of startups globally. Prof. Matias is also on the Computer Science faculty at Tel Aviv University, previously a Research Scientist at Bell Labs and a visiting professor at Stanford. He published over 100 papers and is the inventor of over 60 patents in diverse areas, including pioneering work on internet privacy, contextual search, and big data.Dr Jennifer Holmgren is CEO of the revolutionary carbon recycling company, LanzaTech. Prior to joining LanzaTech, Dr Holmgren was VP and General Manager of the Renewable Energy and Chemicals business unit at UOP LLC, a Honeywell Company. She was one of the key drivers of UOP’s leadership in aviation biofuels, and under her management, UOP technology became instrumental in producing nearly all of the initial fuels used by commercial airlines and the military for testing and certification of alternative aviation fuels. Today, under Dr Holmgren’s guidance, LanzaTech is working towards developing a variety of platform chemicals and fuels, including the world’s first alternative jet fuel derived from industrial waste gases. Dr Holmgren is the author or co-author of 50 US patents and more than 30 scientific publications. In 2003, she was the first woman awarded the Malcolm E. Pruitt Award from the Council for Chemical Research (CCR). In 2010, she was the recipient of the Leadership Award from the Civil Aviation Alternative Fuels Initiative (CAAFI) for her work in establishing the technical and commercial viability of sustainable aviation biofuels. In 2015 Dr Holmgren and her team at LanzaTech were awarded the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Presidential Green Chemistry Award and she was awarded the BIO Rosalind Franklin Award for Leadership in Industrial Biotechnology. Sustainability magazine, Salt, named Dr Holmgren, the world’s most compassionate businesswoman in 2015. In October 2015, Dr Holmgren was awarded the Outstanding Leader Award in Corporate Social Innovation from the YWCA Metropolitan Chicago. Dr Holmgren was named as #1 of the 100 influential leaders in the Bioeconomy by Biofuels Digest for 2016-2017.Gururaj "Desh" Deshpande is a Trustee of Deshpande Foundation along with his wife Jaishree. Desh is the President and Chairman of Sparta Group LLC, a family investment office. Dr. Deshpande has pursued an entrepreneurial career for the last three decades. He was involved either as the founder, a founding investor or chairman of several companies including Cascade Communications, Sycamore Networks, Coral Networks, Tejas Networks, Cimaron, Webdialogs, Airvana, Sandstone Capital, A123 Systems and Curata. Dr. Deshpande lives in Boston and serves as a life-member of the MIT Corporation, and his support has made possible MIT's Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation. The Deshpande Foundation strengthens ecosystems that create significant social and economic impact through entrepreneurship and innovation. Leveraging the experience gained at the MIT Center, the Deshpande Foundation has facilitated the setup of five other centers; Deshpande Center for Social Entrepreneurship in India, Entrepreneurship for ALL (EforALL), the Pond-Deshpande Center at the University of New Brunswick in Canada, the Dunin Deshpande Queens Innovation Center at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario and the Gopalakrishnan Deshpande Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India. Deshpande Foundation also provided the founding grant for MassChallenge in Boston, National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-CorpsTM) and Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI) . Dr. Deshpande holds a B. Tech. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology - Madras, an M.E. from the University of New Brunswick in Canada, and Ph.D. from Queens University in Canada. Deshpande co-chaired the National Council to support President Obama's innovation and entrepreneurship strategy from 2010 to 2015.Head of Marketing. All press inquiries --> press@synthesis.is I work with interesting people on challenging problems. Marketing Hires **Project/Program Manager **Social Media Manager **Customer Relationship Manager **Data ScientistJackie Jung is Vice President of Global Operations Strategy and Center of Excellence (COE) and Chief of Staff at Western Digital. Jackie is a passionate leader with proven success in transforming organizations through technology adoption, business process improvement and culture change. Jackie leads the company’s 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR) transformation, delivering world class operational excellence, augmenting workforce, and driving sustainability implementation in global operations with a footprint of 18 factories across 6 countries. Jackie has been a part of the Western Digital organization for nearly 26 years and has held various positions throughout the company’s numerous mergers, acquisitions, and transformations, including a 5-year assignment in two of the company’s offshore factories. She has held positions in process and product engineering, program management, and manufacturing operations. She is an experienced leader in all stages of the product lifecycle – from design, verification, product ramp through to volume manufacturing. Jackie earned a Master of Science in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University. She also attended Stanford’s Graduate School of Business Executive Education for Strategy and Organization. Prior to this, Jackie earned her Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from UCLA. She is based at the company’s San Jose, CA headquarters location.A pioneer in Emotion AI, Rana el Kaliouby, Ph.D., is Deputy CEO at Smart Eye and formerly, Co-Founder and CEO of Affectiva, an MIT spin-off and category defining AI company. Rana realized a successful exit for Affectiva in June 2021 when the company was acquired by Smart Eye, where she will team with Martin Krantz, Smart Eye’s CEO to scale the company to a global AI powerhouse. Rana is the bestselling author of the newly released book Girl Decoded: A Scientist’s Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology. A passionate advocate for humanizing technology, ethics in AI and diversity, Rana has been recognized on Fortune’s 40 Under 40 list and as one of Forbes' Top 50 Women in Tech. Rana is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and a Young Presidents' Organization member. She is also an Executive Fellow at the Harvard Business School and co-hosted a PBS NOVA series on AI. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and a Post Doctorate from MIT.Daniel Kraft is a Stanford and Harvard-trained physician-scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, and innovator and is serving as the Chair of the XPRIZE Pandemic Alliance Task Force. With over 25 years of experience in clinical practice, biomedical research and healthcare innovation, Kraft has served as faculty chair for Medicine at Singularity University since its inception in 2008, and is founder and chair of Exponential Medicine, a program that explores convergent, rapidly developing technologies and their potential in biomedicine and healthcare. Following undergraduate degrees from Brown University and medical school at Stanford, Daniel was Board Certified in both Internal Medicine & Pediatrics after completing a Harvard residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital & Boston Children's Hospital, and fellowships in hematology, oncology, and bone marrow transplantation at Stanford.
He is often called upon to speak to the future of health, medicine and technology and has given four TED and two TEDMED Talks and has delivered keynotes to a diverse array of organizations.
He has multiple scientific publications (including in Nature and Science) and medical device, immunology, and stem cell-related patents through NIH-funded faculty positions with Stanford University School of Medicine and as clinical faculty for the pediatric bone marrow transplantation service at the University of California San Francisco.
Daniel is a member of the Kaufman Fellows Society (Class 13) and a member of the Inaugural (2015) class of the Aspen Institute Health Innovators Fellowship.
Daniel's academic research has focused on: stem cell biology and regenerative medicine, stem cell-derived immunotherapies for cancer, bioengineering human T-cell differentiation, and humanized animal models. His research has been published in journals that include Nature and Science. His clinical work has focused on: bone marrow / hematopoietic stem cell transplantation for malignant and non-malignant diseases in adults and children, medical devices to enable stem cell based regenerative medicine, including marrow derived stem cell harvesting, processing and delivery.
He is heavily involved in digital health, founded Digital.Health, and is on the board of Healthy.io and advises several Fortune-50 and digital health-related startups. Daniel recently founded IntelliMedicine, focused on personalized, data-driven, precision medicine. He is also the inventor of the MarrowMiner, an FDA-approved device for the minimally invasive harvest of bone marrow, and founded RegenMed Systems, a company developing technologies to enable adult stem cell-based regenerative therapies.
Daniel is an avid pilot and has served in the Massachusetts and California Air National Guard as an officer and flight surgeon with F-15 & F-16 fighter Squadrons. He has conducted research on aerospace medicine that was published with NASA, with whom he was a finalist for astronaut selectionGirish Mathrubootham is the CEO and founder of Freshworks. In 10 years, with backing from leading investors including Accel, Sequoia, Tiger Global Management, and CapitalG, Girish has taken Freshworks from an idea to a leading software company empowering businesses to delight their customers and employees. Under his leadership, Freshworks has expanded its operations to 13 global locations to serve over 50,000 customers throughout the world. He is also a prominent venture capital investor and adviser to over 60 companies, and founding member of SaaSBOOMi, Asia’s largest community of founders and product builders.Michael Moe is the founder and CEO of GSV Holdings (GSV), a growth focused investment platform based in Silicon Valley. GSV has invested in companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Snap, Lyft and Spotify. Inspired by the entrepreneurial mindset of Silicon Valley spreading throughout the world, GSV or "Global Silicon Valley" seeks to identify, invest in and accelerate the transformative companies emerging as innovators. Prior to GSV, he co-founded and was CEO of ThinkEquity Partners LLC, a growth focused investment firm. With a knack for picking the most dynamic, fastest growing companies, he was voted to be on the Institutional All American Research Team and named "Best on the Street" by the Wall Street Journal while heading Global Growth research at Merrill Lynch. He is the co-founder of the ASU GSV Summit, a conference in the education sector that Forbes called the "Davos of Education". Michael is also the Chief Executive Officer of CLASS Acceleration Corp, a publicly traded SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Corporation) on the NYSE. Michael is an advisor to and on the Investment Committee of the GSV Ventures, a fund that invests in the emerging education technology sector. GSV Ventures has a portfolio of dynamic companies including Coursera, Course Hero, Photomath, Guild Education, Physicswallah and LEAD School. He sits on the board at BookClub.com, is a Board Observer at Class Dojo, and is an advisor to Arizona State University. He is the Executive Chairman of Hi Solutions, a company aimed at transforming people's homes into their operating platform for life. Michael is the founder of GSV University and GSV MBA, an accredited graduate program for entrepreneurs. He has authored three books, "Finding the Next Starbucks" and "The Global Silicon Valley Handbook", and "Mission Corps". Michael holds a B.A. in Political Science and Economics from the University of Minnesota and is a licensed Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA).
Transition dean of Stanford’s new school focused on climate and sustainabilityStanford University Kathryn A."Kam" Moler is the Vice Provost and Dean of Research, the Marvin Chodorow Professor, and Professor of Applied Physics and of Physics at Stanford University. She conducts research in magnetic imaging, develops tools that measure nanoscale magnetic fields, and studies quantum materials and devices. Among other honors, she received a national Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, held a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, received the William L. McMillan Award “for her fundamental studies of the superconducting pairing state, Josephson vortices, and the role of interlayer coupling in high-temperature superconductors,” she is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. To honor her sustained commitment to teaching, the American Association of Physics Teachers awarded her the Richtmyer Award for Outstanding Leadership in Physics Education, and Stanford appointed her as the Sapp Family Fellow in Undergraduate Education. She was previously the Senior Associate Dean of Natural Sciences in the School of Humanities and Sciences and the Director of the Stanford Nano Shared Facilities. She is a member of the NanoFront (TU-Delft/Leiden) Scientific Advisory Board, the Physics Frontier Center—Joint Quantum Institute Advisory Board, Co-Chair of the National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee (NQIAC), and a member of NASEM (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine) National Science, Technology, and Security RoundtableShu Nyatta is the founder of a new firm focused on growth investing in Latin America. From March 2015 until April 2022, Shu served in multiple senior investment roles at SoftBank Vision Fund and SoftBank Group International. He was most recently a Managing Partner at SoftBank Group International, where he launched and managed two separate funds - the SoftBank Latin America Fund, and the Opportunity Fund for US-based founders-of-color. In those roles he oversaw investments in a broad range of companies, and sat on multiple boards. Prior to that, he served as a Partner at SoftBank's Vision Fund. Before his investing career, Shu served as a Vice President at J.P. Morgan, a consultant with McKinsey and a singer-songwriter. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Harvard College, as well as a Master of Science in Anthropology with Distinction from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.Dr. Ali Nouri leads the Office of Congressional and Intergovernmental Affairs as an Assistant Secretary at the U.S. Department of Energy. He was previously serving as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary in that office. Prior to joining the Biden Administration, Dr. Nouri was the President of the Federation of American Scientists, a public policy organization focused on countering WMDs, addressing emerging infectious diseases, and crafting solutions to energy and innovation challenges. Under his leadership, the organization also tackled science denialism and COVID-19 misinformation by providing timely, science-based information to policy makers and to the public. Previously, Dr. Nouri served as an advisor in the U.S. Senate for nearly a decade, including six years for a member of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. During his time in the Senate, he served in various positions including as an Energy and Environment Advisor, a National Security Advisor, and as a Legislative Director. Prior to that, Dr. Nouri served as an advisor to the office of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan where he developed initiatives to block biotechnology from being used to produce biological weapons. He earned a B.A. in biology from Reed College and a Ph.D. in molecular biology from Princeton University. He resides in Washington D.C. with his wife, Logan Gibson, and their two sons.Harmit Singh is executive vice president and chief financial officer of Levi Strauss & Co. He is responsible for managing the company’s finance, information technology, strategic sourcing and global business services functions globally. This includes: financial planning and analysis, strategic planning and corporate development, accounting and controls, tax, enterprise risk management, treasury, internal audit, and investor relations. Harmit is a seasoned financial executive with more than 30 years of experience in driving growth for global consumer brands. Throughout his career, he has worked at companies that serve consumers in the hospitality, restaurant, travel and financial industries. Prior to joining LS and Co. in January 2013, Harmit served as chief financial officer of Hyatt Hotels Corporation, where he successfully established a global financial structure, took the company public, built a strong balance sheet, and drove growth by supporting capital deployment for acquisitions and investments. Before Hyatt Hotels Corporation, Harmit held various global leadership roles at Yum! Brand foods, the world’s largest restaurant company, including CFO of Pizza Hut U.S. and CFO of Yum Restaurants International. Early in his career, Harmit also worked at American Express India and Price Waterhouse in India. Harmit holds a Bachelor of Commerce from Shri Ram College of Commerce, Delhi University, and is a chartered accountant from India. In 2018, Harmit was named to the board of OpenText, a global enterprise information management software company. In 2019, he joined the Accounting for Sustainability (A4S) project, helping to establish the U.S. Chapter of the organization and mobilize other prominent financial leaders to promote the business case for sustainability, and in 2021 he was named the U.S. Co-Chair of A4S. He is also a proud member of the CNBC Global CFO Council and the Wall Street Journal CFO Network and World 50 (a private community for C-level executives at globally respected organizations). He was also named in the Top 20 C-sustainability champions for 2021 by Green Biz. He previously served on the board of directors for Buffalo Wild Wings, Inc.I am a South African Sports Scientist & Performance Coach with 18 years of experience in High-Performance Sporting environments. The author of four books on Sports Science & Motivation, a TEDx speaker, recipient of the INK & Australia India Youth Dialogue Fellowship, Men’s Health ‘Trainer of the Year 2014’, Global Fitness Advisory Board Member to Herbalife & Organising Committee Member of the United Nations ChangeMakers Conference. Two decades of on-field experience with Olympians & Championship winning teams & three years of living as a monk have taught me the art & science of work-life balance. We must learn how to starve our fears and feed our courage in our quest to cultivate excellence. I work with athletes & executives to unlock their potential, mentally, physically & emotionally. I push my own physical and mental limits through ultra-marathon running and mountaineering. I dream that I can touch the lives of a million children by making sport an equal opportunity platform, devoid of politics, religion, race, gender or socio-economic basis.Prat Vemana joined Kaiser Permanente in August 2019 as the organization’s first-ever Chief Digital Officer. In this role, Prat leads cross-functional teams across Kaiser Permanente to transform a full range of online and mobile interactions and digital experiences for its more than 12 million members, patients, clinicians and customers, as well as digital tools and processes for its workforce. Prat brings a wealth of experience leading this type of work across large scale, highly-matrixed organizations and will be instrumental in driving this shift across Kaiser Permanente.
Prior to Kaiser Permanente, Prat served as Chief Product and Experience Officer at The Home Depot where he was responsible for a consumer-centric product vision and strategy and driving user experience excellence across the company. He also served as vice president of Interconnected Experience at Home Depot, successfully launching a new digital online experience and cloud based-technology platform. Prat’s prior roles include vice president of Global Ecommerce, Product Management, and Analytics at Staples, Inc. and vice president of Product Development at Informed Clinical Sciences Corporation.
Prat holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering from the University of Madras and a master’s in business administration in global leadership and innovation from MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
Bruno joined Novartis Global Drug Development in 2019 and leads Data and Digital. He is focused on fully integrating data science, A.I. and digital technology into the drug portfolio and development processes.
A digital and technology leader, Bruno has more than 30 years of experience driving digital and technology-led innovation and new business model creation in the pharmaceutical, consumer health, and service industries. Prior to joining Novartis, Bruno led the development of a portfolio of digital health companies in the US. Before, he worked at Takeda Pharmaceuticals in Japan where he became the first Chief Digital Officer in the pharmaceutical industry.
In addition, Bruno serves as a Board Advisor for Koneksa Health (The digital biomarker company), Cara Care (Personalized gastrointestinal care), Seqster (The Operating System for Digital Health) and the Intermediate Capital Group (Private Equity European leader). He previously served as Chairman and Board Member of a few Digital Health startups. Bruno is a regular contributor to events & media and a Forbes Technology Council member.
Bruno has a Master of Science in Industrial Organization and a Master of Science in Business Systems from the University of Lyon. He also has a Master of Engineering in Enterprise Systems from the Arts & Métiers in Paris. In 2017, he was nominated a Top 40 healthcare transformer.
A Women in Tech International Hall of Famer and trailblazer, Dr Jaleh Daie is passionate about improving the human condition. She is a multifaceted thought leader whose career spans academia, business, philanthropy, government and NGOs, A noted research biologist, Jaleh is an investor, board director, keynoter & strategic advisor. She has served the administrations of three Presidents and collaborated/worked in several countries. Her success in navigating disparate careers in both private & public sectors stems from her ability to apply the appropriate mental model to each role. As a strategic thinker, Jaleh has served on numerous boards as director, board chairman, board secretary and board treasurer as well as chair of charity galas helping to raise millions of dollars for her causes. She continues her community service by currently serving on four national/international non-profit boards. Currently, she is a Partner at Aurora Equity & Founder/Chair of AgFood Tech at the Silicon Valley-based Band of Angels, the original organized Angel group. Previously, she was head of STEM at the David & Lucile Packard Foundation giving multi-million-dollar research grants. She has worked on Presidential initiatives with President’s National Science & Tech Council and as a special assistant to Chief Scientist at NOAA. Jaleh began her career at Rutgers Univ. & UW-Madison, where she was a professor (made full professor in 6 years); senior science adviser to the President of the 26-campus UW-System; academic Dept. Chair (1st woman in her field); Founder/Chief Executive of multidisciplinary academic centre & founder/Director of a university-wide graduate program. Jaleh’s honors include LSQ Ambassador (Australia), Biotech Distinguished Speaker (South Africa), a US Congressional Citation, Henry Rutgers Fellow, Honorary Naval Aviator, Hon. Life Girl Scouts, Teksia Lifetime Achievement; Honorary doctorate degree; AAAS & AWIS Fellow. Leaders of Science, among others.George is a seasoned executive whose career spans over 30 years across multiple industries creating, growing, and funding businesses. His expertise encompasses hedge funds, private equity, finance, marketing, operations, and executive management. George was previously a Senior Advisor at National Capital Merchant Banking, LLC. He was one of the original team that founded Friedman Billings Ramsey (NYSE: FBR, acquired), where he was a Senior Managing Director. He implemented FBR’s expansion internationally to Bermuda, London, and Israel. George holds an MBA in Marketing from Southeastern University and a Bachelor of Industrial & Production Engineering from Mysore University in India.Priya is Market Lead for India and MENA in SVB’s international market development team, Global Gateway. She provides market entry advice and insights on cross-border engagement focused on constituents in the innovation ecosystem – founders and investors.
Priya’s work with Indian entrepreneurs and venture capital funds has yielded tangible value with founders accessing leading programs in the U.S. like Y-Combinator and investors getting visibility of great founders and deals.
Priya calls on her experience, expertise and connections to champion a more inclusive innovation economy. She works closely with community leaders, including Change Catalyst, Kapor Capital, and YC Female Founders. She sits on the board of directors at non-profits Big Brothers Big Sisters and Women Who Code – an organization dedicated to helping women excel in technology careers. As a venture partner at Xfund, Priya connects VC firms with superior research universities and advisor at Entrepreneurship at Cornell University.
Priya co-created the Diaspora Community initiative at SVB and is a charter member of TiE, a nonprofit focused on nurturing the next generation of entrepreneurs with Indian ties.
Prior to joining Global Gateway, Priya was a Director in our early stage practice (Startup Banking) where she led university programs and SVB Trek for student entrepreneurs. Leading to partnerships with Dorm Room Fund, The House Fund, Stanford Venture Studio and Rough Draft Ventures.
Priya’s career at SVB Financial Group began as a global group financial officer, a pivotal role in the Finance team. Earlier in her career, she held financial management positions at Charles Schwab and Enterprise Rent-A-Car. In addition to a bachelor’s degree from the University of Madras and a master’s degree in international business from Queen’s University, Priya holds an MBA in business administration from Cornell University and a California CPA in accounting and business administration.
Priya enjoys traveling the world, opening doors, and meeting new people. When not on a plane, Priya enjoys classical music – after studying music for over a decade, she passed on this passion and skill to her two children.
Bipul Sinha is an entrepreneur, engineer and venture capitalist with more than 20 years of experience building billion-dollar companies - including Rubrik which he co-founded and leads as the CEO. In addition, Bipul is the Board Chairman & Co-Founder of Confluera and a Venture Partner at Lightspeed. Previously, Bipul was a Partner at Lightspeed where he focused on software, mobile, and Internet sectors. His investments included Nutanix, Pulse News, Bromium, and PernixData. Before Lightspeed, Bipul worked at Blumberg Capital, where he was the founding investor/board member of Nutanix and Hootsuite. Bipul also held engineering positions at Oracle Corporation, American Megatrends and IBM. Bipul received his Bachelor in Technology in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur where he was bestowed with the Distinguished Alumnus Award. Bipul completed his MBA in Finance from The Wharton School where he was a Palmer Scholar. Bipul holds several patents in distributed computing.Laela Sturdy has invested in some of the world's most consequential companies, including Stripe, Duolingo (DUOL), Gusto, UiPath (PATH), Unqork, Curated, Webflow, Whatnot, and Chief. She brings hands-on operational hypergrowth experience and deep, cross-sector knowledge to CapitalG. Laela serves on numerous public and private company boards and is known for the high level of engagement, wide-ranging expertise, and unwavering commitment that she brings to every investment. Laela joined CapitalG shortly after its inception in 2013 from Google, where as managing director of emerging businesses she launched and scaled a number of domestic and international high-growth businesses and held leadership roles on the YouTube and Google Search teams. Before joining Google in 2007, Laela was a consultant at Bain & Company, advising companies across media, retail, CPG and private equity. She holds an AB in Biochemistry from Harvard College, an MSc in Multimedia Systems from Trinity College Dublin and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. An avid basketball player and former captain of her college women’s team, Laela enjoys spending time listening to live music with her wife and kids in San Francisco.Since being named Vice President of Product in 2014, Todd’s role revolves around changing the way people find great streaming content to watch over the internet on their TVs, computers and mobile devices. He is responsible for leveraging vast amounts of information and best-in-class user interfaces across numerous viewing devices to create an easy, compelling way for Netflix members to find something great to watch. Todd also oversees member acquisition and how to best leverage social and messaging. His team is also responsible for leading our studio technology efforts from pitch to play. Before joining Netflix in 2006, he wrote and directed the feature film Brother’s Shadow, and the short film The Eternal Pitch. He also worked as a documentarian, filming political unrest in places like Tibet and Myanmar (Burma). Todd received a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MFA in Film Production from USC. Head, Content Disney+ Hotstar and HSM Entertainment Network, Disney StarDisney+Hotstar Gaurav is Head, Content Disney+ Hotstar and HSM Entertainment Network, Disney Star. In this role, he oversees all entertainment content for Disney+ Hotstar, and for Hindi Entertainment channels of Star TV Network. Gaurav runs the Star Content Studio which has made 9 out of the top 15 digital and 6 out of the top 10 Hindi TV shows in the country.
Gaurav joined Star News as prime time anchor and senior producer and launched the Bengali news channel of the group, Star Ananda in 2005.
He moved on to lead the content strategy of the network’s regional entertainment channels in 2008 and expanded the company’s reach in two new markets, Bengal and Maharashtra with Star Jalsha and Star Pravah respectively. Within a year of launch, Star Jalsha became the number one Bengali language channel in India.
In October 2009, Gaurav moved on to Hindi entertainment as Head of Content Strategy at Star Plus, and he was responsible for Star’s widely popular shows like 'Diya aur Baati Hum' and 'Sasural Genda Phool'.
Gaurav took on the role of General Manager of Star Plus in 2013 and propelled Star Plus into a strong leadership brand with blockbuster shows like Mahabharata and Yeh Hai Mohabbatein.
Around 2015-2016, as Star’s entertainment became available across screens, Gaurav took charge as the leader of the Content Studio and refreshed the storytelling approach for Star Plus and Star Bharat. He has strengthened the Disney+ Hotstar library with world class content that appeals to unique tastes of audiences with Hotstar Specials like ‘Special Ops’ and the Emmy nominated ‘Aarya’.
Gaurav is dedicated to nurturing a pool of talented writers with Star Writers Program – one of India’s most immersive courses in television writing.
Gaurav believes that good stories provide context. It comes from his experience of being a journalist with Aaj Tak in 2000. As an anchor, he covered the Afghan war and the General Elections.
Gaurav has a Master’s in Film Making and Video from Mass Communications Research Centre, Jamia Milia Islamia University, Delhi.
Alakh Pandey, the founder of India's most trusted and loved ed-tech enterprise PW, is a visionary educationist in his own right. The very idea of democratization of education by making it accessible and affordable to every student has been the hallmark of his vision. Pandey, who took up tutoring during his college days, realised the economic hurdles faced by students from the middle class and marginalised section of the society for whom, quality education was always an unfulfilled dream. He started his own company in 2020 along with his co-founder Prateek with a core aim of imparting a high standard of pedagogy for the student fraternity. Pandey has steered the company to greater heights and all the brand stands for today is "equity, access and quality in education". He recently launched PW's philanthropic venture 'PW Foundation NGO' to empower the downtrodden by virtue of scholarships and free education. With its app, PW has been able to expand and penetrate across the country in a meteoric manner by reaching almost every small town. Alakh was also awarded for his impactful contribution of bringing innovation in education by the Union minister (Govt. of India) Mr. Piyush Goyal and Chief-Minister of Delhi (Govt. of India) Mr. Arvind Kejriwal.Milind Tambe is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science and Director of Center for Research in Computation and Society at Harvard University; concurrently, he is also Director "AI for Social Good" at Google Research India. Prof. Tambe's work focuses on advancing AI and multiagent systems for public health, conservation & public safety, with a track record of building pioneering AI systems for social impact. He is recipient of the IJCAI (International Joint Conference on AI) John McCarthy Award, AAMAS ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Autonomous Agents Research Award, AAAI (Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture Award, and he is a fellow of AAAI and ACM. He is also a recipient of the INFORMS Wagner prize for excellence in Operations Research practice and Rist Prize from MORS (Military Operations Research Society). For his work on AI and public safety, he has received Columbus Fellowship Foundation Homeland security award and commendations and certificates of appreciation from the US Coast Guard, the Federal Air Marshals Service and airport police at the city of Los Angeles. Prof. Tambe has contributed several foundational papers in AI, in particular in multiagent systems, for which he has received or been nominated for best paper awards over 25 times at top AI conferences. Prof. Tambe completed his PhD from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and his undergraduate education at BITS, Pilani, India.Shubo Biswas started his career in the Automotive Industry in Michigan, USA about three decades ago. He joined Dassault Systems where he worked on developing cutting edge dynamic scheduling software under an NSF Grant and built up the Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) software stack and its services practice. He was one of the pioneer engineers who lead the transformation of the US manufacturing industry from paper based work instructions to fully digital 3D graphical model based interactive work instructions. This technology was adopted by Boeing for it's Defense and Commercial Airplane programs. Shubo moved to Seattle in 2006 to lead the Production Operations software team at Boeing in charge of manufacturing their latest airplane - the 787 Dreamliner. He helped develop the Global Production System supporting Boeing's globally distributed manufacturing ecosystem. Subsequently, he took on the role of Chief Architect - Manufacturing Execution Systems and then Chief Architect- Factory Automation and Robotics supporting the integration of billions of dollars worth of Robotics and Automation hardware into Boeing Production facilities. Shubo was hired by Google Inc. at their Mountain View campus in 2016 to lead the integration of Robotics and Automation into Data Center operations. While at Google, Shubo started volunteering with various NGOs in India like Paani Foundation (founded by Aamir Khan and Kiran Rao). He hosted a "Talks at Google"; event with the Paani team while contributing substantial volunteer hours performing "Shramadaan"; building watershed structures in remote villages in Satara, Maharashtra. Shubo left Google in 2020 to launch his own startup GreenGood Labs, LLC focusing on self-help digital tools for rural transformation projects in areas like water, climate, soil, agriculture, agroforestry. He joined Deshpande Foundation as the Global CTO in 2020 where he leads technology initiatives combining the latest in the areas of AI/ML, Remote Sensing, Multi-band Satellite Imagery, Cloud Computing, IoT and Drone based imagery with ancient wisdom sciences in the areas of Regenerative agriculture, Natural Farming and Soil Health restoration. Shubo has a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from India and a Master of Applied Science degree in Manufacturing and Industrial Systems Engineering from Canada.Prateek, who is stated to be the growth hacker of PW co-founded PW along with Alakh and in his current capacity spearheads the technological advancements and strategy of the organization. An IIT (BHU)-Varanasi alumnus, Prateek, holds a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and started his career at Caterpillar Incorporation. But what truly defines his capabilities is that he has been a serial entrepreneur with over a decade of work experience, he has built several profitable ventures ground-up like Moon2noon, Nightpanda and PenPencil. In-fact, it was during his early years at PenPencil - a customizable SAAS for educators planning to go-digital - when he first met Alakh and later in May-2020 when they both decided to launch PW, all his product insights & technological expertise became the heart of the innovation around building "India's biggest & most vibrant classrooms" that PW proudly boasts today. Prateek envisions PW as the go-to brand providing high-quality education for everyone and as setting new standards for equity & access in education. Beyond work, he is a philanthropist by nature being associated with NGO(s) like Kashi Utkarsh and Asha Deep Vidyashram - both working towards improving learning outcomes at grassroot levels.Mercedes Bent is a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. Mercedes is an investor and operator who lives and breathes startups. She invests in consumer, fintech, edtech, LATAM, & multicultural regions and founders including Flink, Outschool, Stori, and more. In 2016, she was named a "40 Under 40 for Tech Diversity in Silicon Valley" and in 2021, WSJ named her one of "Women to Watch in VC". She has an MBA and a Masters in Education from Stanford University and an AB from Harvard University. She is an African-American of Bermudian, Grenadian, and Colombian heritage and in her free time she enjoys playing cards & off-roading in her Jeep.
I hold a doctorate in Culture and Performance from the department of World Arts and Cultures/ Dance at UCLA. My dissertation is "Virtual Actualities: Technology, Museums, and Immersion," which examines the use of immersive technologies within museum and cultural heritage spaces. My MA thesis is entitled "Visiting Digital Tombstones: Unearthing Questions of Digital Personhood, Commemoration, and Remembrance Processes." I am interested in the ways in which digital devices and tools are reshaping cultural practices and academic disciplines (specifically art history). Writer-Director - Producer at The Repertory Company Associate Professor at University of Southern CaliforniaUSC Steve’s career began as a resident new play director for the internationally acclaimed Actor’s Theater of Louisville. In his long tenure there, he mounted several world premieres including Groves of Academe starring Chris Cooper and In Darkest America by Joyce Carol Oates. For the USIA, he directed the culminating event for The American Theater Exhibit in Budapest, Hungary. His production of Talking With by Jane Martin represented ATL in The International Festival of Australia. As an Artistic Associate for LA Theater Works, Mr. Albrezzi recorded David Henry Hwang’s M Butterfly with John Lithgow, B. D. Wong and Margaret Cho; Athol Fugard’s The Road to Mecca with Julie Harris, Amy Irving and Harris Yulin; Ingmar Bergman’s adaptation of Ibsen’s The Doll’s House, with Robert Foxworth. For the BBC and NEA, Mr. Albrezzi co-adapted and directed Ruby McCollum with a cast of 56 including James Morrison, Jean Smart, Kurtwood Smith and Loretta Devine. Steve’s short film Fantasy in D Minor, garnered the Best Director Award at Worldfest Houston and Best of the Fest at Santa Barbara Film Festival. His co-adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ play The Eclipse won Best Screen Adaptation at Charleston International Film Festival and was subsequently optioned by Goldie Hawn’s Cosmic Entertainment and Alliance Atlantis as a Special Event Movie for CBS. Mr. Albrezzi directed three seasons of 'It's A Miracle' for NBC/PAX TV. His directing work has also been featured as the spirit segment on The Oprah Winfrey Show and on The PBS series Reading Rockets - Reading and the Brain with Henry Winkler. Steve’s 2007 documentary Reel Lives, about his foundation project created for underserved youth, was the featured video installment at Benjamin Barber’s Interdependence Day in Mexico City.William E. Quigley is a cryptocurrency and blockchain investor. He was the first institutional investor in PayPal and has over 25 years of experience as a technology-focused venture capitalist. Mr. Quigley has incubated and invested in more than 30 bitcoin, blockchain and cryptocurrency-related investments. Mr. Quigley co-developed the first crypto derivative used to trade pre-release Ethereum. He co-founded many other transformative crypto companies including Tether, the first fiat-backed stablecoin and world's most traded cryptocurrency and GoCoin, a pioneering crypto payments processor. He also co-founded WAX, a blockchain built for video game and NFT virtual item trading. In 2013, Mr. Quigley co-founded and co-managed Crypto Currency Partners, a blockchain equity investment fund with early notable investments in Coinbase, Kraken, Bitfury, Authy, ChangeTip and Circle.
Prior to his involvement in blockchain, Mr. Quigley was a venture capitalist. He co-founded Clearstone Venture Partners, a $700M early-stage focused venture capital firm where he concentrated on communications and consumer technology companies. Before Clearstone, Quigley was a Managing Director at idealab! Capital Partners ("ICP"), the world's first consumer Internet venture capital firm. ICP was affiliated with idealab, the most successful consumer Internet incubator of the 1990's. ICP was an early investor in some of the leading Web 1.0 era companies including Paypal, Netzero, MP3.com and Goto.com, the first company to rank search results based on a competitive bidding process.
Earlier in his career, Mr. Quigley spent seven years in business planning and new venture roles at The Walt Disney Company. His tenure at Disney included finance and operational roles at Euro Disney, the Disney Store retail chain and Disney Consumer Products. He also oversaw strategic planning and financial operations for Disney Licensing, the world's largest consumer products licensor. Before Disney, Mr. Quigley was a Senior Consultant with Arthur Andersen's Financial Services Group ("Andersen"). At Andersen, Mr. Quigley assisted banks and S&Ls in their asset securitization and risk segmentation efforts. He also advised Japanese banks on their US market entry strategies.
Mr. Quigley received his MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School, where he was appointed a Kauffman Fellow. He holds a B.S. in Accounting with honors from the University of Southern California.
Induprakas (Indu) Keri is SVP Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and Chief Product Security Officer (CPSO). At over $1B+ in annual revenue, NCI is the industry-leading Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) offering that brings scale-out and elastic web-scale architecture to the enterprise. In addition, in his CPSO role, Indu leads Nutanix’s company-wide product security efforts. As a long time C-level executive,
Indu has served as Chief Operating Officer at Limelight Networks, CTO at SunGard and CISO at Intuit. Currently, he is also a visiting scholar at MIT where he works on FinTech and Space. Indu started off his career as an engineer at Silicon Graphics (SGI) where he implemented his dissertation work into the high-end parallelizing compiler delivered by SGI. His other work experience includes stints at McKinsey & Company, BEA Systems and Oracle. He has a PhD in Computer Science from Cornell.
Sal Khan is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, a nonprofit organization with a mission to provide free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. He is also the founder of Khan Lab School, a nonprofit laboratory school in Mountain View, California, and Schoolhouse.world, a new nonprofit that offers free tutoring over Zoom. Sal’s interest in education began while he was an undergraduate at MIT. While there, he developed math software for children with ADHD and tutored fourth- and seventh-grade public school students. Sal also taught test prep courses for the MCAT and was named Teacher of the Year by a national test prep company. He holds three degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Sal founded Khan Academy as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization in 2008. Khan Academy’s platform includes more than 70,000 practice problems, videos, quizzes, and articles that cover a range of K–12 subjects. Khan Academy’s learning system is mastery-based, which allows students to master key concepts at a pace that’s right for them before moving on to more challenging content. The organization partners with school districts across the country that serve students who are historically under-resourced. School districts use Khan Academy Districts and MAP Accelerator to help teachers differentiate instruction. Khan Academy partners with College Board to provide free Official SAT Practice. More than 135 million registered users around the world have used Khan Academy across 190 countries and 51 languages. Sal lives in Mountain View, California, with his wife and three children. - Speakers
Priya Abani brings more than 20 years of experience in building high-performing organizations, launching innovative products on a global scale, and leading cross-industry strategic alliances.
As AliveCor CEO, Priya is leading the drive to patient-centric remote cardiological care. Under Priya’s leadership, the company has built the largest AI-driven consumer subscription service in the world for cardiovascular care. AliveCor has put its technology in the hands of more than 1.5 million people in 40 countries around the world. Priya led the company’s recent growth into enterprise markets with reimbursed cardiac monitoring services for healthcare providers, partnerships with pharmaceutical companies and clinical research organizations for remote cardiac safety testing and is overseeing the development of a comprehensive condition management service offering for cardiology.
Prior to joining AliveCor, Priya served as the General Manager at Alexa Voice Service (AVS) at Amazon, where she was responsible for leading product, engineering, technical enablement, and developer experience teams and led the expansion of Alexa technology into partner products. Earlier in her career, Priya was a Senior Director of Customer Enablement and Solutions Integration at Intel.
Abhijit has over twenty-five years of international experience building products and scaling businesses. Abhijit was the first top-level executive to be hired by WhatsApp for India. Formerly the CEO and Co-Founder of Ezetap Mobile Solutions, Abhijit has also had senior leadership roles with Siebel Systems, Intuit, and NGPay, one of India’s first mobile commerce companies. Abhijit holds a B.S. in Engineering from Cornell University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.Dr. Anderson is a General Managing Partner of Supply Chain Ventures, LLC, a venture capital company specializing in early and late stage investing in AI enabled supply chain planning and execution software, ecommerce logistics, digital freight networks, visibility, and 3PLs. He is a retired managing partner of supply chain consulting at Accenture, a global technology consulting company. He has served on the Board of Directors of Descartes Systems Group, of Waterloo, Ontario, Steelwedge Software , of Pleasanton, California, Placester of Boston, Massachusetts, and NBD Nanotechnology of Boston, Massachusetts. He is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the University of New England and a member of the Boston College Technology Council. Dr. Anderson received his Doctor of Philosophy Degree in Econometrics and Finance from Boston College and his Bachelor of Arts Degree in Economics from the University of Connecticut.At Sutter Shared Services (S3), Lee oversees the organization’s strategy for Supply Chain Distribution in both acute and non-acute locations. He is responsible for the stock, store and issue of an array of medical and non-medical supplies across multiple service lines.
Lee has 25 years of global Supply Chain experience in both the public and private sectors. During his tenure with the US Air Force, he oversaw both tactical and strategic planning in logistics, distribution, and inventory management across a wide-range of commodities, often while embedded in a combat zone. As Sutter Health’s Supply Chain Unit Lead during COVID-19, he led strategic efforts to source, purchase and deliver PPE and critical items, resulting in zero stock outs during the pandemic. Lee earned his Master’s Degree in Performance Improvement, magna cum laude, from Grantham University and has certifications in Lean Six Sigma and as a Project Management Professional (PMP).Randolph brings over 20 years of information technology and leadership experience to the company. He was most recently Head of Security Operations at Zoom Video Communications (NASDAQ:ZM) where he was responsible for the aggressive growth of the overall security program on the Zoom platform.
Previously, Randolph was Chief Security Officer at CISCO – WEBEX Communications Senior Vice President and Chief Information and Security Officer at Topia and Senior Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer at Aryaka. He held several leadership positions at leading cloud companies ahead of this. Randolph earned a Bachelor of Administration and Computer Science from the University of Phoenix.As a Principal Architect of Ethical AI Practice at Salesforce, Kathy develops research-informed best practice to educate Salesforce employees, customers, and the industry on the development of responsible AI. She collaborates and partners with external AI and ethics experts to continuously evolve Salesforce policies, practices, and products. She is also a member of Singapore’s Advisory Council on the Ethical Use of AI and Data. Prior to Salesforce, she worked at Google, eBay, and Oracle in User Experience Research. She received her MS in Engineering Psychology and BS in Applied Psychology from the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is the co-author of Understanding Your Users: A Practical Guide to User Research Methodologies.Naveen Bisht is Founder and CEO of Akitra Inc - an AI-powered, cloud-based compliance automation and cybersecurity solutions company and is a serial entrepreneur who has founded and led numerous companies in the security and network infrastructure industries. He was the founder or co-founder and CEO of Straks, SecurAct, Nayna Networks, and Ukiah Software (acquired by Novell). He is the past Chair, Programs and a Board Member of TiE Silicon Valley and also, Chair of highly successful TiE Silicon Valley My Story Program that he started in 2011. He pursued PhD studies at University of California, Santa Barbara, and holds an MS from Texas Tech and BS/MS degrees from the Birla Institute of Technology & Science. He holds six patents in the areas of artificial intelligence, security and networking and has published several papers and articles on entrepreneurship and industry trends.Subedar Neeraj Chopra PVSM VSM is an Indian track and field athlete who is the reigning Olympic Champion in javelin throw. A Junior Commissioned Officer in the Indian Army, Chopra is the first track and field athlete to win a gold medal for India at the Olympics.Kay Firth-Butterfield is Head of Artificial Intelligence and a member of the Executive Committee at the World Economic Forum and is one of the foremost experts in the world on the governance of AI. She is a Barrister, former Judge and Professor, technologist and entrepreneur who has an abiding interest in how humanity can equitably benefit from new technologies, especially AI. Kay is an Associate Barrister (Doughty Street Chambers), Master of the Inner Temple, London and serves on the Lord Chief Justice’s Advisory Panel on AI and Law. She co-founded AI Global and was the world’s first Chief AI Ethics officer in 2014 and created the AIEthics twitter hashtag. Kay is Vice-Chair of The IEEE Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems and was part of the group which met at Asilomar to create the Asilomar AI Ethical Principles. She is on the Polaris Council for the Government Accountability Office (USA), the Advisory Board for UNESCO International Research Centre on AI and AI4All. Kay has advanced degrees in Law and International Relations and regularly speaks to international audiences addressing many aspects of the beneficial and challenging technical, economic and social changes arising from the use of AI. She has been consistently recognized as a leading woman in AI since 2018 and was featured in the New York Times as one of 10 Women Changing the Landscape of Leadership.Daniel H. (Don) Callahan is an executive partner at Bridge Growth Partners and serves as executive chairman of TIME, where he is leading a comprehensive digital transformation of this iconic media brand. Acknowledged internationally as a leader in both the financial services and technology industries, Mr. Callahan was most recently the chief administrative officer and global head of operations and technology at Citigroup. He retired from Citigroup in December 2018 and now serves on the boards of Tata Consultancy Services, Ltd., WEX, Inc., Kore AI, Capco, and Accedian, a Bridge Growth Partners-backed company. At Citigroup, Mr. Callahan managed a complex set of businesses and services spanning more than 100 countries, a multi-billion dollar operating budget and critical systems infrastructure including the bank’s cyber security initiatives. He most recently led a top- to-bottom transformation of operations and technology, helping move the global bank from a collection of independent and dispersed entities into a lean, fully integrated enterprise.Dr. Richard Dasher has been Director of the US-Asia Technology Management Center at Stanford University since 1994. His research and teaching focus on innovation and entrepreneurship in different business cultures, the impact of new technologies on industry value chains, open innovation management, and the integration of sustainability and social inclusiveness in corporate strategy. From 1998 – 2015, he concurrently served as Executive Director of Stanfords industry-funded Center for Integrated Systems (CIS), widely regarded as one of the world’s most productive university-industry partnerships. He was the first-ever non-Japanese person asked to participate in Japanese national university governance, serving as an outside Board Director and member of the Management Council of Tohoku University from 2004 – 2010. He is currently an advisor to venture capital firms, accelerators, nonprofit organizations, and government S and T funding programs in the U.S., Canada, India, Japan, S. Korea, and Thailand. He is fluent in Japanese.Lisa Davis is Senior Vice President and CIO at Blue Shield of California, a $21 billion nonprofit health plan serving 4.6 million members in California. She’s driving Blue Shield toward a future state of health care, transforming the IT business model and leveraging digital technology, data, and analytics to accelerate the delivery of capabilities to improve the member and provider experience. An innovative business executive, Davis’ future-forward vision has improved business outcomes and customer experiences for organizations in high-tech, academia, and the federal government. She led a global P&L at Intel prior to being the CIO at Georgetown University. She was also CIO of both the U.S. Marshals Service and Counterintelligence Field Activity. Lisa holds a Master of Science in Human Resources Management from Golden Gate University and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from Syracuse University. She serves on the board of Blue Shield of California Foundation.Shamini Dhana is CEO of D/Sphere, a creative fashion tech platform founded in 2020, for people to create, collaborate and story-tell through the medium of fashion. D/Sphere empowers the consumer to be the solution to climate change by reengineering second life materials and recreating existing clothing into zero-waste fashion, thereby diverting the 70% of the $3 trillion fashion industry that would have ended up in the landfill. D/Sphere connects customer to the garment workers making clothes thereby providing transparency and honoring the worker by paying it forward. D/Sphere is unlocking creativity through the personalization of fashion Shamini Dhana founded Dhana Inc. in 2008, a Certified B Corp, headquartered in California, a pioneer of circular and regenerative fashion, a purpose driven leader and climate advocate with over a decade experience in global sourcing, supply chain management and a recognized leader in sustainable fashion. A former investment banker, turned entrepreneur, Shamini Dhana witnessed firsthand the exploitation of children, workers and the environment while doing business in India over twenty years ago, which was the pivotal moment in her life vision “Uniting Humanity Through Fashion”. In 1999, Shamini Dhana joined Silicon Valley Bank, and as senior vice president, Shamini Dhana managed the India operations, private equity and investor relationships and grew cross-border technology clients in seven years. Credited for the landmark Silicon Valley VC mission to India in 2002, Shamini Dhana successfully paved the way to much of the foreign VC investment today in India including the set up of new funds, collaboration and teams to support the growing emerging technologies arising in India. Prior to banking and finance, Shamini Dhana worked with multinational companies in the Asian Pacific Region bringing foreign direct investment into the State of California, the seventh largest economy in the world in 1990s and was on the lead team for the governor’s business trade and investment mission to seven countries in Asia. With over 20 years of experience in international strategy, global operations, venture capital, business development, and executive leadership in Corporate America, Shamini Dhana has served on numerous non-profit boards, including the UNA which organized the first ever climate and sustainability conference in California post the Rio Earth Summit in 1992.Daljit S. Doogal is a partner and business lawyer with Foley & Lardner LLP, where he is a member of the firm’s Management Committee. Daljit focuses his practice in corporate, private equity, venture capital and restructuring law matters. He is a member of the firm's Transactions, Private Equity & Venture Capital and International Practices, and its Automotive and Manufacturing Industry Teams. Daljit is a former managing partner of Foley’s Detroit office and the former chair of the firm's national Business Law Department.
Daljit’s practice includes representation of automotive and manufacturing companies, venture capital/private equity funds, financial institutions, and other publicly and privately held businesses in the areas of mergers, acquisitions and divestitures; private offerings of equity securities; fund formation/representation, financing matters and corporate reorganizations, including the restructuring of financially distressed companies, both inside and outside of bankruptcy. Daljit serves as the outside general counsel for numerous companies and frequently advises boards of directors and special committees in regard to fiduciary duty issues in various contexts.
Ken Elefant joined Sorenson Ventures in 2017 and leads the firm’s early-stage technology practice. Prior to Sorenson Ventures, Ken spent more than 18 years in Silicon Valley at leading venture capital firms including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Battery Ventures. In addition, Ken has over 6 years in operational roles at technology companies. Ken enjoys working closely with entrepreneurs to help them attack new market opportunities and gain access to key initial customers and partners. His efforts have led to recognition as one of the most connected names in tech. At Sorenson, Ken has invested in Bridgecrew (Palo Alto Networks), CloudKnox (Microsoft), Openpath (Motorola Solutions), Octarine (VMWare), Kenna Security (Cisco), CyCognito, Talon Security, Qualio, Acceldata, Evo Security and several other startups.
Before joining Sorenson, Ken was Managing Director at Intel Capital and VP at Intel Corporation. Leading the software and security groups at Intel Capital, Ken invested in several market-leading companies including DocuSign, Forescout, AlienVault (AT&T), AtHoc (Blackberry), Prolexic (Akamai), Venafi, Vectra Networks, Gigya (SAP), BrightEdge, among many others.
Prior to Intel Capital, Ken was a founding general partner at Opus Capital. While at Opus, he served on the boards of Spock Networks (Intelius), Transpond (Webtrends), Supersecret (Knowledge Adventure), Alert Enterprise, Jivox, and TrustedID (Equifax). Previously, Ken was a Senior Associate at both Lightspeed Venture Partners and Battery Ventures. Before business school, Ken worked at Radius, Claris Corporation (the software subsidiary of Apple), and RealNetworks, where he held various sales, marketing, finance, and business development positions.
Ken received an MBA from Harvard Business School and holds a Bachelor of Science in economics from the Wharton School of Business. He is a Kauffman Fellow.Carl Eschenbach focuses on infrastructure technologies, cloud, and SaaS investments. He is a director of Aurora, Cohesity, Cresta, Gong, Grafana, Palo Alto Networks, Salt, Snowflake, UiPath, Workday and Zoom. He has been or is still involved with Sequoia Capital portfolio companies including CaptivateIQ, GitHub, Medallia, Retool, Rockset, StackRox and ThousandEyes. Carl has thirty years of high-tech industry experience including infrastructure software, cloud, SaaS, networking, telephony and storage. Prior to Sequoia, Carl was President and COO of VMware, where he helped grow the company from $31 million in his first full year to $7 billion in revenues and from 200 people to 20,000. Prior to joining VMware, Carl held various sales leadership positions with Inktomi, 3Com, EMC, and Lucent Technologies. Carl is passionate about leadership and the importance it plays in building iconic companies.Nikki Farb is an active investor in and advisor to technology companies. She is currently a Venture Partner at Headline and invests in web3 companies.
Farb began her career as a teacher for the Broad Foundation - selected as 1 out of 10,000 applicants to pioneer a program in public high schools. After her program, Farb attended the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and studied finance, entrepreneurship and accounting. Upon graduation, Farb joined Goldman Sachs’ Investment Banking Division and advised technology companies of all stages across a range of strategic and financing transactions. In 2011, she was promoted to Head of Emerging Internet Companies - a new role established to ensure GS was identifying and selecting the most promising early stage technology companies including Pinterest, Instagram, Reddit and SnapChat. She was the first touch point for Goldman Sachs and established early, meeting in the garage, relationships with the CEOs of the companies that became icons of their decade. In addition to building relationships and executing deals, Farb was a senior investing team member on a $200M Goldman Sachs Venture Capital Fund. In 2013, Farb left Goldman Sachs to found Darby Smart, a user-generated video shopping platform. Darby Smart was an early leader in the creator economy. Darby Smart was acquired by Grove Collaborative (expected IPO in 2022). After serving as an executive at Grove (1,100 employees), Farb joined Headline, $2.5BN AUM, as a Venture Partner and began focusing on partnering with and investing in the best entrepreneurs in web3. She advises SoFi, and is an investor in Consensys (MetaMask), Fractal, AfterParty and Wander.
Farb has been involved in the web3 movement since 2013, having invested in BitCoin then, and is deeply passionate about the potential for this computing paradigm.
Farb has made regular appearances on Good Morning America and has been featured in the WSJ, Fortune, Forbes, CNN, Bloomberg and Fox.
In her free time, she hangs out with her twin boys, Kass and Cooper, and her husband Michael (a 3 time entrepreneur).Isabelle Freidheim is a venture capitalist and entrepreneur and the founder of the Athena family of SPACs. She currently serves as Athena Technology Acquisition Corporation II's Chief Executive Officer and as Chairman of the company's Board of Directors and is the founder and Chairman of Athena Technology Acquisition Corp. (NYSE: ATHN).
She is the co-founder and was CEO of Magnifi (acquired by The Tifin Group) and is a co-founder and managing partner of Castle VC (formerly Starwood VC), a venture investment firm. She has had a career in venture capital at various VC funds making investments in technology companies across stages with a current focus on late-stage investments in the sectors of financial technologies, data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning and SaaS.
Ms. Freidheim received a BA in Economics from Columbia University and an MA from Columbia Business School.
Dwight French is a proven executive with over 20 years of successful business leadership and experience in the health insurance, provider, and life science sectors. His work serving healthcare includes executive positions at BearingPoint (formerly KPMG Consulting), SVP of Enterprise Product Management at HMS Holdings Corp (HMSY-US), Chief Business Development Officer at Santa Clara County IPA (SCCIPA), and co-founder of a population health management software company that a Fortune 20 strategic invested in and was successfully exited.Dwight has been working at the leading edge of healthcare reform since its inception. Described as an insightful leader, his innovative strategies exploit business opportunities that arise from this evolving reform. Dwight possesses the rare ability to craft policies and shape vision into actionable results. He accomplishes this unique skill through developing leaders, solid operational execution, effective communication and intentional relationship development. He now services as a Healthcare Principal in the Global Healthcare practice for Red Hat.Red Hat provides transformative digital capabilities that improve flow, and reduce the friction, and toil inherent in monolithic IT—the abilities required to transcend the cloud-native paradigm shift. As the healthcare ecosystem and health IT gets more complicated, with more specialized outside applications, we have to create a new technology system in which data flows freely and delivers more insights for patients, providers, and the health system across the health ecosystem. Join our session at TiEcon22 with one of our customers, Blue Shield of California. Their SVP and CIO, Lisa Davis, will talk about their Health Reimagined vision to deliver personalized, holistic, high-tech and high-touch care worthy of our family and friends and affordable for all.Hiroshi Furukawa is responsible for a global innovation strategy and co-creation projects with customers. As a hard-working, knowledgeable, and target-oriented Sales Leader, he has built and maintained client loyalty through relationship-building skills, excels at devising strategies for increasing revenue, and can manage and coach team members effectively and motivate them with a clear strategy and goals. In addition, he has done a lot of Business Development with new technologies and has built innovative solutions with forward-thinking solid to drive growth in the organization.Lorien is a wannabe polymath who was born in Malaysia while his dad was curing tropical diseases with the Peace Corps. Off to a cool start, he spent the next few years of his life in Hawaii, San Diego, India…before settling into the much more exciting, colorful and exceedingly polite land of Canada. In 1994, at the age of 24, when Lorien’s younger brother Matt asked him to run his bourgeoning internet company, Lorien did what any self-respecting lawyer of 6 months would do--he quit. He moved the company from their parent’s basement and over the next four years managed the growth of Interlog, one of Canada’s first commercial ISP’s, to over 150 employees, 65,000 customers and profitability. The company was then acquired by a large multinational telecommunications provider. Determined not to be one hit wonders. Lorien and Matt teamed up again and co-founded Bird on a Wire Networks - a managed web hosting and data-center provider which was one of the first of its kind in Canada. Within two years, the company was acquired by AT&T Canada. Their third start-up, pingg.com, based in New York City, was acquired by 1800-Flowers. Lorien has also been known to run divisions of Fortune 500 companies (Micron), spearhead the exponential U.S. growth of a UK based tech company (MessageLabs) as Global VP Business Development, serve on the advisory board of a number of start-ups and whip up a mean breakfast of Spanish eggs. Lorien has a LLB from Toronto’s Osgoode Hall Law School and is a member in good standing with the Ontario Bar. He splits time between NYC where he can be seen running along the west side highway listening to the latest DJ mix and Jackson Hole WY, where he owns a sporting good store and chases powder, obviously....Rohit Ghai is Group Chief Executive Officer of RSA, a leader in cybersecurity and risk management solutions that provides organizations with technology to address challenges across security, risk management and fraud prevention in the digital era. In addition to serving as CEO for SecurID and NetWitness businesses, Ghai provides oversight to the Archer, Outseer and RSA Conference businesses as member of the board of directors for RSA. He regularly advises global customers on their digital and security transformation initiatives and is often cited in broadcast and print media on topics like data privacy, content management, information governance, digital risk and cybersecurity.
Previously, he served as President and chief executive of Dell EMC’s Enterprise Content Division (Documentum), where he was instrumental in setting a compelling vision, transforming go-to-market and revitalizing the portfolio for the digital era through strategic partnerships and acquisitions. Ghai has experience in both startup and big company settings, with expertise in digital transformation in highly regulated markets, and knowledge across software, systems and security. He joined Dell EMC from Symantec, where he held a variety of senior product and general management roles. Previously, he was at Computer Associates (CA) in a number of senior management roles. Ghai joined CA through the acquisition of Cheyenne Software, a startup in the backup and data protection space. Rohit holds a master’s degree in computer science from the University of South Carolina and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Roorkee.Shravan Goli is Coursera's Chief Product Officer and Head of Consumer Revenue. Before joining Coursera, Shravan was at DHI Group Inc. where he initially served as President of Dice, a tech job marketplace, and successfully led the growth strategy and operations for Dice, Dice International, ClearanceJobs, and Slashdot Media. Before that, Shravan served as President and Chief Executive Officer of Dictionary.com where he sparked impressive growth through product innovation. Previously, Shravan was GM for Social Media Business at Slide, Inc. and at Yahoo!, he served as GM for Yahoo! Video and as Head of Products for Yahoo! Finance. Earlier in his career, Shravan was at Microsoft where he started out as an early member of the MSN.com team and led the launch of several MSN services and subsequently held roles in the home and entertainment division. In addition, he was a co-founder of Corners.in, a content-centric social networking service. Shravan holds an M.B.A. from the University of Washington and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland.Rashmi Gopinath is a General Partner at B Capital Group where she focuses on enterprise software investments in cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, devops, and artificial intelligence and machine learning. She brings over two decades of experience investing and operating in enterprise technologies. She led B Capital’s investments in companies such as DataRobot, FalconX, Clari, Phenom People, Synack, Innovaccer, Hypersonix, Yalo, Labelbox, Armory, Fabric, Pendo, OwnBackup, Perimeter81, Figment, TRM Labs, and Highspot.
Rashmi was previously a Managing Director at M12, Microsoft's venture fund, where she led investments globally in the enterprise space and sat on several Boards including Synack, Innovaccer, Contrast Security, UnravelData, Incorta, among others.
Prior to M12, Rashmi was an Investment Director with Intel Capital where she was involved in the firm’s investments in startups including MongoDB (Nasdaq: MDB), ForeScout (Nasdaq: FSCT), Maginatics (acq. by EMC), BlueData (acq. by HPE), among others. Rashmi held operating roles at high-growth startups such as BlueData (acq. by HPE) and Couchbase (Nasdaq: BASE) where she led global business development, product and marketing roles. She began her career in engineering and product roles at Oracle and GE Healthcare. She earned an M.B.A. from Northwestern University, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from University of Mumbai in India.Reena Gupta is a mom, a solo bootstrapped entrepreneur, an author, a work-life harmony coach, and an advocate of teaching entrepreneurship. She is an integral part of her community, serving in the city economic vitality committee and school superintendent advisory board. Growing up in a joint family in India with three dozen relatives, Reena always knew she was not alone and that a rising tide, indeed, lifts all boats. Having no business background or connections, Reena wrote her own script by emigrating to Nashville, TN where she created two companies, Avankia and TargetRecruit. Hiring a stay-at-home mom as her first employee left a big impression on Reena, and she knew that someday she would do more to help women and the underutilized talent pool. After a successful exit from TargetRecruit, Reena founded Mom Relaunch Foundation, to nurture and mentor women reentering the workforce. Using her experience, Reena wrote her new book, Career Interrupted, which teaches about balancing life’s 3-legged-stool; career, wellness, and family & friends. Reena is a lifetime learner and an optimist who is inspired by her kids every day. She is intrigued by traveling to new places, exploring new cultures, exercising her mind through yoga, and meditation.Kazuya Hirota is the Vice President and Head of the Silicon Valley Office of NTT Data Corporation. He is responsible for setting up partner alliance strategies and tactics for expanding the digital capabilities in the global market and strengthening the partnerships with multinational companies, including IT Giants, next-gen companies, and startups in the cloud, cyber security, enterprise application, data, and intelligence areas. Mr. Hirota is a highly experienced IT service professional with a solid technical background and 25+ years of experience in System Engineering, especially in the IT infrastructure and system platforms. In addition, he is skilled in system engineering, solution sales, planning strategy, and organizational management with experience.Hiroshi Honjo has over 10 years of experience in cybersecurity. He is responsible for protecting NTT DATA clients and NTT DATA from cyber-attacks. Previously, he was responsible for Strategy in Technology and Innovation, maximizing NTT Research and Development outcomes and the partner technology practices delivered to worldwide clients.Varun Jain is a General Partner of SE Ventures, a $600M venture capital fund launched in close partnership with Schneider Electric, and a member of the Investment Committee. He has spent close to a decade in investing in several transformative AI and IoT startups that have proven to be powerful catalysts for digital transformation and decarbonization of industry, mobility, and the built environment.
Varun led SE Ventures' investments in Augury, Aquant, Oosto, Energetic Insurance, Prisma Photonics, Pico MES, and Navix Solutions. Before joining SE Ventures, Varun was running the global early-stage fund at Qualcomm Ventures. One of the world's first and most successful corporate-backed early-stage investing efforts, this fund backed several breakout winners such as Zoom (NASDAQ: ZM), Matterport (NASDAQ: MTTR), Cruise Automation (acquired by GM), Noom and many others.
Varun holds an MBA from Kellogg School of Management, where he was a McCormick Scholar.
Jackie Jung is Vice President of Global Operations Strategy and Center of Excellence (COE) and Chief of Staff at Western Digital. Jackie is a passionate leader with proven success in transforming organizations through technology adoption, business process improvement and culture change. Jackie leads the company’s 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR) transformation, delivering world class operational excellence, augmenting workforce, and driving sustainability implementation in global operations with a footprint of 18 factories across 6 countries. Jackie has been a part of the Western Digital organization for nearly 26 years and has held various positions throughout the company’s numerous mergers, acquisitions, and transformations, including a 5-year assignment in two of the company’s offshore factories. She has held positions in process and product engineering, program management, and manufacturing operations. She is an experienced leader in all stages of the product lifecycle – from design, verification, product ramp through to volume manufacturing. A recognized strategist on the cutting edge of technology, Jackie has received numerous awards. Most recently, Jackie led Western Digital’s advanced manufacturing sites in Malaysia and Thailand to be named the 1st World Economic Forum (WEF) “Lighthouse” in each respective country, demonstrating each site’s advancement and implementation of 4IR technology. Individually, she was a recipient of Connected World’s “2021 Women of Technology” award. Jackie earned a Master of Science in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University. She also attended Stanford’s Graduate School of Business Executive Education for Strategy and Organization. Prior to this, Jackie earned her Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from UCLA. She is based at the company’s San Jose, CA headquarters location.Justin Kan is an American web3 entrepreneur and investor. He is a cofounder of Fractal, a marketplace for gamers to discover, buy and sell durable game assets and NFTs. He’s also a General Partner at Goat Capital, a seed fund that backs entrepreneurs with over $100M in assets under management.
Previously, Justin was a cofounder of Twitch, the internet live video streaming platform. In 2006, Justin launched the live video service Justin.tv, a company that started when he strapped a camera to his head and streamed his life to the internet 24/7. Over the next 8 years, through twists and turns, he and his cofounders turned the business into Twitch, ultimately selling to Amazon in 2014 for $970 million. Over the years, he has founded half a dozen companies which have raised over $500 million in venture capital and invested in some of the fastest growing startups around, including Reddit, Cruise Automation, Bird, Rippling, SendBird, Scale AI and many more.Jocelyn Kinsey is a partner at DFJ Growth. She joined the team in 2014 and has been actively involved with DFJ Growth’s investments in Collective Health, Giphy, Helix, Mapbox, Neocis, NotCo, Patreon, Ring (Amazon), and Splice. Prior to joining the firm, Jocelyn was with J.P. Morgan’s Alternative Investments Group in New York where she worked on the placement, diligence, and structuring of private equity, venture capital, real estate, and hedge fund products. Jocelyn graduated from Stanford University with a BS in management science and engineering. While at Stanford, she was part of the founding team at StartX, Stanford’s student startup accelerator. Jocelyn was featured on the 2017 Forbes 30 under 30 Venture Capital list as "investing in the next great tech companies." She is an active member of All Raise, the non-profit dedicated to increasing diversity across venture capital and venture-backed businesses.Ms. Kline is the President and Board Member at AHEAD Medicine, a biotechnology company in the San Francisco Bay Area. Prior to joining AHEAD, Ms. Kline founded an impact venture capital fund targeting entrepreneurs in emerging markets, where she remains a Partner. She also founded SeaSky Lab, which brings knowledge and resources from Silicon Valley to Asia for tech entrepreneurs Ms. Kline is a veteran of Intel Corp., where she created the company’s first tablet for emerging economies and remains a Board Member of the Intel Alumni Network in San Francisco Bay Area. Prior to Intel, Ms. Kline was an economist at the World Bank, where she implemented technology projects in South America, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe. An advisor to several incubation programs, Ms. Kline is UC Berkeley Skydeck’s Lead Ambassador to 48 countries in the Asia-Pacific region. She is also a Professional Faculty in the Sustainable and Impact Finance Group at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business and a board member of The Circulate Initiative in Singapore. Ms. Kline holds an MBA from UC Berkeley and an MA in Economics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. A native of Bangkok, Thailand, she graduated with First Class Honours from Chulalongkorn University.Hilarie joined NEA as a Venture Partner in 2017 on the technology team where she focuses on enterprise software and services. A software industry veteran, Hilarie spent the last three decades at growth-stage companies in operating and board roles. Most recently, Hilarie was President at New Relic. Prior to that, Hilarie was President at Salesforce.com responsible for the company’s worldwide sales organization. Hilarie started her career at Intuit and Oracle.Hilarie currently serves as a member of the board of directors of public and private companies including Zendesk, Automation Anywhere, HackerOne, BloomReach, Beyond Identity, Tulip, Knotch, Sentry, Toast, and Uniphore. She is Chair of the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network. She also is Chair of the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy Advisory Council and serves on the Board of Trustees. She previously served on the board of directors for Informatica, now a private company, Duo Security which was acquired by Cisco and Tableau which was acquired by Salesforce.Hilarie has a master’s degree in Public Policy from the University of Chicago and a bachelor’s degree from Mills College. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two children.As Chief Information Officer, Praniti is responsible for leading Zscaler’s Information technology solutions and enabling a seamless experience for customers and employees. She is focused on driving a comprehensive strategy that will help scale the company rapidly, build a world class IT organization, deliver innovative solutions globally, and create a secure robust infrastructure.Greg Lavender is Senior Vice President, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and General Manager of the Software and Advanced Technology Group (SATG) at Intel Corporation. As CTO, he is responsible for driving Intel’s future technical innovation and research programs. He is also responsible for defining a singular artificial intelligence software stack to support Intel’s range of business and hardware offerings. Lavender joined Intel in June 2021 from VMware, where he served as senior vice president and CTO. He has more than 35 years of experience in software and hardware product engineering and advanced research and development. Before VMware, Lavender was managing director and CTO for Cloud Architecture and Technology Engineering at Citigroup, where he led the global transformation of Citi IT to adopt modern mobile technology, cloud IaaS and PaaS, big data and advanced analytics, high performance computing, and agile software development models. Lavender holds a Bachelor of Science in computer science from the University of Georgia, and a Master of Science and Ph.D. in computer science from Virginia Tech.Matthew Lekstutis is the Global Managing Partner, Global Supply Chain Consulting Practice & Center of Excellence for Tata Consultancy Services. He has over 20 years of experience as an industry executive and advisor. Mr. Lekstutis helps clients capture business performance improvement opportunities and drive growth by enabling new business models and technologies across the supply chain. Mr. Lekstutis has deep functional expertise in Enterprise Transformation, Supply Chain, Strategic Sourcing, Operations, Merger Integration and Enabling Technologies. He has worked with customers globally to provide insight into the driving issues and dynamics across many industries, including aerospace and defense, automotive, consumer goods, diversified industrial, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and retail. He is a frequent contributor of articles and blog posts on the transformation of supply chain management to digital supply network management and speaks regularly at industry conferences and summits. Mr. Lekstutis’s prior experience includes senior leadership roles at A.T. Kearney, General Dynamics, PwC, and ZIN Technologies. Matt earned his Bachelor of Science in Engineering from Webb Institute and his MBA from the Harvard Business School.Hrish is a Co-founder and CEO at SuperWorld. Previously, he co-founded Rogue Initiative Studios, a Hollywood film, TV, gaming, and immersive entertainment studio. He was also the founding Managing Partner of Eastlabs, an early-stage VC fund based in Kyiv, Ukraine. Previously, Hrish was a Senior Business Developer and Global Evangelist at Toptal (backed by Andreessen Horowitz, the Rockefellers & the co-founders of Facebook and Zynga), a venture capital investor at Spencer Trask Ventures, and an investment banker at both UBS Investment Bank and HSBC Securities, where he specialized in public finance, corporate finance, and M&A. He also was an Associate in the Global Business Development Group at management consulting firm Hewitt Associates. Hrish was born in India and grew up in the United States. He also has spent many years living around the world in Europe, Asia, and South America. He has a close connection to the people and cultures in Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Spain, France, Vietnam, China, Colombia, Bali, and Thailand. Hrish holds a BA in Political Science from Rice University and both an MBA and MPH from University of Illinois at Chicago. In his free time, he enjoys working out, fashion photography, and traveling the world.Yvonne is an accomplished Investment Principal at Robert Bosch Venture Capital’s (RBVC) affiliate office located in Sunnyvale, responsible for sourcing, evaluating, and executing venture capital deals for RBVC in North America. Her specialty are investments in deep tech fields such as Machine Learning/AI, edge computing, industrial IoT, mobility, next generation computing including quantum, semiconductors, or sensors. She is an investor and non-executive board member of RBVC’s portfolio companies InSyte Systems, Syntiant, Zapata Computing, UltraSense Systems, Aclima, and Recogni.
Prior to this position Yvonne was Director of Technology Scouting and Business Development building up an Innovation Center in Silicon Valley for Bosch Automotive Electronics. She has two decades of solid experience in operations and engineering in the automotive and consumer electronics space through different executive roles at Bosch in Germany.
Yvonne received a diploma in Experimental Physics from University of Siegen, Germany, and holds a PhD in Applied Physics from University of Tuebingen, Germany.
Outside of work she mentors & advises several startup CEOs, serves as a board member at women@Bosch Silicon Valley, and volunteers in Bosch’s Mentoring Program.
Ed Macko is the Global Vice President and General Manager for Healthcare & Life Sciences (HCLS) industry. In his role(s), Ed works with clients worldwide to leverage information technology to solve critical business problems. Ed provides strategic technical and business leadership to drive digital transformation across the HCLS clients (commercial and academic hospitals, health plans, pharmaceutical, biotech, and government) including working with strategic business partners. Some of Mr. Macko’s activities include technical and digital business strategy, architecture, business development, presales client engagement, product development, and industry standards. This includes leveraging capabilities like Cognitive Computing, AI / Machine Learning, Automation, Security and Blockchain across solutions for Enterprise Health Analytics, Population Health, Real World Evidence, Consumer Engagement, Fraud, Supply Chain, Clinical Trials Optimization and Translational Medicine. These solutions and capabilities spanning various data domains across the continuum of care (clinical, financial, administrative, genomics, consumer, social determinants, etc.). My expertise includes strategy, architecture, development, deployment and support across hybrid , multi cloud environments in a highly regulated environments (e.g. HIPAA, HITRUST, GxP, GDPR, FISMA). Ed received a bachelor’s degree with honors including a double major in information systems and business administration with a minor in Computer Science from Appalachian State University. He has worked for IBM for the past 25+years in product / solution development, business development, and client engagement roles including last 15 years as the HCLS CTO. Ed previously worked as a Software Engineer for NASA and commercial airline industry.Sumant is a Co-Founder & Managing Partner of March Capital. Sumant leads investments in cloud driven enterprise platforms, cloud infrastructure, AI/ML, and network infrastructure as well as companies supporting the Indian market. In his two decades of venture capital, Sumant has generated multiple meaningful exits in companies that he has either incubated or been the first institutional investor. His most recent exits include BillDesk (acquired by Prosus) and CarTrade Tech (NSE: CARTRADE), both valuable companies capitalizing on the digitization of the Indian Economy in their respective industry sectors.
Sumant’s previous exits include VeloCloud Networks (acquired by VMware), Magnite (NASDAQ: MGNI), Kosei (acquired by Pinterest), Appcito (acquired by A10 Networks), Deep Forest Media (acquired by Rakuten), Kazeon Systems (acquired by EMC), Mimosa Systems (acquired by Iron Mountain), Ankeena Networks (acquired by Juniper), Cetas (acquired by VMware), Apture (acquired by Google), and Perspica Systems (acquired by Cisco). He currently serves on the Board of Directors of market-leading technology companies SparkCognition and Uniphore.
Additionally, Sumant is co-founder of two leading technology incubators in the San Francisco Bay Area: The Hive, focused on AI and Blockchain driven companies, and The Fabric, focused on cloud, IoT, and network infrastructure companies. He has helped incubate more than 25 companies throughout his career. In 2000, Sumant joined Clearstone Venture Partners and became a Managing Director four years later. Prior to Clearstone, Sumant spent more than eight years as an entrepreneur, starting companies in both India and the United States.
Sumant has an M.B.A. from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Michigan State University. He is a Charter Member of TiE.Vivek Mehra is a Partner Emeritus at August Capital, a venture capital firm that invests in innovative technology companies. Previously Vivek was General Partner till 2018. Vivek's areas of interest include data center technologies, infrastructure software, SaaS, networking, security, and storage. Prior to joining August Capital, Vivek co-founded Cobalt Networks in 1996.Mr. Dayton Misfeldt is a Partner at Decheng Capital and has been with the firm since January 2021.
Prior to joining Decheng Capital, Mr. Misfeldt was a Managing Director of Bay City Capital. At Bay City Capital, Mr. Misfeldt invested in biopharmaceutical companies and worked closely with management teams on strategic decision making, business development and positioning companies for exit opportunities through accessing the public markets or acquisition. Past investments include Cadence Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Mallinckrodt), Civitas Therapeutics (acquired by Acorda Therapeutics), Dermira (acquired by Eli Lilly), MAP Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Allergan), Nextwave Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Pfizer), Oculex Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Allergan), and Pharmion (acquired by Celgene), among others.
Prior to joining Bay City Capital, Mr. Misfeldt was a Vice President at Roth Capital Partners where he worked as a sell-side analyst covering the biopharmaceutical industry. He began his career in consulting at LifeScience Economics.
Mr. Misfeldt received a BA in Economics from the University of California, San Diego.
Kenji Motohashi is a Cloud Evangelist responsible for the widespread deployment of professional services for various clouds such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, VMWare, and NTT Data cloud service. He also teaches at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Previously, he was at NTT DATA AgileNet (US), working on business development of public clouds and engaged in open innovation at OpenStack, Open Compute, and Open Networking Foundation.Milind serves as Chief Technology Officer at Early Warning, the fintech company owned by seven of the country's leading banks. In this role he oversees the teams responsible for the technology and engineering of solutions that empower financial institutions of all sizes to make confident decisions, enable fast payments, and mitigate fraud. With more than 20 years of experience in technology leadership roles, he specializes in reimagining and fortifying core platforms and processes while building strategic innovative capabilities to fuel growth.
Prior to joining Early Warning in 2020, Milind served as EVP & Chief Information Officer for Innovation & Strategic Services at Wells Fargo Bank. There he was responsible for technology strategy to position the bank for the future, relying on engineering excellence in capabilities such as data, advanced analytics, machine learning, natural language processing, automation, distributed ledger platforms, and quantum computing research.
He has an extensive background in highly regulated financial industries and managing large scale portfolios of critical transaction processing platforms, applications, data, and infrastructure services. In previous roles, Milind was responsible for Citigroup’s global data, advanced analytics and regulatory services technology, and payments technology at JPMorgan Chase.
Milind has a Bachelor of Technology Degree from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay and an MBA in Computer Information Systems and Finance from Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Calcutta. He has co-authored a book on Java2 Network Security published by Prentice Hall.
Sandeep Nailwal is a co-founder of Polygon, a leading Ethereum scaling and infrastructure platform. Sandeep started his career as a software engineer and, in 2015, launched ScopeWeaver, India's largest marketplace for professional services, where he designed blockchain-based decentralized application architecture. Prior to that, Sandeep led the technology department at Welspun, the largest textile company in Asia, and worked as a consultant at Deloitte. Sandeep co-founded Polygon with Jaynti Kanani and Anurag Arjun in 2017.
Sandeep holds an MBA from the National Institute of Industrial Engineering (Nitie), one of the top schools in India. He is based in Dubai with his 200+ people team distributed across India, Dubai, Asia, the USA, and Europe. His primary responsibilities include spearheading the branding, marketing, adoption, and operations at Polygon as well as partnering with key stakeholders to push forward the vision of Polygon.Shreyas has been an experienced technical product leader in Trust & Safety over the last 12+ years and currently leads safety products for LinkedIn. He leads a team of product managers focused on building AI/ML-based defenses and user experiences that serve over 800 million users of LinkedIn. He is passionate about keeping people safe online from fake identities, fraud, scams, malware, phishing, obscene & pornographic content, and confirmed misinformation. Before LinkedIn, he held engineering and product manager roles at Yahoo and Box.Ben Narasin is the Founder and General Partner of Tenacity Venture Capital, a pre-Series A venture fund. Immediately previously, Narasin was a full time investor and Venture Partner at New Enterprise Associates (NEA), one of the worlds largest and oldest traditional venture firms. A prolific entrepreneur and highly regarded early-stage investor with three decades of company-building expertise, Narasin has focused on emerging technologies and new markets throughout his investment career. With a portfolio comprising key early successes in some of today’s fastest growing sectors, such as fintech, digital marketplaces, mobile and connected devices. His overarching focus in seeking new investments is, in his words, “to find founders who make me say wow.”
Narasin is a 25-year entrepreneur and 10-year early-stage investor. His knack for spotting emerging trends led him to make seed investments in companies like Dropcam, Lending Club, TellApart, Kabbage and Zenefits. Before NEA, Narasin served as a General Partner at Canvas Ventures, and was prior to that was President of TriplePoint Ventures, the equity arm of TriplePoint Capital, where he oversaw the firm’s seed funding investment activities.
Narasin’s path to investing is rooted in entrepreneurship. He founded several consumer companies before launching his investing career, including Fashionmall.com, one of the first e-commerce companies, which he founded in 1993 and led to a successful IPO in 1999. Narasin frequently writes and speaks about technology and investing, as well as food and wine, a lifelong passion. He holds a B.A. in Entrepreneurial Studies from Babson College.
I am a Staff Machine Learning Engineer with Planet, applying machine and deep learning to remote sensing imagery of Earth's surface. Planet images the entirety of the Earth daily to monitor changes and pinpoint trends. The ultimate goal is to enable a Queryable Earth, indexing physical change on Earth and making it searchable for all. I have a decade and a half experience as a software engineer across such companies as Google & Dropbox, startups, and the open source world. I also have a Machine Learning Research Scientist affiliation with the SETI Institute and NASA’s Frontier Development Lab, applying deep learning to space science and space exploration. Before the SETI Institute I was a Machine Learning Engineer at Dropbox, doing industrial R&D to ship deep learning-powered products to millions of users and across billions of files. I've worn many hats in my career, whether as a tech lead, a product engineer, a startup founder, or a full stack software engineer. I have a long tradition of untraditional, cross-disciplinary innovation across fields. Earlier work includes having started Coworking, which grew into an international grassroots movement to establish a new kind of workspace for the self-employed, with more than 15,000 coworking spaces now open globally. At a startup named Inkling I founded Inkling Habitat, re-imagining interactive digital textbooks for higher education and how they are published by adopting ideas from computer science — Inkling Habitat turned into a multi-million dollar business that was adopted by the world’s major educational publishers, including Pearson & Elsevier. At Google I helped the web blossom into a true application deployment platform through efforts like HTML5. Finally, I worked with Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the computer mouse & hypertext, on the National Science Foundation-funded HyperScope project to use advanced hypertext to support collaborative teams.Liv spearheaded the creation of the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA), an initiative endorsed by the UN Secretary-General that facilitates the discovery and implementation of digital public goods. The DPGA is co-hosted by UNICEF, UNDP, and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD). In her role, she leverages her 15 years of experience with NORAD, where she has worked on country capacity building and led several digital innovation projects involving open-source technologies. Liv studied political science at the University of Oslo and holds an Executive Master in Energy Management from the BI Norwegian Business School.Jonathan Norris is a managing director for business development in SVB's Healthcare practice. Norris oversees business development efforts for banking and lending opportunities as well as spearheading strategic relationships with many healthcare venture capital firms. He also helps SVB Capital through sourcing and advising on limited partnership allocations.
In addition, he speaks at major investor and industry conferences and authors widely cited analyses of healthcare venture capital trends. Norris has more than nineteen years of banking experience working with healthcare companies and venture capital firms.
Norris earned a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University of California, Riverside and a Juris Doctorate from Santa Clara University.Adam runs VC & Startup Partnerships for Silicon Valley at Zendesk. Previously he worked as an investment associate at a Silicon Valley VC (investors in Airbnb, Amplitude, etc.), where we reviewed 2000+ high-growth startups. Before investing, Adam founded 2x B2B SaaS companies (1 exit, 1 failed). Adam lives in San Francisco, and in his free time runs a podcast called TheTop.VC, where he has interviewed VCs from Sequoia, Emergence, 500 Startups, Techstars, and more.Ganesh is an accomplished business executive, entrepreneur and investor, with deep expertise in data and artificial intelligence (AI) related businesses. He is passionate about using technology to solve the biggest challenges for humankind and is a believer in the power of AI to augment human potential. He is an advocate for ethical use of data and AI, and using technology as a global equalizer to create opportunities for all. He is currently the Founder of Autonomize AIm an AI Solutions company and Stories in AI, an edu-tainment venture, and consults for several Fortune 500 organizations on Data & AI strategy. He is an investor and advisor for several companies including Credo AI, OpsLab, Advanced Scanners, SuperWorld, Piggy Capital, Stonks and Laureti Motor Corporation. He previously co-founded and scaled Molecula Corp, a data management company, and led growth and commercial scaling at CognitiveScale, Inc, an Enterprise AI company. Prior to that he spent a 15 year career spanning Dell Technologies and Intel Corp. A frequent keynote speaker, he is published at Forbes, Business Insider, Fast Company and other publications and was honored by the Enterprise Management 360 as one of the top 10 tech experts revolutionizing AI. Ganesh holds a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from University of Calicut, India, and an MBA from McCombs School at the University of Texas Austin.Jayesh is a Co-Founder of Sony Entertainment Television, a multibillion-dollar major television network of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which he successfully exited. He is a Managing Partner of Good Startup, a venture capital fund manager in Singapore that invests in Alternative Protein companies. Good Protein Fund is a venture capital impact fund that invests worldwide in plant based, cultivated meat and fermentation technology companies. Good Startup's mission is to remove animals from the food chain. He was an advisor to Vistas Media Acquisition Company Inc., which successfully concluded a $100 million Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) of Anghami (Nasdaq: ANGH). Anghami is the largest music portal in the Middle East. He is on the board of One Animation and Milaap. He is on the Advisory Board of Akhand Jyoti Eye Hospital a non-profit in Bihar. He is on 2 Investment Committees of Aavishkaar social impact venture funds. The Aavishkaar group has assets under management of $1 billion dollars. Jayesh spent over 12 years at IBM in Houston and Singapore. He was part of the team that brought IBM back to India. IBM's largest headcount in the world is now in India. He holds a Bachelors degree from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Jayesh is a published author of "What Shall We Do With All This Money?"Wendy is the CIO of Nutanix, where she leads the global Information Technology team and functions that support the company’s business operations and employees. Prior to Nutanix, Wendy led technology teams for industry-makers like GoPro, Yahoo!, Cisco Systems, Exodus Communications and Robert Half. Dedicated to excellence in operations and delivery while maintaining a focus on innovation, Wendy has played a key role in envisioning and delivering business technologies for the past two decades.Rated as the top 50 Management thinkers, he is on a mission to bring back ancient Indian wisdom in a modern format. He is rated as India’s No 1 Bestselling Business author. With 17 best selling books on Chanakya, starting with all-time record breaking sales of ‘Corporate Chanakya’ to children series named ‘Chatur Chanakya’ he has readers from all age groups from across the globe. He is the Founder and Director of Chanakya International Institute of Leadership studies (CIILS) at the University of Mumbai. He has done over 1000 lectures in institutions like National Defence college (NDC), Defence services staff college (DSSC),Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Reserve Bank of India (RBI), Bombay stock exchange (BSE), National stock exchange (NSE) etc He has been part of various national and international projects of the government of India. He has been a leadership and strategy advisor to over 500 organizations including various corporations, government and non government (NGO) organizations. Many national and international awards have been conferred on him.Shiva Rajaraman is currently VP of Product at OpenSea the world’s largest NFT marketplace. Previously he led Commerce at Meta (neé Facebook) helping direct-to-consumer brands reach new customers via new experiences such as live shopping, product drops, and creator-led curation. Prior, he was CTO at WeWork where he launched a new on-demand space offering and received a masterclass in the importance of governance. Earlier he was VP Product at Spotify, where he helped usher in an era of personalization, new product experimentation, and expansion into new formats including podcasts. He spent much of his early career at Google and YouTube, helping people discover entertainment, education, and inspiration created by anyone for everyone. He’s most passionate about helping underserved creators reach an underserved audience.As CIO of Palo Alto Networks, Meerah Rajavel leads the global IT team that drives industry transformation for Cybersecurity, and delivers solutions that empower the company's mission of making a world where each day is more safe and secure than the last.Meerah excel at promoting transformation, innovation, profitability and agility through the creative use of technologies at large corporations such as Citrix, McAfee, and Cisco Systems, as well as rapid growth startups. She is a passionate leader who inspires and motivates teams to achieve extraordinary business outcomes through entrepreneurial thinking and collaborative cross-functional partnerships. She is a change agent, thought leader and a frequent speaker with a reputation for supporting women in technology, and promoting diversity and sustainability at the workplace.Vibhor is a growth and private equity investor in enterprise software with a specific focus on Artificial Intelligence and data infrastructure. Vibhor's prior investing experience includes General Partner at SymphonyAI, a $1B mid-market AI focused private equity fund, and Investment Director at Intel Capital, Intel's global VC group investing $500M-$700M per year in startups globally.
Vibhor has experience originating, structuring, and executing deals in North America, Europe, and Asia (China and India), and has investing experience in a variety of sectors. His exits include: iZettle (Fintech, acquired for $2.2B by Paypal); Venafi (cybersecurity, acquired for $1.2B by Thoma Bravo); Cloudgenix (SD-WAN, acquired by Palo Alto Networks for $460M); EazyTec (cloud computing and IoT in China, $1B IPO on the Shanghai stock exchange); Basis (smartwatch, acquired by Intel); Paxata (self-service data prep for big data and ML workloads, acquired by DataRobot); CareCloud (SaaS/digital health, acquired by Nasdaq: MTBC); and TOA (mobile field service, acquired by Oracle). During his investing career, Vibhor has served on multiple boards and has extensive corporate governance experience.
Vibhor has also served as interim CEO/COO of portfolio companies and greatly enjoys helping companies with their growth strategy, sales strategy and operational execution of business plans. Prior to his investing career, he was a management and technology consultant at Deloitte.
Vibhor has an MBA with High Honors from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he won the Student Management Investment Fund scholarship, and an undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering from IIT Kanpur, where he won the Dean’s Award for academic excellence. Outside of investing, he enjoys hiking, running, and non-fiction reading.Kirthiga Reddy brings over twenty years of experience leading technology-driven transformations to her role as President, Athena Technology II, the third in a series of all women-led SPACs bringing leading talent, access to capital and transaction experience to enable a market leader to access the equity capital markets. She is Founding Investment Partner of F7 seed fund. She serves on the Board of Directors for WeWork and Pear.
Previously, she was the first female Investing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers (SBIA), manager of the $100B+ SoftBank Vision Fund. At SBIA, Kirthiga focused on frontier, enterprise and health tech investments and managed a portfolio of $5B+. She served on the Board of Directors for Collective Health and Fungible. She also served on the Investment Committee for Emerge, global accelerator for brilliant companies led by underrepresented founders.
Prior to SBIA, she was Managing Director, Facebook India and South Asia for over six years, starting as their first employee in India. Her subsequent experiences at Facebook focused on emerging and high-growth markets including Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa and the Middle East. She has also served as Chair, Stanford Business School Management Board. Kirthiga holds an MBA from Stanford University, where she graduated with highest honors as an Arjay Miller Scholar, an M.S. in Computer Engineering from Syracuse University and a B.E. in Computer Science from Marathwada University, India. She has been recognized as Fortune India’s “Most Powerful Women” and as Fast Company’s “Most Creative People in Business” among other recognitions.Umesh Sachdev is Co-founder and CEO of Uniphore, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company focused on conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Automation across the enterprise. Sparked by his vision and focus to use technology to bridge the gap between the human voice and modern machines, Umesh’s passions morphed into a hypergrowth startup that has changed how businesses operate and solve complex enterprise customer service challenges. As one of the fastest-growing companies in the AI space, Uniphore’s pioneering work has transformed how business enterprises harness the value of conversations with their customers to create a future-proof customer experience – for every industry.
Umesh has been globally recognized as a ‘Next Generation Leader’ by Time Magazine, an ‘Innovator Under 35’ by the MIT Tech Review and a ‘40 under 40’ honoree by the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Umesh holds patents in AI and Conversational AI.
Kulwant is Vice President of Integrated Supply Chain at Outset Medical (Nasdaq: OM), Outset is a medical technology company pioneering a first-of-its-kind technology to reduce the cost and complexity of dialysis. She is responsible for all aspects of the supply chain, including procurement, strategic sourcing, informatics, logistics, distribution, vendor management and equipment/asset management. She has more than 30 years of diverse industry experience from High tech to medical devices and a proven track record in driving cost reductions and complexity with exceptional strategic direction, supporting dynamic growth, implementing new initiatives, improving operational efficiencies and driving supplier diversity. Currently, she serves as the Board of Punjabi Chamber of Commerce (PCC). Adept at achieving solid business outcomes through collaborative leadership, strategic analytics, and complex problem solving to remodel supply chain with eminent strategies.Team leader with 14 years of media experience throughout the ecosystem, including one of the largest social media platforms globally, the world's leading video platform, the #1 U.S. digital publisher for males age 18-34, and the only digital-first sports multi-platform network. Have built organizational infrastructure & operations, developed and executed content, distribution, & monetization strategies across digital platforms, and negotiated a range of partnerships in the business development function.Shahram is the Founder and General Partner of Civilization Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on supporting cutting edge innovations in health tech and biology. Prior to founding Civilization Ventures, Shahram was a life sciences entrepreneur and angel investor for more than a decade. Shahram was the founding CEO and later Executive Chairman of Rgenix, a biotech company with multiple first-in-class therapeutics for cancer now in Phase 2 clinical trials. Prior to Rgenix, he was founding CFO and VP of Corporate Development at NextBio, a genomics pioneer acquired by Illumina. Shahram sits on the boards of Rewrite and Foresight and has been one of the first checks into frontier tech companies such as Omada Health, CatalogDNA, Evonetix, BilliontoOne, Lemonaid Health, Outpace Bio, Ample, Avantome (acquired by Illumina), Bina (acquired by Roche), Rocket Pharma (IPO), and Counsyl (acquired by Myriad). Shahram began his career in Silicon Valley over twenty years ago at Wilson Sonsini and went on to advise some of the world's preeminent technology leaders while at Goldman Sachs. He earned his JD from Harvard Law School and obtained a BA in Economics from Pomona College. Shahram founded CV in 2017 to support innovations that could - with some luck and perseverance - improve human health, preserve the world's natural resources, and further our shared civilization.Jigna Shah is VP, Management & Finance, a member of Jacqui Guichelaar’s Digital Enterprise Solutions Senior Leadership Team. In leading the Management and Finance team, Jigna is responsible for the strategy, transformation, delivery and operations of Cisco’s core ERP and non-ERP platforms and services. Her team drives the effective and efficient operation of Order to Cash, Accounting and Close, Financial Planning and Performance Management, Treasury, Legal, Procurement and Cisco’s Leasing and Financing business. Jigna started at Cisco as an IT Engineer where she designed and developed various Channels business systems. She has played several leadership roles in Cisco IT in Sales Finance/Sales as well as in the Enterprise Data space. She led the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) transformation program on the Teradata platform and the IT effort for establishing the EDW platform within the enterprise data model for Financial Measures.  In her most recent role, she led the Incubation and Scaling as well as SaaS Operations services and was instrumental in commercializing ~200 new business model offers across the Commerce Lifecycle. Jigna is passionate about accelerating transformation, innovation and process simplification, experience led design, solving business problems with use of technology, and using the power of data and insights to influence key business decisions.  Jigna has a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering and MBA in Finance. In her personal time, she enjoys traveling, hiking and practicing yoga.Nadir joined Qatalyst in May 2011 and leads the firm’s coverage of the communications technology, storage and systems sectors. He has over 21 years experience in investment banking and prior to joining Qatalyst, Nadir spent more than 7 years at Credit Suisse, where he served as Head of the Global Communications group. Prior to that, Nadir worked in a similar capacity at Banc of America Securities and its predecessor firm, Montgomery Securities. Before that, he was a member of the Global Project Finance team at Bank of America, specializing in the telecommunications sector.
Nadir has advised on several landmark transactions in the technology sector, including Motorola Mobility’s $12.5B sale to Google, Sun’s $7B sale to Oracle, Avaya’s $8B sale to SilverLake and TPG, and Scientific-Atlanta’s $7B sale to Cisco. Recent transaction experience at Qatalyst includes Appdynamics’s $3.7B sale to Cisco, Jasper’s $1.4B sale to Cisco, SolidFire’s $870MM sale to NetApp, OpenDNS’ $650MM sale to Cisco, Aruba’s $3B sale to HP, Riverbed’s $3.6B sale to Thoma Bravo, Fusion IO’s $1B sale to SanDisk, Mandiant’s $1B sale to FireEye and SourceFire’s $2.7B sale to Cisco amongst others. Nadir has also had the privilege of advising on capital-raising and M&A transactions for leading technology companies including 3PAR, Acme Packet, ADC Telecommunications, Alcatel-Lucent, Appdynamics, Ciena, Cisco, Corning, Dell, Finisar, Fusion-io, JDS Uniphase, Hewlett-Packard, Nicira, Nokia, Nortel, Quantum, Sandforce, Silver Tail Systems and Tellabs.
Nadir currently serves on the Board of Trustees of University High School in San Francisco. He holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honors) degree in Economics and History from the University of Western Ontario, Canada.Piyush is a serial entrepreneur & customer first technologist in building successful cybersecurity products generating over $20- $350M annually. Piyush has been an investor, advisor for multiple startups and helping them strategize the product led growth. Most recently Piyush was CoFounder & CEO @ Accurics which was acquired by Tenable. Currently Piyush is VP/GM of Cloud security products at Tenable.Abhinav Shashank is the CEO and co-founder of Innovaccer, a leading San Francisco-based healthcare technology company. He built the foundation for Innovaccer’s success as a leader in population health management and machine learning-oriented healthcare solutions recognized by Gartner, KLAS, Forbes, and Black Book Market Research.
Abhinav’s continued efforts and ambition enabled the company to flourish in health information technology in the U.S. and acquire over 40 healthcare organizations as customers, with more than 37,000 providers using Innovaccer’s solutions daily. With his vision for seamless care delivery using unified patient records, Abhinav is now leading the team towards $1 billion in savings for U.S. healthcare. Additionally, Abhinav Shashank is an influential thought leader and a renowned author. Abhinav has published over 300 articles for various international media outlets, was bestowed a coveted spot in Forbes “30 Under 30 Asia 2017: Enterprise Tech” and was recognized by Becker's Hospital Review as one of the ‘Top 60 rising leaders in U.S. healthcare under 40’ in 2019.
Abhinav is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur.
Beerud Sheth is the Co-founder and CEO of Gupshup, a Conversational AI unicorn headquartered in San Franciso. He is a successful two-time entrepreneur, investor and futurist. An IIT-B and MIT alumnus, he started his career working on Wall Street.
Beerud was the founder of Elance (now Upwork), a listed company on Nasdaq focused on the gig economy. Sheth, who comes with a track record of thinking far ahead, witnessed scepticism when he started Elance (now Upwork), a freelancer marketplace, in the early 90s. Elance was the quintessential poster boy of the gig economy (even before the phrase ‘gig economy’ became popular), leveraging the internet to create a global services market, powered by skilled freelancers. Beerud played a critical role at Elance as its founder, CEO and top executive till 2007 and later as a board member until the merger in 2014. The company was listed on NASDAQ in 2018.
Started in 2004 as a social network, Beerud has transformed Gupshup into a global leader in conversational engagement, with a strong AI-powered enterprise messaging platform. Gupshup’s brand philosophy stems from Beerud’s vision of a future where it's as easy for a customer to chat with a business as it is with a friend. Primarily focused on mobile-first markets, Gupshup is helping businesses unlock the power of conversational messaging, The tech platform powers over 6 billion messages per month. Across verticals, thousands of large and small businesses use Gupshup to build conversational experiences across marketing, sales and support. He now believes a few years from now, we’ll wonder how anyone did business without conversational messaging.
A profitable entity for the last few years, the company posted a revenue upwards of USD 100 mn in FY21. Gupshup already has a significant presence across India, Middle East and Africa, South East Asia, USA and Latin America. 80 of India’s 100+ unicorns have scaled their business better and faster with Gupshup. The company has raised upwards of $340 million at a $1.4 billion valuation from an industry-leading group of investors.Siddharth is a Fellow at the iSPIRT Foundation, a nonprofit technology think-tank based in Bangalore that has contributed to many of India’s digital platforms including eKYC, eSign, and UPI, DigiLocker, FASTag, Bharat Bill Payments System, and RBI Account Aggregator, which is used by 1.3 billion Indians. At iSPIRT, Siddharth designs and drives the adoption of India’s Data Empowerment & Protection Architecture (DEPA), a techno-legal framework that gives every Indian control of their data. He’s also been involved in designing Digital Sky, India’s effort to integrate drones into civilian airspace, and RBI’s Public Credit Registry for enabling real-time credit reporting. In addition, Siddharth is a member of the Volunteer Fellows Council at iSPIRT and a Board Member at the Digital Public Goods Alliance.Navrina Singh is the Founder of Credo AI, a Responsible AI Governance SaaS empowering enterprises to build fair compliant and auditable Artificial Intelligence at scale. A technology leader with over 18+ years experience in Enterprise SaaS, AI and Mobile. Navrina has held multiple product and business leadership roles at Microsoft and Qualcomm. Navrina is a member of the U.S. Department of Commerce National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee (NAIAC), which advises the President and the National AI Initiative Office.Navrina is an executive board member of the Mozilla foundation guiding their trustworthy AI charter. Navrina is also a young global leader with the World economic forum & was on their future council for AI guiding policies & regulations in responsible AI. Navrina holds an MS in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an MBA from the University of Southern California and a BS in Electronics & Telecommunications from Pune College of Engineering, India.Harveer Singh serves as the Chief Data Architect and Global Head of Engineering at Western Union since July 2020, where he manages the Data Platforms, Data Marketplace, Martech & Adtech Platforms, Digital Banking Integrations (WU+), Loyalty Platform and several Consumer Financial Ecosystem platforms<br><br>Harveer is a technology executive with experiences spanning several industries such as financial services (including banking, payments, insurance, capital markets, and asset management), retail, and professional services. Previously, he has been working in EY’s Financial Services where he currently co-leads EY’s Next Generation architecture & solutions for Financial Services. Prior to EY, Harveer held various consulting roles at Deloitte, IBM, and Accenture.<br><br>Harveer has extensive experience in Digital Transformation, Technology Management, Data architecture, Governance and Platform development. His past track record has proven success through his design and implementation of tech strategies, business cases, multiyear roadmaps, platforms and solutions. Haveer was was inducted in Forbes Technology Council in Jan 2022.<br><br>Harveer also enjoys philanthropy work and is currently involved with Western Union Foundation, Mark Cuban Foundation, She Jobs Initiative and others.Jonathan Shieber is the chief editor and a venture partner at FootPrint Coalition. He previously worked as Climate Editor, Contributors Editor, and a Senior Editor and writer at TechCrunch. Before TC he was a reporter covering venture capital and private equity investment in the U.S. and China at Dow Jones & Co. with work published in Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.Anu Shultes is an entrepreneur and Forbes 50 over 50 honoree for her commitment to and progress towards Financial inclusion. She is a 30 year veteran of the Financial Services industry with senior leadership roles at Providian, National City, AccountNow, Blackhawk Network and more. She is the CEO of Ahead Financials and LendUp. Anu is passionate about building products that get people ahead financially. Her significant experience in building efficient operational processes and teams to support them has led her to become one of the few female CEOs in Fintech.Sriram Subramanian is a Research Director within IDC AI and Automation Software Research group covering AI/ ML Lifecycle Management Software. His coverage on AI// ML Lifecycle management includes the tools, technologies, and end-user needs for building, training, tuning, running, and scaling the end-to-end life cycle for AI/ML solutions from experimentation to production. He advises vendors on product strategy, market positioning, and messaging; and buyers on implementing end to end scalable ML pipelines and AI-enabled digital transformation best practices to meet their business needs. Prior to joining IDC, Sriram was the founder and principal analyst at CloudDon, an independent market research and advisory services firm. He is a certified Yoga instructor passionate about teaching Yoga/ Healthier lifestyle to kids. He spends his free time playing cricket or outdoors with his kids.Brad Surak is the CPO of Turntide Technologies. Brad joined Turntide in 2021 after serving at Hitachi Vantara. As president of digital solutions, he spearheaded the transformation of this 110-year-old global company into a digital solutions leader. He has also served as COO at GE Digital and GM of Mobile Analytic Applications at SAP.Karthik leads Invitae’s Global Products and Technology organization, including Research and Development of Invitae's testing products across all arcs, Data and Digital platform and services, Information Technology and Information Security. Previously, Karthik served as chief operating officer at GE Digital and COO for GE’s Industrial IOT and Data Platform. In addition, he has held leadership roles in platform technology companies including PayPal, eBay, Magento,?Yahoo! and Barclays following his early career at GE.? Karthik serves on the Steering Committee of the World Economic Forum’s Digital Platform and Ecosystems group and also on the board of directors for Junior Achievement of Northern California. He holds a Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering and a Masters in Chemistry from BITS, Pilani, India; a Masters in Industrial and Systems Engineering from The Ohio State University and a dual MBA from Columbia Business School and University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business.Rajesh is a Partner at Khosla Ventures and brings with him two decades of experience assisting and investing in deeptech startups. At Khosla Ventures, he manages deeptech investments across climatech, healthcare and advanced manufacturing. Having invested in climatech startups for more than a decade, he is particularly fascinated by materials science innovations that are driving the next generation of climatech startups.
Before joining Khosla Ventures, Rajesh served as the Head of Applied Ventures LLC, the Venture Capital arm of Applied Materials (AMAT) and at Third Point Ventures. At Applied Ventures, Rajesh managed a portfolio of 85 deeptech startups. Driven by a strong interest to provide access to deeptech startups with a state-of-the-art manufacturing fab in the US, Rajesh helped AMAT establish a $850M semiconductor fab in New York. He received Global Corporate Venturing’s (GCV) Powerlist award in 2019.
Ameya is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Cequence Security, a company disrupting the API security space. Over the past five years, Ameya has helped several Fortune 500 companies across the globe secure their public facing APIs and applications from a variety of threats. Cequence protects over 6 billion API calls daily, for 100+ global brands and has raised over 100 million dollars in venture funding from top tier VC firms in the valley. Ameya has over 20 years of experience in Cyber Security. Previously, Ameya was the engineering head for Symantec’s entire anti-malware platform – responsible for blocking over 5 billion threats annually. Ameya has built several high performance product and threat research teams across the globe, fighting some of the most complex threats.Sriram Thiagarajan has served as Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Ancestry, since November 2020 and is responsible for ensuring Ancestry’s customers have the best product experience powered by its software products, advanced technologies and cloud platform. Sriram leads the overall vision, strategy and execution for all aspects of Ancestry’s product engineering and technology development including architecture, data science and product analytics, platform engineering, cloud operations, cyber security, corporate infrastructure and business systems. Sriram joined Ancestry in 2017 as Senior Vice President & Chief Information Officer, and in December 2019 added the position of SVP Platforms. Sriram is a seasoned, growth minded technology executive with 20+ years of experience in scaling businesses and delivering growth by leveraging advanced technologies and software solutions at Fortune 500, Venture and Private Equity backed companies. Prior to Ancestry, Sriram served as SVP & Chief Information Officer at Infoblox, where he was responsible for Information Technology and Cybersecurity. Before Infoblox, Sriram was the Global Head of IT & Corporate Engineering at Twitter, where he helped architect and scale corporate infrastructure, enterprise applications and integrations to revenue and billing platforms, to help prepare the company for its IPO. Prior to Twitter, Sriram served as VP of Payments Infrastructure & Corporate Systems at Yahoo, and its premium services monetization platform and enterprise systems organizations. Earlier in his career, Sriram held leadership roles at Verisign and Ernst & Young. Sriram holds a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Florida Atlantic University, FL. and a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics & Communications Engineering from Anna University, India.Anita Rehman is Partner at GSV. Anita's experience encompasses roles as an entrepreneur, investor, and advisor to global companies in the Technology sector. Prior to GSV, she was an investment professional at Vantage Point Capital Partners and an investment consultant at The Three Cairns family office where she invested in early to growth stage technology companies across the Consumer, Enterprise and Energy sectors. Anita is also an entrepreneur and was the founder of a global vertically integrated plus size womenswear retail startup which she scaled and led for five years. Anita graduated from the MSEE program at Stanford and later earned an MBA from the Wharton School of Business. Prior to this she was a distinguished graduate of Manipal Institute of Technology, where she earned an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering.Resilinc CEO Bindiya Vakil is credited with bringing supply chain risk management into the mainstream. Vakil has helped transform the way that global organizations approach supply chain visibility and risk; driving them to shift from reactively addressing catastrophic supply chain events to putting preventative solutions in place through monitoring, mapping, and planning. She is a founding member of the Global Supply Chain Resiliency Council and a member of the Advisory Board of MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics.
Vakil holds a master’s degree in supply chain management from MIT and an MBA in Finance. She was named Supply & Demand Chain Executive’s inaugural Woman of the Year and has appeared on nationally syndicated TV, radio and print media speaking on the topic of supply chain resiliency.Henri was previously the Director for Digital Information and Communications Systems of France; and Director of Etalab, the French agency for public open data. In addition, Henri is an entrepreneur who is the Co-Founder and CEO of MFG Labs, an internet-based startup involved in social data mining, and Board Chairman of Cap Digital, the French-European Cluster for Digital Content and Services. He co-authored, with Nicolas Colin, the book, L'Age de la Multitude, Entreprendre et Gouverner Aprèsla Révolution Numérique (The Age of Multitude, Entrepreneurship, and Governance After the Digital Revolution). Mr. Verdier is a graduate of Ecole Normale Supérieure.As Sutter Health’s first Chief Innovation Officer, Chris Waugh applies his extensive experience in human-centered design to guide the integrated network’s innovation strategy. Human-centered design is a creative approach that seeks personalized solutions to meet individual needs — understanding people and their behaviors, identifying trends and exploring solutions that improve a person’s healthcare experience — in order to make healthcare more usable and accessible for patients, doctors and nurses. At Sutter, Waugh has spearheaded the digital transformation of healthcare and the implementation of Tera — a virtual-first medical practice which aims to best resolve issues before patients have to schedule an in-person appointment. This work is driven by the idea that healthcare should fit into the patient’s life, and not the other way around. He is also passionate about taking on mental health issues and driving simpler, easier to navigate and more resonate healthcare for all patients.
Before joining Sutter Health, Waugh held entrepreneurial leadership roles at IDEO, a globally regarded Bay Area design and innovation firm, and was vice president of design at One Medical Group in San Francisco where he helped create a culture of innovation.
He is an affiliated member of both Rock Health and Innovation 50.
Waugh graduated from Fort Lewis College in Colorado, with bachelor’s degrees in international business and French.Donna Wilczek is a SaaS technology executive with 20 years of industry experience. She currently serves as the senior vice president of product strategy and innovation at Coupa Software, a global leader in business spend management. In her time at Coupa, she has helped the company scale from young startup to successful public company. Wilczek has supported the development of many new applications and the unification of acquired companies while collaborating closely with customers and partners. Her personal passion is for innovation and the democratization of good with a quest to make every business dollar spent more sustainable and more inclusive. Over the last decade at Coupa, she has held leadership roles in product strategy and marketing, customer experience, and professional services. Prior to Coupa, Wilczek led shared services for TriNet (NYSE: TNET), a cloud-based professional employer organization for small and medium-sized businesses, and led professional services at Ketera (acquired by Rearden Commerce), a cloud spend management provider. Wilczek is also a board member at Optimizely and a technology innovator who has been awarded twelve software patents.Raghu is the Co-founder and CEO of FalconX, one of the fastest growing companies in the world. With consolidated, seamless workflows that make it easy to access cryptocurrency trading, credit, and clearing on a single platform, FalconX gives the world&rsquo;s largest institutions an edge as they navigate digital assets. Recently named one of crypto&rsquo;s top 25 CEOs, he led the company to double its customers, increase monthly trading volume by more than 12X, and increase net revenue by 46X in 2021. In less than 4 years, FalconX is valued at $3.75 billion after its most recent $210M Series C financing round. He's an engineer by background and passionate about building products that create value. Prior to FalconX, Raghu held product leadership roles at Google. He was on Sundar Pichai&rsquo;s Chrome OS team and led efforts to scale Chromebooks to over $3 billion revenue for Google and its partners. He started his career at Motorola as an engineer in a team that pioneered high definition video transmission over IP stack, laying the technical foundation for many popular video streaming services such as Netflix and Youtube. Raghu holds an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, M.S. from University of Texas at Dallas specializing in Signal Processing & Machine Learning, and B.Tech. from Vellore Institute of Technology. He&rsquo;s an active angel investor, board advisor to several Silicon Valley startups, and advisor to the Stanford Journal of Blockchain Law and Policy.Naeem Zafar has been teaching entrepreneurship and innovation for over 15-years. He is a faculty member at the University of California Berkeley and also at the Northeastern University. He has taught at multiple other universities (Santa Clara University, Brown University, Ozyegin University and LUMS). He is a frequent speaker at conferences and advises entrepreneurs all over the world. Naeem is a 7X entrepreneur and 5X CEO with a history of building and exiting companies. He currently serves as the founder & CEO of TeleSense, an IoT company creating real-time wireless sensing and predictive analytics solutions for the stored grain industry. He is deeply ingrained in the Silicon Valley ecosystem and frequently speaks about innovation and entrepreneurship. Naeem has been advisor to and invested in over 20 companies (recent exits include Luminar (IPO in 2020) and Electriphi bought by Ford in 2021). Naeem has authored five books on entrepreneurship. He has a graduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota. More about him at www.NaeemZafar.com.
Lu Zhang, Founder and Managing Partner of Fusion Fund, is a renowned Silicon Valley investor, a serial entrepreneur, and a Stanford Engineering alumna. Lu is a World Economic Forum - Young Global Leader (Class of 2018).
She has also garnered other accolades including the Featured Honoree in VC of Forbes 30 Under 30 (2017), Silicon Valley Women of Influence (2018), Town & Country 50 Modern Swans – Entrepreneurship Influencer (2017) and was recently selected as the Best 25 Female early-stage Investor by Business Insider (2021). Lu is also on the Jury Board of Cartier’s Young Leader Award. Prior to starting Fusion Fund, she was the Founder and CEO of a medical device company (acquired in 2012)
Lu is a frequent speaker at tech events and conferences such as Davos World Economic Forum, Future Investment Initiative (FII), Forbes, Web Summit, SuperReturn, etc., and serves as a mentor and advisor to several tech innovation programs in Silicon Valley.
Scott Zoldi is Chief Analytics Officer at FICO, driving innovation in artificial intelligence with a focus on standards for Explainable AI, Ethical AI and Responsible AI. While at FICO, Scott has been responsible for authoring over 110 analytic patents with 71 patents granted and 46 in process. Scott serves on the Boards of Directors of Tech San Diego and Cyber Center of Excellence. Scott received his Ph.D. degree in theoretical physics from Duke University.Randi has always believed that the world is better when technology and the arts come together. She left a successful career in Silicon Valley to star in Rock of Ages on Broadway. Since then, she has won three Tony awards and returned to her tech roots as an advisor/investor/ board member making her one of the only leaders in the Web3 space to have expertise and credibility in both groundbreaking technology and the creative arts.
She believes that the new breed of Web3 leaders are a new type of entrepreneur who is fearless in leading through both art and technology, and through her experience on the ground floor of Web2, as well as her expertise leading commercially successful artistic projects, she can’t wait to help grow the next crop of billion dollar brands that nurture both these worlds.James currently is SVP of Technology and Engineering for Chime. Chime is a leading financial technology company founded on the premise that basic banking services should be helpful, easy and free. Chime is the market leader in the U.S. challenger banking segment. Before Chime, James founded and ran an independent strategic technology advisory consulting firm. He formerly was PayPal’s Global CTO and SVP of Payment Services. At eBay, James was VP of Technology and led the architecture and systems teams, re-writing the entire eBay.com platform. James lead a number of strategic technology initiatives, including delivering open platforms, creating infrastructure services, systems software, 3rd party developer ecosystems, enterprise analytics and overall site operations running the world’s largest marketplace at scale. With more than 30 years of technology experience that spans banking, commerce, payments, the military, academic world, business consulting, enterprise platforms and infrastructure, James Barrese has broad experience in digital transformations, financial systems, high performance processing systems, security, infrastructure and developing innovative product solutions for consumers and businesses. James earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Stanford University. He is based in Silicon Valley. He also served in the U.S. Army and currently serves as an independent director for Visteon, the leading automotive technology company delivering the next generation of digital cockpits and electronic control systems for the world's top automobile manufacturers.Lori Harmon is a strategic leader who helps customers maximize their return, drives sales innovation and empowers teams in a digital era. She is also the author of the book 42 Rules for Building a High Velocity Inside Sales Team and a frequent speaker on topics related to sales, sales enablement, inside sales and AI in sales. Currently, Lori is the Vice President of Global Renewals & Customer Success at NetApp. Prior to NetApp, Lori was Vice President of Sales at BlackBerry, Ltd. Prior to BlackBerry Lori held a number of executive sales leadership positions at high tech companies such as Contrast Security, VeriSign, Melbourne IT, Interwoven, Brio Software and Network General. Ms. Harmon holds a BS degree in Information Systems from Appalachian State University.Pinak Shah is currently working as SVP, Chief Supply Chain Officer for OSF Healthcare System, Peoria,IL &ndash; a 15 hospitals system in Midwest America. He is accountable for providing leadership in strategic sourcing & contracting, overseeing procurement, and supply chain management. Pinak has led the leadership of the Pointcore Supply Chain, LLC (a for-profit arm of the Health System). Pinak comes to OSF from Johns Hopkins Health System, where he was the senior director of the supply chain. He has over 25 years of experience leading in supply chain contracts negotiation, procurement, distribution processes, and technology solutions. One of his key accomplishments included building a consolidated service center in less than 12 months for Johns Hopkins Health System and Northwell Health. This project led to the consolidation of supply chain and logistics for hospitals. Pinak earned his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering at Shree Bhagubhai Mafatlal Polytechnic in India. He received his Master&rsquo;s in business administration from the National Institute of Management, an affiliate of The International University in India.Omer is SVP & GM of the $1.4 Billion Data Storage, Data Services SaaS, and HyperConverged business at Nimble, an HPE Company. Omer is responsible for Engineering, Product Management, and Operations for all Data and SaaS services in Storage and Data Infrastructure platforms.Sandeep is a High impact marketing leader with 18 years of experience as a senior marketing and product management executive. Strong track record of shaping markets and driving growth at startups and Fortune 500 technology companies. Unique blend of driving thought leadership and global marketing strategy for a $5B portfolio at a Fortune 500 company, leading category creation and product marketing from under $50M to $1B in revenue at an enterprise technology startup, and leading product strategy and planning from pre-revenue to $1B at another enterprise technology startup. Experienced at bringing emerging products to market and accelerating growth in highly competitive markets including cloud services, enterprise storage, data management, hybrid cloud, and hyperconverged infrastructure. Successful in category creation, driving thought leadership, demand generation, go-to-market, and sales enablement. Highly regarded spokesperson. Skilled at building and leading high performance organizations.An IIT-B Graduate and a Techie at heart, Deepak is the co-founder and CTO at Mindtickle, one of the latest Unicorns in India today. Mindtickle is the world&rsquo;s leading sales enablement and training platform used by many Fortune 500 companies. An avid biker and mountain climber, Deepak loves mentoring the next generation of Indian entrepreneurs who are building from India, for the world!Vijoy Pandey is Vice President, Emerging Technologies and Incubation (ET&I) at Cisco. ET&I is chartered to create and drive the next Bold Bets businesses for Cisco in an agile, ambitious, and entrepreneurial manner. Vijoy runs product, engineering, research and a product-led growth team. He is also the CTO for Cloud at Cisco. Vijoy has held various strategy, product and engineering leadership roles and has over 20 years of expertise in planet-scale distributed systems, cloud, operational excellence, and application-first software infrastructures which serve to complement his role as a technical visionary for a software-focused digital future. Before joining Cisco, he served as Head of Engineering at Google for the company&rsquo;s global cloud networks, where he was responsible for developing software systems for intent-driven automation, observability, AI/ML-based data analytics, and application-level awareness. Vijoy has held the CTO role at various companies including IBM, and Blade Network Technologies, and has led large geo-diverse, agile product and engineering teams at Blade Network Technologies, Nortel, Alteon, and Google. Vijoy has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Davis. He currently holds over 80 patents in cloud, networking, AI/ML, and distributed systems.Charu is the site leader for the growing Cloud + AI organization at IDC and the VP of Engineering leader in Azure Core leading Compute and Cloud Native technologies. She has a bachelor&rsquo;s degree in Computer Science from Anna University and a master&rsquo;s degree in Computer Science from University of California, Santa Barbara. Charu has been with Microsoft for 30years and has worked in multiples roles. She is known for her engineering excellence, innovation, and organizational leadership. Charu has innovated in different areas of the Microsoft Cloud and is currently focused on understanding technology to build privacy preserving computational approaches. Over the years, Charu has led multiple initiatives across IDC that focused on building innovation excellence, empowering women leaders, and mentoring senior engineering talent. She was the founding members for Microsoft WISE Mentoring Program where tech leaders at Microsoft volunteer to mentor women in computer science and software engineering. She partnered with CII&rsquo;s Centre of Excellence on their vision for Digital Transformation and is the board member on the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) National Committee on Technology.Dr. Billings has devoted his life to studying and teaching medicine and genetics, while accelerating the use of a broad range of novel genomic technologies in clinical settings. Over his decades in healthcare, he has established key business partnerships, driving adoption of innovative discoveries and commercial success. His leadership has been demonstrated by notable achievements - physician, researcher, founder, senior executive or director of multiple public and private companies, and scientific advisor for government entities.
Dr. Billings has held academic appointments at Harvard University, U.C. San Francisco, Stanford University, and U.C. Berkeley; and served as a board-certified internist and medical geneticist at leading medical centers. He has authored more than 225 scientific and medical publications. His published doctoral studies at Harvard were supervised by Dr. Baruj Benacerraf, who subsequently received the Nobel Prize in Medicine. In addition, he has served on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Genomic Medicine Advisory Committee at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and as an appointee to the Secretary's Advisory Committee on Genetics, Health, and Society at the Department of Health and Human Services. His work on genetic discrimination was instrumental in the creation and passage of the federal Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act of 2008. He holds an MD and a PhD in Immunology from Harvard, and an Artium Baccalaureus, summa cum laude from U.C. San Diego.
Product Management leader with over 12+ years of experience in software development, design and product management. Strong technical background combined with a demonstrated ability to ship high quality products. Excellent communication skills, and a proven capability to influence and inspire.Shalini is General Manager and Vice President of Google TV, where she conceived, implemented and executed the company’s TV strategy and is also leading emerging platform technologies at Google.
Earlier, Shalini was the senior director for technology solutions at YouTube, where she led the distribution strategy for media creators - growing this cohort to have a billion monthly active users up 10X during her tenure. Shalini was technical director at Pixar, launching the blockbuster films: Toy Story and A Bugs Life, and worked with clients including Levi’s, Chips Ahoy and Listerine on award winning commercials.
Shalini is an industry thought leader and a frequent speaker on digital transformation. She was the keynote speaker at Google’s annual hardware event, IBC 2019 and at CES 2021. She was featured on NextTVs executive watchlist, Forbes, Vogue and Economic Times and writes frequently on leadership. Devoted to education, she is a board member of Pratham, an educational non-profit.
Shalini holds a BS in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay where she holds a Distinguished Alumni award, and a MS in Computer Science from Penn State from where she holds an Outstanding Engineering Alumni award.
Incubate & grow strategic initiatives in the consumer space - Google Search, Maps, YouTube, and in the enterprise world at Oracle. Build strong engineering teams from the ground-up. Active in empowering and enabling women & girls in technology. PBS' Ready To Learn Advisory Board member & advice startups.I serve as Head of R&D and Chief Medical Officer for Elicio Therapeutics, a Boston based biotechnology company advancing clinical development of a novel amphiphile vaccine for KRAS mutated solid tumors; KRAS mutations are found in 25% of all cancers. Our interdisciplinary project team is comprised of experts in preclinical development, translational immunology, clinical vaccine development and manufacturing. As the EVP of R&D and Chief Medical Officer of Elicio Therapeutics, I have extensive experience in translational biology and clinical development. I am also Associate Adjunct Professor of Urology at the University of California San Francisco. My primary research interest is development of novel immunoactivating therapeutics, such as the ELI-002 a novel first-in-class lymph node targeting vaccine targeting the seven most frequently mutated KRAS alleles that are observed in 25% of human tumors. I oversee a team of vaccine immunologists, clinical operations, research scientists, project management, regulatory and manufacturing technical operations staff and consultants who perform target validation, product development and translational research in a state of the art 10,000 square foot research facility at 451 D Street in the Seaport District of Boston, MA and a 250 square foot animal holding and procedure room suite at CRADL located in Cambridge, MA. I successfully administered projects supported by NIH grants, and projects in industry resulting from candidates originating with academic research that have resulted in FDA breakthrough designation and global marketing approvals for example, for Zytiga&reg; (abiraterone acetate). Thus, I bring with me knowledge and leadership experience which will allow me to carry out my role successfully.Debo (Debojyoti Dutta) is a VP of Engineering at Nutanix leading AI driven ops products, open source and AI incubations. Before Nutanix, he has been a Visiting Scholar@Stanford, Founding Member@MLCommons, Distinguished Engineer@Cisco and a Postdoc in Computational Biology@USC. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from USC and his BTech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Kharagpur (India).Sandy Carter is Senior Vice President at Unstoppable Domains. In this role, she is responsible for driving partnerships for blockchain based identity platforms for Web3. Previously, Sandy was Vice President at AWS. In this role, she was responsible for driving next-generation partnering in cloud, machine learning and blockchain. Sandy is the Chairman of the Board of Girls in Tech, and adjunct professor at CMU Silicon Valley. She is founder of Women of Web3. She is a Top 100 Chief Tech Leader, Federal 100, Fortune Most Powerful Women, CNN Top 100 In Technology, Verdicts Top 10 AI & Cloud Computing Influencer.Richard Socher is the founder and CEO of You.com, the search engine that puts you in control — Your sources. Your time. Your privacy. Richard previously served as the Chief Scientist and EVP at Salesforce. Before that, Richard was the CEO/CTO of AI startup MetaMind, acquired by Salesforce in 2016. Richard received his Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford, where he was recognized for his groundbreaking research in deep learning and NLP. He was awarded the Distinguished Application Paper Award at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2011, the 2011 Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges Award, a Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship in 2012 and a 2013 "Magic Grant" from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, and the 2014 GigaOM Structure Award. He also served as an adjunct professor in the computer science department at Stanford. Outside of work, Richard enjoys paramotor adventures, traveling, and photography.Guru Chahal is a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners focusing on early stage enterprise startups in Security, Cloud Infra, DevOps, Observability and Automation. Guru joined Lightspeed after VMware acquired Avi Networks in 2019, where he was a cofounder and focused on Product and GTM. At Lightspeed, he's an investor in category creating companies like Noname Security, Buf, Pensando, Hubilo, Arrcus, Shortwave among others. Guru leverages his founding experience, product expertise and extensive customer network in helping entrepreneurs through funding and beyond. During his operational career, he's worked on three product lines as they’ve gone from inception to over a billion dollar run rate. Before Avi Networks (next generation application services), Guru worked at Nuova Systems (acquired by Cisco), and Tropos Networks (acquired by ABB). Guru is an alum of Purdue University School of Engineering and initially worked on distributed systems and networking and holds several patents in the space.Pauline Yang is a partner at Altimeter Capital, a tech-focused crossover firm based in Menlo Park. She joined the team in 2017 and has led or worked actively on investments in Confluent, Epic Games, Gitlab, H1, Reify Health, Transposit, Unity, UiPath, and Workato. Prior to joining Altimeter, Pauline was an investor at Berkshire Partners, a middle-market private equity firm based in Boston where she focused on vertical software and consumer investments. She began her career working on M&A transactions at Blackstone in New York. Pauline graduated from Dartmouth College with a BA in economics.Hyun is a Partner at March Capital, a venture capital and growth equity firm based in Santa Monica. Prior to March, Hyun was at Allen & Company, a New York-based investment bank, where he was a Vice President covering media, consumer internet, and enterprise software sectors. He executed M&A and equity financing transactions for clients such as Activision, Adobe, Discovery, Fox, LinkedIn, Samsung, Spotify, and Twitter. Prior to Allen & Company, Hyun worked on M&A, equity and debt financings, and various strategic assignments at Citigroup in Chicago and Montgomery & Co. in Los Angeles. Hyun received his BBA in Finance and BS in Financial Mathematics from the University of Michigan’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business and College of LSA, respectively.Tom is a senior executive in venture and finance. Throughout his career, Tom has built businesses, as an entrepreneur and as an executive in global firms. He has successfully led growth and turn-around businesses in international markets. Tom is a Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisors, working with outstanding entrepreneurs building extraordinary businesses. Previously, Tom was an executive at Deutsche Bank AG, where he led the Structured Finance business in US and Europe. From 2006 to 2010, Tom was based in Asia, where he created DB Principal Investments Asia, and led Distressed Trading in Asia. Prior to joining DB, Tom was a Principal at Insight Partners, the pre-eminent software investing firm in the world. He was also a co-founder of Oakdale Capital Management, a fundamental long/short equity investment firm.Dami is Head of Value Creation for the SoftBank Opportunity Fund, where she’s charged with helping the portfolio companies grow and scale. At SoftBank, she’s led ecosystem partnerships and value creation work for companies in SB’s $100B Vision Fund including WeWork, Uber, Bytedance, amongst others. She also created and launched SB’s early-stage global accelerator, Emerge, where she led the sourcing, investing and support of companies across health tech, fintech, e-commerce, edtech, and software industries, and sat on the Investment Committee of. She’s invested in 12 companies from this inaugural cohort, which has now gone global. Prior to joining SoftBank, Dami helped lead Intel’s $75B Corporate Finance and Strategy team, and managed an extensive fulfillment operation with more than 100 employees, filling 15,000 orders a day at McMaster-Carr. She’s also led operations and finance teams at Sprint Corporation and Kraft Foods. Dami holds a Finance and Chinese degree from Emory University and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.Maggie McGrath is the editor of ForbesWomen, the Forbes vertical dedicated to covering all angles of female entrepreneurship. She loves a good Forbes list: she is the editor of the 50 Over 50 and the World's 100 Most Powerful Women, and previously edited the 30 Under 30 Food & Drink list and the Just 100. She has worked at Forbes since 2013 and in that time has written on everything from the student debt crisis to Triple Crown-contending (and winning) horses. Before coming to Forbes, Maggie worked with TODAY show financial editor Jean Chatzky.- Founded and built 2 companies in the technology space; raised more than $40 million in aggregate. - Key player in growing startup from zero to $20M+ annual revenue in 4 years, positioning it for successful exit. - Spearheaded strategy, product design/development, and commercialization of a ground-breaking, sensor-based system designed to stream and track real-time basketball statistics and analytics to teams, fans, and broadcast networks. - Led and negotiated technology and business alliances with multiple Fortune 500 partners. - Raised $33M+ through MFOs, VCs, and angels, including Magic Johnson and late NBA Commissioner, David Stern. - Secured business and technology partnerships with IBM, Google, Catapult, NBA, NCAA, Apple, ESPN, CBS, Turner, NCAA, Genius Sports, and other broadcast organizations. - Launched multimedia sports content provider delivering premium college sports video content and applications to websites and mobile devices to millions of consumers through a broad portfolio of leading publishers including The Miami Herald, USA Today, The Detroit News, The McClatchy Co., and The Seattle Times.Dr. Mahul Amin is an internationally recognized researcher, leading urologic pathologist and highly effective operations executive, with consistent success heading up clinical practice and research transformations in translational pathology, leading growth, and increasing industry recognition for large academic laboratories. He is an international consultant in tumors of the genitourinary tract and a world-renowned expert and educator in genitourinary pathology playing an active role in developing the 2002 and 2016 WHO classification systems for urologic cancers. Dr. Amin is also a thought leader in AI Diagnostics having developed several research papers on the topic. His scientific interests are in the discovery and validation of biomarkers in urologic malignancies for clinical personalized medicine. He has co-authored 13 books and published over 372 papers and 73 book chapters. Dr. Amin&rsquo;s H Index is 112 and his i10 index is 383; his work has a total of 72,834 citations (as of July. 2020). Dr. Amin is a sought out speaker and has given over 400 pathology grand rounds, lectures and workshops. He has extensively spoken around the world and lectured in 31 countries and 75 cities outside of the US. He has made pioneering contributions including the first major descriptions of entities in genitourinary pathology including lymphoepithelioma-like carcinoma of the bladder, micropapillary carcinoma of the bladder, acquired cystic disease associated renal cell carcinoma, clear cell-papillary renal cell carcinoma, thyroid-like carcinoma of the kidney, tubulocystic carcinoma of the kidney, intratubular large cell hyalinizing sertoli cell neoplasia of the testis, and low-grade glandular tumors of the urachus. He has authored some of the first major series and descriptions on Succinate dehydrogenase - deficient renal cell carcinoma and Fumarate hydratase- deficient renal cell carcinoma and the classification of neuroendocrine tumors of the prostate. He hold/s leadership positions for the AJCC, CAP, WHO and several international organizations.Dr. Ronjon Nag is an inventor and entrepreneur. He is Adjunct Professor in Genetics in the Stanford School of Medicine and visiting Fellow at the Stanford Center for Language and Information (CSLI). He is founder of the R42 Institute which invents, informs and invests. He has won the 2021 IEEE-SCV Outstanding Engineer award, the IET Mountbatten Medal, and the $1m Verizon Powerful Answers Award (for Bounce Imaging where he is Chairman). He is a founder and advisor/board member of multiple start-ups and part owner of some 80 AI and biotech companies. His companies have been sold to Apple, BlackBerry, and Motorola.Dr. Payel Das received her Ph.D. degree from Rice University in 2007. Currently, she is a principal research staff member and a manager at IBM Research AI, IBM Thomas J. Watson. Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York, USA, 10597. She is an IBM Master Inventor, as well as an AI Horizons Network IBM-MILA principal investigator. Her research interests include statistical physics, trustworthy machine learning, neuro- and physics-inspired machine learning, and machine creativity. Das has co-authored over 50 peer-reviewed publications and over 30 filed patent disclosures, given dozens of invited talks at several university colloquiums, department seminars, top rated conferences, and workshops. She has served as an adjunct associate professor in the Applied Physics Applied Mathematics department at Columbia University, NY, and as an editorial advisory board member for the ACS Central Science journal. Das is the recipient of IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award (the highest technical award at IBM), as well as several IBM Research Accomplishment Awards and IBM Invention Plateaus. Her work has been recognized by the Harvard Belfer Center Technology and Public Purpose program and she was a member of the IBM team that received the National Medal on Innovation and Technology in 2009.Arvind Thiagarajan is the Founder and CEO of HD Medical Inc. He is an inventor and entrepreneur with a history of founding, advising, and building technology companies. Arvind was given a special award from Member of Parliament for Science and Technology from the Government of India for his contributions to research and science and his work as part of HD Medical won the Socially Relevant Product (SRP) award in IIT Madras. His inventions have helped in screening thousands of children and people in India and worldwide. The HD Medical products invented by Arvind have been used to screen over 100,000 children in India to detect cardiac murmurs and defects. This resulted in the early detection and timely intervention to save close to 100 children's lives so far. His second invention, a data compression technology called ABO (Adaptive Binary Optimization) at MatrixView was chosen as the "Top 5 evolving technologies" by CNBC Asia and also named twice the Frost & Sullivan "Best Technology Award" for medical imaging. Hundreds of hospitals worldwide use MatrixView’s technology for solving storage and transmission issues. Arvind took MatrixView Public in the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX), and the stock price went up to almost $250 Million market cap value at its peak. Arvind is also a Founding Trustee and Director of Heart to Heart Foundation, which supports the Free Heart surgeries of underprivileged children in India. He also volunteers for SAI Global Mission Foundation which is focused on Societal Advancement Initiatives for providing Free Healthcare, Education and Nutrition to underserved communities worldwide. Arvind was mentored by Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, the former President of India. He graduated from the College of Engineering, Guindy part of the Anna University in India with an engineering degree in Electronics and Communications. Arvind specializes in signal processing and algorithm development with multiple granted and pending patents along with several award winning technical publications under his name.Smita Deorah is Co-Founder and Co-CEO at LEAD, India's largest School EdTech company and the first unicorn in the segment. A chartered accountant-turned-educator, Smita has over 22 years of experience in Finance, Leadership and Education. At LEAD, Smita is responsible for education research, product development and capability building. She has been instrumental in developing the LEAD integrated system, which is benchmarked with the best education systems globally and contextualized for Affordable Private Schools in India. Smita is passionate about excellence and values in academia. Her goal is to bring quality learning to underserved communities and to bridge the gap between India's high-fee schools and its affordable private schools, so that every child can be nurtured to his or her true potential. Prior to co-founding LEAD, Smita founded Sparsh, an NGO that worked for the uplift of Anganwadis in Mumbai in association with the Maharashtra government. She also implemented a "pre-school in a box" solution in 16 Anganwadis to prepare students for school, and to reduce dropouts and low attendance. Before that, Smita spent nine years at Procter & Gamble Singapore and India as a leader in Finance, Treasury and Strategy. Smita is a great believer in continuous learning. After graduating from Narsee Monjee College of Commerce and Economics and becoming a Chartered Accountant, she completed Executive Programs from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Stanford Graduate School of Business. Smita is the only leader from India to be conferred the 2022 Power of Women (POW!) award for her work in providing equal access to the future through quality education for all. She lives in Mumbai with her family and loves traveling to different parts of the world.Navneet S. Chugh is the Managing Partner and founder of Chugh, LLP.
Mr. Chugh has extensive experience in a wide variety of Corporate, Tax, Immigration, Litigation and Mergers & Acquisition matters. He is an attorney (1992) and a Certified Public Accountant (1990).
He was the first president of the North American South Asian Bar Association (2003), a co-founder of The Indus Entrepreneurs Southern California (1997), Founder President of the South Asian Bar Association of Southern California (1995), the Indian Professionals Toastmasters Club (1986), the International Indian Bar Association and Chairman of the Board of Premier Media, Inc., a publishing company based in Los Angeles, California. Mr. Chugh is also on the board of Asia Society of Southern California, Habib American Bank, Ignify – an IT Consulting Firm, Pratham Southern California, and American India Foundation (AIF).
Sri Ambati is the founder and CEO of H2O.ai. A product visionary who has assembled world-class teams throughout his career, Sri founded H2O.ai in 2012 with a mission to democratize AI for anyone, anywhere, creating a movement of the world’s top data scientists, physicists, academics and technologists at more than 20,000 organizations worldwide. Sri also regularly partners with global business leaders to fund AI projects designed to solve compelling business, environmental and societal challenges. Most recently, Sri led the initiative o2forindia.org , sourcing O2 concentrators for more than 200 public health organizations in Tier 2 cities and rural communities in India during the Delta wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, helping to save thousands of lives. His strong “AI for Good” ethos for the responsible and fair use of AI to make the world a better place drives H2O.ai’s business model and corporate direction.A sought-after speaker and thought-leader, Sri has presented at industry events including Ai4, Money2020, Red Hat Summit and more, is a frequent university guest speaker, and has been featured in publications including The Wall Street Journal , CNBC , IDG and the World Economic Forum and has been named a Datanami Person to Watch .Before founding H2O.ai, Sri co-founded Platfora, a big data analytics company (acquired by Workday) and was director of engineering at DataStax and Azul Systems. His academic background includes sabbaticals focused on Theoretical Neuroscience at Stanford University and U.C. Berkeley, and he holds a master’s degree in Math and Computer Science from the University of Memphis. Sri is inspired by his two daughters and genius.Avichal is a successful entrepreneur with executive experience at Google and Facebook, which acquired his previous company. As an angel investor, Avichal has invested in 15 unicorns and 5 decacorns including Airtable, Boom Supersonic, Color Genomics, Cruise, Deel, Figma, Newfront Insurance, Notion, Nova Credit, Pulley, and others. He co-founded Electric Capital in 2018 and has grown it to one of the largest crypto venture firms globally. Electric is an investor in many of the leading web3 protocols and companies such as Bitwise, Bitnomial, dYdX, Kraken, Magic Eden, NEAR, Terra, and Tokemak.Asha Jadeja is a Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist who has invested in over 200 technology startups in the Bay Area. As an entrepreneur herself, her investing philosophy is designed to ignite young entrepreneurs into becoming disruptive change makers. &ldquo;Making a dent in poverty requires money. Without a strong focus on economic growth, developing countries like India will continue to be stuck in a cycle of poverty. The need of the hour is to let technology-driven growth enable India to break out of the cycle of poverty. It is critical that we identify and remove legacy obstacles to growth as fast as possible.&rdquo; All of Asha&rsquo;s venture and philanthropic initiatives in India have been designed to help the nation break free of this cycle of poverty. &ldquo;Exponential growth is possible through technology-enabled entrepreneurship, lean government, world-class education, and women&rsquo;s leadership.&rdquo; Gender equality, inclusive growth, lean government, and national security are core interests of MITLI (Motwani Institute for Thought Leadership in Innovation) - an unprecedented bridge between the US and India. Asha created MITLI as an advocacy platform designed to drive policy changes in India. A firm believer in the power of grassroots socio-economic movements Asha created MakerFest in 2013. A powerful network of makers and innovators that pro-actively problem-solve for their own communities. Makerfest is now prolific in Africa, India, and more recently in Brazil. She created India&rsquo;s first network of dozens of Fablabs designed to spark a just in a time manufacturing environment in India. With help from Prof Sugata Mitra, Asha also set up India&rsquo;s first self-supported School in the Cloud in Ahmedabad. This has now grown to over 60 locally managed and sustained &ldquo;schools in the cloud&rdquo; within South Asia. Asha is a prolific thought leader rooted within the milieus of Stanford, UC Berkeley, Google, Hoover Institute, Council on Foreign Relations, and Brookings USA. She is a limited partner in over 20 Bay Area venture funds, Acumen Fund NY, and Kawasafi Fund, Africa. As a prolific collector of Indian art, Asha is currently engaged with Stanford University Cantor Art Museum in bringing top Indian artists into a global forefront.Robert C. Jacobson the founder of Space Advisors&reg;, a strategic and financial consulting firm for space startups and organizations looking to establish a space strategy. His decade-plus of professional experience in includes roles at Arch Mission Foundation, where he notably worked to initiate the first Solar Library(the payload famously launched in Elon Musk&rsquo;s Tesla in 2018), and Lunar Library and Space Angels Network, the world&rsquo;s first space-focused angel investment group. He is also the author of Space Is Open for Business: The Industry That Can Transform Humanity. Jacobson is a graduate of University of Southern California and California Institute of the Arts.Tony Pan is the co-founder and CEO of Modern Electron. Modern Electron is democratizing energy generation to make energy greener and more affordable. Buildings are responsible for more CO2 emissions than any other sector of the economy. Modern Electron's tech enables distributed energy generation in buildings, even in our homes. This saves money, reduces carbon emissions, and complements renewables. Dr. Pan is a co-inventor on 250+ patents pending in deep tech, spanning energy & climate, nanotechnology, and biomedical devices. His past experiences include pro bono consulting on global health for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and for the Global Good Fund. He is a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations. Previously he served as a member of the Global Future Councils on Entrepreneurship & Energy, and was a Global Shaper of the World Economic Forum. He has been named to Forbes 30 under 30, MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35, and the Business Journal's 40 under 40. During his PhD at Harvard, his national recognitions include the Hertz, Soros, and the National Science Foundation fellowships. Tony grew up in Taiwan, Scotland, and Korea, and was the first in his family to immigrate to the USA.Arielle Gross Samuels is the Global Head of ESG Business at Facebook. She founded and leads a global team that builds initiatives and strategic partnerships focused on ESG, social good, and business equality in service of 200M+ businesses around the world. Key initiatives include running Facebook’s grants program to provide $40M to 10K Black-owned businesses in the US to boost liquidity for those businesses hit hardest by COVID-19, overseeing Facebook’s commitments towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 8 ‘decent work and economic growth, and leading Facebook’s business sustainability presence through initiatives like Communities for Recycling – a Messenger experience to improve recycling. Her accolades include being named a Forbes 30 Under 30 in Marketing and Advertising, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Goalkeeper, Board Member of the Geena Davis Institute of Gender in Media, Board Member of Girl Up – United Nations Foundation, Board Director of the University of Illinois Alumni Association, Adweek Executive Mentor, Representative on the United Nations Women Global Innovation Coalition for Change, Lead of Facebook Women New York, Founding Member of Chief, and Advisor for #BuiltByGirls. Samuels holds a B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, where she founded the Arielle Gross Engineering Visionary Scholarship Fund to accelerate the diversity of engineering students.Dwight French is a proven executive with over 20 years of successful business leadership and experience in the health insurance, provider, and life science sectors. His work serving healthcare includes executive positions at BearingPoint (formerly KPMG Consulting), SVP of Enterprise Product Management at HMS Holdings Corp (HMSY-US), Chief Business Development Officer at Santa Clara County IPA (SCCIPA), and co-founder of a population health management software company that a Fortune 20 strategic invested in and was successfully exited. Dwight has been working at the leading edge of healthcare reform since its inception. Described as an insightful leader, his innovative strategies exploit business opportunities that arise from this evolving reform. Dwight possesses the rare ability to craft policies and shape vision into actionable results. He accomplishes this unique skill through developing leaders, solid operational execution, effective communication and intentional relationship development.Rahul Bhuman, MS, MBA, has more than 18 years of leadership experience across corporate development, corporate strategy, business development, sales and software development. At Tech Mahindra, he is VP of Emerging Business. He is also a adjunct faculty at University of California Santa Cruz Extension campus. Bhuman has a master&rsquo;s degree in Computer Science from Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago and an MBA in Finance and Strategy from the Indian School of Business where he continues to work as a startup business mentor at the school&rsquo;s Atal Incubation Center. Formerly he was an advisor to the UC Berkeley Garwood Center of Innovation and Technology Pioneers selection committee at the World Economic Forum. In addition to teaching, he serves as an advisor to UCSC Silicon Valley Extension Artificial Intelligence program. Rahul was also on the Advisory Board of High Tech High Heels, a not profit organization with a mission to increase the number of girls entering into a college-level degree program in Science, Technology, Engineering or Math (STEM).Shankar Venkataraman is a distinguished technology leader and a pioneer in the streaming data and analytics, big data, and machine learning / AI space. He works as SVP of Products and Engineering at Jivo Corporation, which provides a cloud-based, data-driven platform for delivering personalized digital advertising and marketing experiences at scale. It is a powerful solution for engaging consumers with the right message in real-time and across all channels. Shankar holds an MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley and a Bachelor's degree in Engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, India.Dante Orsini serves as 11:11 Systems Chief Strategy Officer. He brings more than 20 years of experience leading direct and indirect sales teams, ideally positioning him to lead customer-focused strategy across all facets, from planning to execution, business transformation, and partner growth. In his role as Senior Vice President of Business Development for iland, he oversaw the global direction and execution of iland strategic and channel partnerships. Additionally, Dante along with his team were responsible for designing iland robust global, partner ecosystem from the ground up. He sits on the VMware Service Provider Advisory Council, as well as the HPE, Veeam, and Zerto Partner Advisory Boards. Dante was instrumental in helping iland to achieve Leader status in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service from 2016 through 2019 when the report was retired. Additionally, Dante and his team led iland to win CRN Partner Program (Five-Star rating) for three consecutive years as well as the Veeam Impact Partner of the Year award for four consecutive years and the Zerto Cloud Service Partner of the Year for three consecutive years. Dante background, combined with his thought leadership in cloud computing and cloud infrastructure, have ensured that he is repeatedly tapped to present at events across the globe. Dante holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Interpersonal Communications from Bowling Green State University.Drew Lydecker is the Co-Founder and President at AVANT, a global leader in powering next generation technology decisions. Drew comes from a family of entrepreneurs who have continually pushed the envelope in disrupting the status quo by focusing on high value and high touch solutions. Drew built AVANT to fill a void in the market created by the accelerating pace of change in IT. AVANT&rsquo;s market research, resources and technology helps Trusted Advisors support their customers to achieve their business transformation objectives, by navigating the ever changing IT landscape. From complex cloud design to global wide-area network deployments, AVANT empower Trusted Advisors and clients with access to the global marketplace of Cloud, Colocation and Telecom service providers that are disrupting todays IT landscape. To learn more about Drew, see this recent profile on &ldquo;Let go and Lead&rdquo;https://www.gagenmacdonald.com/lgl-print/drew-lydecker/Amir Husain is a serial entrepreneur, inventor, technologist, and author based in Austin, Texas. He is the Founder and CEO of an award-winning artificial intelligence company, SparkCognition, and is the founding CEO of SkyGrid, a Boeing and SparkCognition joint venture that is building an aerial operating system to power the next century of aviation. Amir’s work has been featured in world-leading outlets such as Forbes, Fox Business News, and Fortune. He is the author of the best-selling book “The Sentient Machine: The Coming Age of Artificial Intelligence”.Vikas is a Managing Partner at the SoftBank Vision Fund where he focuses on investing in Enterprise Software, and emerging technologies.&#8239; Representative&#8239;investments include Attentive, Cohesity, Mapbox, Pantheon.io, OSIsoft, Redis, and Slack. Prior to SoftBank Vikas worked in Private Equity at KKR, and in Consulting at Boston Consulting Group.&#8239; Vikas holds an MBA with highest honors from Harvard Business School, a BS in Electrical Engineering (Highest Honors) and MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology.Harsh is a global business leader with years of experience in industrial manufacturing and supply chain networks, digital marketing, and technology. He is passionate about helping Tada transform the business and supply chain world. His work has taken him around the world, managing global supply chains, manufacturing, and R&D for CGN Global, Avon, Schlumberger, and Sumida America. Harsh is passionate about driving speed and reducing complexity in supply networks. Harsh has a BTech degree from IIT Bombay and graduate degrees from the University of Cincinnati. Harsh is on the Board of the American Red Cross of Illinois and other entrepreneurial companies.Jillian Manus is an experienced banking and media executive, a technology investor and entrepreneur. She is Managing Partner of an early stage Silicon Valley venture fund, Structure Capital. Branded” Architects of the Zero Waste Economy” they invest in underutilized assets and excess capacity. Jillian serves on numerous boards including: Stanford University Digital Health, Stanford University School of Medicine Board of Fellows, Advisory Board of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, NASDAQ Entrepreneurial Center Board of Directors, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and Communities in Schools. Prior to Structure Capital, Jillian was Founder of Broad Strategy, Manus Media and Global Goal Sports Management. She served as Co- Director of TMT for Credit Suisse Zurich, and Director of Development for Universal and Warner Bros and Associate Publisher of the national publication Upside, reporting on the financial strategies of the technology industry. As a frequent global public speaker, Jillian provides business and political commentary in the media, primarily on CNBC’s Squawk Alley and Bloomberg Business news. She also co-hosts Gimlet Media’s business podcast “The Pitch.” Ms. Manus attended The University of Oxford & NYU, where she served on the Board of Trustees. Throughout her careers, she has been a strong advocate for inclusion and diversity, frequently speaking on the topic of “Investing in Values, not just Valuations”.Ritu Verma is the co-founder and Managing Partner at Ankur Capital, an early stage venture capital firm that invests in innovations for the next billion markets. She sits on the board/board observer positions at multiple of Ankur's portfolio - Cropin, Agricx, Niramai, StringBio, Vegrow, Krishify and BigHaat. She is passionate about disruptive technologies across multi sectors. Prior to starting Ankur Capital, Ritu ran Truven an advisory firm for venture funds looking at investments in India and SE Asia. One of the funds she worked with was BASF corporate venture fund, which focused on investments in renewable energy, agri-biotech and materials. She is passionate about bringing innovation from lab to the market and did that for over a decade across different roles at Philips and Unilever across the globe. She holds an MBA from INSEAD and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Pennsylvania and has bachelors from Middlebury College, Vermont. Ritu is also part of the steering committee and director at ThinkAg an agri-sector platform for scaling innovations in India. She is a member of the Global Development Committee for American Society of Mechanical Engineers that focuses on hardware innovations globally. She is also a member of the IMC agri and food processing committee.A global pandemic and multi-country lockdowns were just the catalysts. In reality, it was a lifetime of unconventional, non-institutional learning that led to the birth of Ravi Bhushan's BrightCHAMPS in August 2020. He had always known that traditional educational systems lacked the agility to impart the ever-changing life skills that kids will need in future, and were unable to fast-track learning for kids who are hungry for more, but the learning loss during Covid made the feeling just that much more acute. Ravi's penchant for subverting the norm started at the tender age of 7, when he formulated a homeschooling plan with his grandfather, a revolutionary educationist in his own right, despite his family's apprehensions. He later went on to graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology, Varanasi, but not before sweeping every coding honor in every IIT festival in the country, including the prestigious Yahoo Global Hackathon, presided by Yahoo co-founder David Filo himself. It's no wonder then, that Ravi is leading the charge for global educational innovation, with operations spanning over 30 countries already, and more being added every day. He is committed to the cause of skilling children from the age of 6 to 16 in a wide range of next-generation life skills such as coding, robotics, artificial intelligence, design thinking, and financial literacy. To quote Ravi's vision in his own words, "When I started college, I was criticized for dreaming of a computer science degree without ever having a computer in my life. It fueled me to be the best coder it was in my power to be. But it also made me realize the importance of early exposure and skilled guidance in a student's life. We exist to bridge the wide gap between school education and kids' real learning needs. Our aim is to empower students all over the world to be technologically, financially, and socially smart".
This crystal-clear vision, coupled with a data-backed growth plan, has enabled Ravi to secure a distinguished set of investors, such as Premji Invest the investment office of Wipro Founder Azim Premji, GSV Ventures, Flipkart's Binny Bansal-backed 021 Capital and Singapore-based venture fund Beenext. A self-professed lover of technology and product lover, Ravi chooses to work with a handpicked team of industry-leading experts from Goa, building, what he calls, "The best edtech company in the world" that operates on the PPP formula - people come first, then comes product, both of which enable profit for everyone. Over the years, he has donned multiple avatars in renowned companies such as Decho Corporation, Syncapse, Clickable, Housing.com (Elara Group) and PropTiger to help them achieve technological revamp, revenue, and growth goals, before becoming an angel investor and advisor to other startups in 2019, a role he still enjoys, and finally launching BrightCHAMPS in 2020. Ravi's current focus lies in fortifying BrighCHAMPS' purpose of ensuring the highest return on education (ROE) for kids and parents around the world by building an iconic brand that is synonymous with high quality education across important life skills.
Dr. Goertzel is one of the world’s foremost experts in Artificial General Intelligence, a subfield of AI oriented toward creating thinking machines with general cognitive capability at the human level and beyond. He has decades of expertise applying AI to practical problems in areas ranging from natural language processing and data mining to robotics, video gaming, national security, and bioinformatics. Dr. Goertzel has published 25+ books and 150+ research papers and is the leading architect and designer of the OpenCog framework for human-level general intelligence. Together with Cassio Pennachin, Dr. Goertzel co-authored Artificial General Intelligence, published in 2002 by Springer Publishing. He is also the chair of the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) conference series, chair of humanity+, advisor to Singularity University, and former Director of Research of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (formerly the Singularity Institute). He also served as Chief Scientist for Hanson Robotics until early 2019, crafting the software for Sophia the robot. His recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast scored over 2 million views on Youtube and the wide-ranging discussion continues to be viewed, shared and referenced today.
Lecturer at Medill School of Journalism and freelance copy editorMedill School of Journalism Elise De Los Santos is a lecturer at Medill and the editor of Medill Reports. She teaches undergraduate and graduate classes on reporting and writing. Prior to joining the faculty at Medill, she worked in various editing roles at the Chicago Tribune. She started out as a copy editor at RedEye, the Tribune&rsquo;s former publication geared toward millennials, and rose to executive editor. In 2017, she joined the Chicago Tribune copy desk and edited metro, investigative, politics and breaking news stories for online and print publication. She was the lead copy editor on several high-profile stories, including &ldquo;Betrayed,&rdquo; a 2018 investigative series on sex abuse at Chicago Public Schools, and the follow-up coverage on the 2019 mass shooting in Aurora, Illinois. She occasionally wrote for the Tribune&rsquo;s &ldquo;Flashback&rdquo; section, revisiting the paper&rsquo;s coverage of historical events. While at the Tribune, she was an adjunct lecturer at Medill.Manju Devadas, the CEO and Founder of Pluto7 and Google Partner of the Year Award winner for data and analytics has helped 500+ customers across the globe successfully transform their businesses. With over 20+ years of experience, Manju has built a stellar portfolio by leading organizations, building predictive analytics, and being a business architect for companies like Cisco, Vmware, Synaptics, Igloo, Netgear, Levis, AbInbev, Hero Motors, and many more. He continues to work closely with a passionate group of executives who share his vision for change and innovation as we enter Industry 4.0. Manju plays an advisory role at the University of Southern California Marshall School.For the past two decades, Dr. Guhathakurta has enabled the development of Heliophysics as an integrated scientific discipline from which fundamental discoveries about our universe provide direct societal benefits. As the Lead for the Living With a Star (LWS) program for 16 years since its initiation in 2000 she made possible the flagship missions (e.g. the Solar Dynamics Observatory, Van Allen Probes, Solar Orbiter Collaboration with European Space Agency and Parker Solar Probe), many other missions, including STEREO that would revolutionize our understanding of how the Sun shapes space weather in the solar system. To accelerate innovation and scientific discovery she created funding mechanisms to shepherd traditional domain scientists out of their comfort zones to create LWS system science known as the Targeted Research & Technology program and Focused Science Teams that foster competitive, yet collaborative environments that promote the crosspollination of science ideas and technology. To nurture the next generation of leaders in Heliophysics, she created the Jack Eddy Fellowship Program which has become an important channel for the professional growth of promising researchers. Since 2017, she has championed the growth of FDL, both in terms of the breadth of problem areas tackled as well as in the number of agency and industry partners. The types of innovative solutions include virtual telescopes, data fusion, edge computing, and autonomy and this approach will have an enduring imprint on the way science and exploration is carried out by future generations. Presently she is back at NASA HQ where she is a program scientist and also splitting her time as a Senior Advisor for New Initiatives at the Heliophysics Division, GSFCpanning film and television, script analysis, development and current programming, Andy has razor-sharp creative instincts and the experience to back them up. He is a talented and creative leader with industry-wide relationships, respected for his abilities to collaborate and negotiate. Andy&rsquo;s expertise is in strategy, acquisitions, linear/multi-platform scheduling, mentor and develop talent, channel conversion, start-ups and launching new platforms, on-air media planning, and maximizing and creating unique operational and technological systems. Andy is a member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (ATAS), the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS), the National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE), the British Academy of Film & Television Arts (BAFTA), East Coast, and has been appointed to the Board of Governors at the Friars Club and the Alumni Council at New York University&rsquo;s Tisch School of the Arts. In addition, he has been an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Film & Television at NYU&rsquo;s Tisch School of the Arts since 2004. Andy holds an MFA in Cinema Studies from NYU&rsquo;s Tisch School of Arts and a BA from Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications.An executive leader with a demonstrated ability to inspire and lead global teams to reach and exceed goals. My objective is to build and lead groups that can bring value to internal and external stakeholders through creative and critical thinking, collaboration, and partnership.Sudakar Kodandaram joined Equinix in 2019 leading business development efforts with HPE. In this role, Sudakar collaborates with Equinix technology partners to ideate, co-develop, and launch joint offerings that help customers address their technology business needs. A tech veteran with over 20 years of experience, Sudakar previously spent over a decade with EDS, Hewlett Packard, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, working in different capacities across pan HP/HPE business units. He has managed business development and go-to-market strategies for application transformation, testing and validation services for retail and transportation verticals, been a solutions specialist for HP Technology Consulting Services supporting data center transformation and has been an HPE GreenLake Sales Specialist focused on accelerating digital transformation efforts. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Bangalore.Caity Curtis is an Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) leader with nearly 15 years of experience helping companies cultivate ESG programs that create social and stakeholder value. She is currently Nutanix’s Director, Corporate Social Responsibility where she leads the philanthropic and sustainability programs. In her time at Nutanix, she has helped launch a formal ESG program, formalized strategic targets for community impact and minimizing environmental footprint, and advanced diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging initiatives. Prior to Nutanix, Caity headed the corporate citizenship program at DISH, an American television provider and mobile wireless service, led corporate fundraising at HelpMeSee, a global nonprofit dedicated to ending cataract blindness, supported Fortune 500 clients in developing their corporate social responsibility programs at United Way of New York City, and helped build community affairs strategy at Capital One, an American financial holding company. Caity is also a board member at B:Civic, an organization that provides businesses of all industries, insight and network to learn more about how to be civic-minded while meeting business goals.
Best-known as the founding COO of BlogHer, Inc, Elisa was there at the birth of the social web revolution, building a grassroots phenomenon into a national women’s media brand with 100 million web users, and thousands of conference goers. BlogHer bootstrapped for two years, raised four rounds of venture capital and ultimately exited by acquisition.After selling BlogHer and leaving the acquiring company, Elisa turned her attention to social and civic engagement in the wake of the 2016 election, becoming the co-author of Road Map for Revolutionaries: Resistance, Activism, and Advocacy for All and the host of the podcast, The Op-Ed Page with Elisa Camahort Page and the This Week-ish newsletter. Elisa lives in San Jose with her spouse and her cats, and is dedicated to helping people figure out how to operate at the intersection of technology, media, inclusivity, and social impact.
Muddu Sudhakar is a successful Entrepreneur, Executive and Investor. Muddu has deep product, technology and GTM experience plus knowledge on enterprise markets including Cloud, SaaS, Al/Machine learning, IoT, Cyber Security, Big Data, Storage and chip/Semiconductors.
Muddu brings strong operating experience with startups as CEO (Caspida, Cetas, Kazeon, Sanera, Rio Design) and in public companies such as SVP & GM role at ServiceNow, Splunk, VMware, and EMC. Sudhakar holds a Ph.D. and MS in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles and a BS in Electronics & Communications Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He is widely published in industry journals and conference proceedings and owns more than 40 patents.
Jorden is a Caltech-trained astrophysicist, successful 3-time serial entrepreneur with exits, and a pioneer in Web 3 decentralized technologies. He is a Founding Partner at StarChain Ventures, a Silicon Valley based venture studio solving significant global challenges with Web 3/Blockchain plus other advanced technologies such as AI/ML and IoT – a core thesis of his best-selling book, Enterprise Blockchain Has Arrived, co-authored with Radhika Iyengar. Jorden is the host of The Future of Business, an educational videocast series focused on business opportunities with Web 3 and the Metaverse.
Jorden has been very active in the entrepreneurial community over the last 2 decades having raised over $220 million from top tier Silicon Valley and global investors for both his own companies and advised startups. His first company GlobalSight became a market leader and was rated as one of the “Top 50 Private Companies in the World” by both the Red Herring and Upside Magazines. His second company, in 2002, was focused on decentralized technologies and what we now call the Metaverse (the 3D Web). Jorden has been an invited guest speaker at Stanford University, Google, UC Berkeley, MIT, Draper University, and over 100 technology events including leading blockchain and AI conferences in Silicon Valley. He has also been interviewed by Forbes Japan and BusinessWeek plus has appeared on numerous podcasts. Jorden is Chairman of the Board for the World Business Angels Investment Forum (WBAF) Silicon Valley Office, a partner to the G20 on financial inclusion, with a mandate for increasing diversity and sustainability.
Natasha Allen is a partner based in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco offices of Foley & Lardner LLP, where she serves as Co-Chair for Artificial Intelligence within our Innovative Technology sector, Co-Chair of the Venture Capital Committee, and is a member of the Venture Capital, M&A and Transactions Practices. Natasha is a strategic advisor, supporting her clients in complex decision making. Prior to joining Foley, Natasha was a founding partner at a corporate and transactional law firm, where she counselled startups and emerging companies on debt and equity financing, venture capital financing, commercial matters, and general corporate matters including formations, corporate governance, structuring, and share issuances across a variety of industries including Artificial Intelligence, FinTech, robotics, and life sciences. Natasha’s transactional experience includes mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures, including domestic and cross-border buy-side and sell-side transactions in Augmented/Virtual Reality, software, cybersecurity, telecommunications, and healthcare industries. Natasha draws on a depth of experience developed in a combination of law firms, business consulting firms, and startups in both Canada and the U.S. She was previously managing counsel at a technology enabled law firm where in addition to her management role, she acted as external general counsel for clients. Before her time there, Natasha practiced at various laws firms including at a U.S.-based multinational law firm. Natasha advised public and private companies in corporate and securities matters, mergers and acquisitions, public and private offerings, company and investor side venture capital financings, formations, corporate governance, and other general corporate matters.Wes is CEO of DreamStart Labs, an award-winning fintech company that helps people in emerging markets access affordable loans. Prior to co-founding DreamStart Labs, Wes served as a senior executive and board member at several Silicon Valley companies including Marketo, Citrix, Sun Microsystems, and Network Associates. Wes is a frequent industry speaker and was voted Top Executive Leader in Silicon Valley by the San Francisco Bay Area News Group in 2010. He is passionate about using business and technology for good.Pratibha, or Patti Tripathi developed a tenacity that allowed her to achieve impressive professional success, becoming a network news anchor when she was not well versed in English at age 12. But her personal journey is even more remarkable. She is making an impact worldwide using her voice to advocate for women and girls.She was born near the Nepal border and became the first Indian American face on TV news while anchoring for CNN, CNNRadio, and CNN International. After graduating from the University of Notre Dame, she began working in media – print, radio, and television in Phoenix, South Bend, IN, and Raleigh-Durham, NC. She joined CNN in her late 20s and worked as a broadcaster in Atlanta from 1996 to late 2004. She was also the news director/main anchor for a startup in charge of editorial decisions and hires.She has been running two companies simultaneously for the past decade. In 2006, she launched TriPath Media after getting accepted to a unique TiE entrepreneur mentorship program. She was one of 11 and the only female accepted the inaugural year as a TiE-Smith Entrepreneur Fellow at the RH Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. Hence, TriPath Media was born. Most of her clients in the DC Metro were mid to large technology firms for whom she provided media strategy, media relations, accent reduction and coaching. Her clients have been CEOs, TV medical advice experts, and iconic newsmakers. She presently provides media relations support for University of Michigan Medicine and not long ago spearheaded pro bono support to get the word out internationally about a ventilator invented by a Georgia Tech professor and his wife during peak of COVID. She had had so many extraordinary clients including Nelson Mandela’s family for whom she provided exclusive media outreach from the Harvard Club in New York a few months before their father and grandfather passed away. She's written front cover stories on behalf of clients such as the City of Chicago and its interoperable communication equipment or “Disaster Relief on Wheels." In 2014 she traveled to Tunisia on a UN mission to media train women political hopefuls. She thoroughly enjoyed being a spokesperson for Michelin Star Winning Parisian chef/owner located in Longboat Key, FL who was nowhere to be found in search engines despite being a world class chef. Maison Blanche is now ranked one of top 100 restaurants in the US.She launched a charity in 2012 named Saris to Suits www.SarisToSuits.org. The tax exempt NGO's mission is women's empowerment, girls' education, social justice, gender equality, and cultural competency. The charity has a legal fund to help survivors of domestic violence and trafficking. Last year she partnered with a social enterprise in India to launch an ethical and sustainable western fashion clothing line made from preloved saris. It is lifting 165 women "break the bias" out of poverty, thanks partly to support from Gucci Equilibrium. The charity also profiles extraordinary women in digital stories that you may find on the website to inspire girls to achieve their fullest potentialHer motto: You have to love what you do, dream big, and make it happen! No shortcuts in life, except hard work. As global citizens, we have a responsibility to give back for the betterment of society!Rashmi Gopinath is a General Partner at B Capital Group where she focuses on enterprise software investments in cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, devops, and artificial intelligence and machine learning. She brings over two decades of experience investing and operating in enterprise technologies. She led B Capital’s investments in companies such as DataRobot, FalconX, Clari, Phenom People, Synack, Innovaccer, Hypersonix, Yalo, Labelbox, Armory, Fabric, Pendo, OwnBackup, Perimeter81, Figment, TRM Labs, and Highspot. Rashmi was previously a Managing Director at M12, Microsoft's venture fund, where she led investments globally in the enterprise space and sat on several Boards including Synack, Innovaccer, Contrast Security, UnravelData, Incorta, among others.
Prior to M12, Rashmi was an Investment Director with Intel Capital where she was involved in the firm’s investments in startups including MongoDB (Nasdaq: MDB), ForeScout (Nasdaq: FSCT), Maginatics (acq. by EMC), BlueData (acq. by HPE), among others. Rashmi held operating roles at high-growth startups such as BlueData (acq. by HPE) and Couchbase (Nasdaq: BASE) where she led global business development, product and marketing roles. She began her career in engineering and product roles at Oracle and GE Healthcare. She earned an M.B.A. from Northwestern University, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from University of Mumbai in India.Dr. Sue Xu is a Managing Partner at Amino Capital, and her focus areas of investment include data-driven solutions. She was interim CEO of CandyHouse and CyteSi. Since 2012, she has involved with more than 260 investments mostly in seed and Series A, with 13 unicorns, including Chime Bank, Webflow, Rippling, Weee, Headspin, Grail (acquired by Illumina), OmiseGo and DFINITY (launched with $45B market cap), Mobike (acquired by Maituan), and industry leading fast growing startups, such as Wyze, Avail MedSystems,, Orbeus (acquired by Amazon), Ozlo (acquired by Facebook), GrokStyle(acquired by Facebook), Assemblage (acquired by Cisco), Woomoo (acquired by Priceline), Contastic (acquired by Sugar CRM), Evertoon (Acquired by Niantic | PokemonGo), Yiqixie (Acquired by Kuaishou), Dataform (acquired by Google), Voyage (acquired by Cruise) and et al. Dr. Sue Xu began her early stage entrepreneurship when she was the founding scientist of GlycoMira (also involved in undergrad and PhD laboratory spin-offs). She has three patents and over 20 journal publications, and previously was a Postdoc fellow at Stanford University.Juliet Blake is a British-American film, and television producer and serves as Head of Television for TED Talks. Blake executive produced the TED Talks Live TV series for PBS and produces TED Talks India Nayi Soch a TV series on Star Plus in India produced in Hindi, hosted by Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan. The show&rsquo;s topics include some of the world&rsquo;s most pressing issues, from climate change and the role of women in India, to pollution solutions and how technology can affect change for the better. The series has just been picked up for the next three years after reaching over 96 million people across India. In 2014, Juliet took a break from TED to join Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey in producing the feature film &ldquo;The Hundred-Foot Journey,&rdquo; a film shot entirely in France and India starring Academy Award&reg; winner Helen Mirren and the late Om Puri. Blake is currently developing a new film for Steven Spielberg&rsquo;s company Amblin Partners: &ldquo;Stolen Time&rdquo; a feature film based on the life of Sonia &ldquo;Sunny&rdquo; Jacobs, a woman wrongfully convicted of murder who is later freed and starts a center to assist exonerees. In June 2018 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Savannah College of Art & Design.Raghava KK is a multidisciplinary artist working at the intersections of art, science, technology, education, and entrepreneurship. A National Geographic Explorer and a multiple-time TED speaker, he has also conducted talks and workshops for visionaries such as Tom Hanks, Jeff Bezos and Oprah Winfrey, to think about the role of creativity in the future. Aside from working with traditional forms, including painting, installation and performance, his art practice involves inventing and employing media to express post-human contemporary realities. In keeping with this, he co-founded 64/1, along with his brother Dr. Karthik Kalyanaraman. A research collective focused on art for the post human age, their debut curatorial project, Gradient Descent, was recognized as the first AI Art exhibition in India. Raghava KK&rsquo;s projects often work towards disturbing the limits of the social and the perceptual self through the friction between found digital elements. Apart from exemplifying ideas of distributed authorship and authenticity, his work can also be seen as re-evaluating our notions of transcendence and sublimity. Through his unique marrying of art and science, Raghava KK pushes the boundaries of both, compelling viewers to expand and challenge their socially and psychologically settled selves and perceptions. Artistic creativity is a deeply decentred enterprise shared with the users of the artwork for him, as is evident in his numerous collaborations with other artists, technologists, corporations, educationists, scientists and academics.Apoorva Bakshi is an International EMMY Award-winning producer, spearheading the production of most notably Sundance favorite & NFLX Original DELHI CRIME, National Award-winning films, SHUT UP SONA & LEECHES; NFLX Musical WHAT ARE THE ODDS?; and widely watched Facebook Original HOMESPUN. She serves as a Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Golden Karavan, Awedacious Originals, and Project FUEL carving her niche as one of the youngest producers of prolific South Asian productions. A fierce guardian of independent voices, Apoorva has successfully acquired and distributed over 40+ award-winning independents, notably the Cannes favorites, GANGS OF WASSEYPUR; Golden Globe shortlists FANDRY & SIDDHARTH; IDFA winner PLACEBO and Indian Selection for the Oscars VISARANAI among others. She has also worked at Sony Pictures Entertainment Networks Asia on large-scale format productions AMAZING RACE ASIA, CYRIL SIMPLY MAGIC & INDIA'S MINUTE TO WIN IT.Utkarshini Vashishtha is a renowned prolific writer and director most known for penning iconic poignant feminist titles like Gangubai Kathiawadi (2020), Tinki (2018), Sarbjit (2016), and Five (2020). She worked as an associate director for movies like Goliyon Ki Rasleela Ram Leela (2013), India's Got Talent (2011), and The X factor India (2011). Sarbjit (film) was an official selection at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival and was shortlisted for the 88th Academy Awards. Gangubai Kathiawadi, starring Alia Bhatt is a celebration of the art and anguish of being a woman.Actor, director, producer, writer - Vinita Sud Belani is the Founding Artistic Director of US theatre production house EnActe Arts, and a Board member at several non-profits. Her recent directing credits include Go to your room, Mother!, Chaos Theory, The Conference of the Birds, Soundwaves: The Passion of Noor Inayat Khan, Queen and The Case of The Vanishing Firefish, which she co-wrote. Belani is trained in street theatre under the renowned director and playwright Badal Sircar. Belani transitioned to an Arts career after 20+ years in technology in the corporate world. She holds a CS degree from BITS, Pilani and an MBA from HEC, France.Dr. Rao Mulpuri is the CEO of View, a technology company that creates smart and connected buildings to improve people&rsquo;s physical and mental health, while simultaneously reducing energy consumption. Since its inception ten years ago, View has developed groundbreaking technology and products that are now installed in and designed into more than 90M square feet of buildings&mdash;and counting. Prior to View, Dr. Mulpuri held several executive positions at Novellus Systems, most recently President of Novellus Systems Japan. He holds a BE in Mechanical Engineering from Manipal Institute of Technology, India, as well as an MS in Manufacturing Engineering and a Ph.D. in Materials Engineering from Boston University. He also completed the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School. Dr. Mulpuri is a member of the Young Presidents Organization and the Urban Land Institute and serves on the Executive Board of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, the Advisory Board of the College of Engineering at Boston University, and the Advisory Board of Stanford University CARE.A serial entrepreneur leading a number of startups in Silicon Valley, Daniel Faber has leveraged his experience in a wide range of industry sectors to bring together teams and build companies in the emerging field of in-space operations. Founding CEO of Orbit Fab, Mr. Faber is building the fuel supply infrastructure upon which the bustling in-space economy will be built, and upon with it will depend. Since founding in 2018 the company has tens of millions of dollars of contracts, tens of millions of equity financing, dozens of customers, and several systems operated in orbit. "We founded Orbit Fab to create the propellant supply chain in orbit to enable a bustling in-space economy that can ultimately support permanent jobs in space."Eric Ingram is the Founder and CEO of SCOUT Inc., a US-based company developing orbital products and services to enable a new era of space safety and transparency. He is also a Board Member at the Space Frontier Foundation, and is an Organizing Team Member & Ambassador for Mission: AstroAccess. Previous to SCOUT, Eric served as an Aerospace Engineer for the Licensing and Evaluation Division of the FAA&rsquo;s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, where he gained valuable expertise in the regulatory environment of commercial spaceflight. Prior to this, he worked as an Engineer for Deep Space Industries&rsquo; Special Projects Division, where he designed cubesat subsystems for testbed missions. Eric holds a Bachelor of Science in Physics from Old Dominion University, most of a Masters of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Houston, a sport pilot certificate, and is working towards his SCUBA certification. Outside of the space industry, Eric proudly served as the President of the United States Wheelchair Rugby Association from 2016 to 2020, leading the USWRA to its largest budget surplus in its 30+ year history. Eric has competed in the sport of wheelchair rugby for 15+ years, competing domestically for several club teams, and internationally with the US Developmental team.currently serve as Dean of the Lucas College and Graduate School of Business at San Jose State University. My favorite stat : Silicon Valley firms employ more graduates from SJSU than from any other university in the US. My teaching, research and consulting focuses on leadership, high performance teams, change management, and attitudes and emotions in the workplace. I have been a faculty member and a dean at Montana State University and Dominican University of California, have taught in an executive master's program at the University of Lugano in Switzerland, and have served as a research fellow for the Nemours Center for Medical Leadership. I received my PhD in management from the University of Oregon (Go Ducks!) and master's and bachelor's degrees from GeorgeJames Darryl Peacock MBE, is a motivational speaker, leadership mentor and former English professional rugby league footballer. He played for Leeds Rhinos and the Bradford Bulls in the Super League, and captained both Great Britain and England at international level.Divya Chander is an anesthesiologist (MD UCSD, residency UCSF) and neuroscientist (PhD UCSD) who also works at the intersection of health, data, technology, and data security. She is a practicing physician, Chair of Neuroscience and Faculty of Medicine at Singularity University, former faculty in the Stanford Department of Anesthesiology, and Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Atlantic Council GeoTech Center. An advocate for data and biometric rights, she serves as medical advisor to the Extended Reality Safety Initative (XRSI.org), and is helping develop standards for identity and sensitive healthcare data security. Dr. Chander also leads 2 companies she co-founded during the pandemic &ndash; Lucidify, a continuous, intelligent brain monitoring platform for the detection of delirium, and Plexxus, a company building the data security fabric for secure communications and transactions, supporting the integration of IoT devices to help build the world&rsquo;s connected global immune system. She was named one of 2020&rsquo;s top digital health innovators by Intelligent Health AI. Dr. Chander also served on a NASA task force for COVID19, and directed the post-pandemic global health initiative for OneShared.World. Her research involves mapping consciousness and writing algorithms for the automated tracking of altered states, elaborating theories of consciousness (which she presented on the TED-NYC and UN stages), predicting the effect of human augmentation on consciousness, and how mapping consciousness in humans may enable us to recognize it in non-human, intelligent beings (both on and off-planet, through initiatives like SETI, where she joins the newly formed Complexity Group). Dr. Chander also contributes to space life sciences and medicine. A finalist for astronaut selection and an alumnus of the International Space University, Dr. Chander has performed remote simulations of trauma rescues, anesthesia and surgery in Mars analogue settings. Her desire to alter her own Consciousness is to someday see the Earth rise from the surface of the moon. https://divya@divyachander.comEric Ingram is the Founder and CEO of SCOUT Inc., a US-based company developing orbital products and services to enable a new era of space safety and transparency. He is a Board Member at the Space Frontier Foundation, and is an Organizing Team Member & Ambassador for Mission: AstroAccess, and serves on the Advisory Committee on Commercial Remote Sensing (ACCRES). Previous to SCOUT, Eric served as an Aerospace Engineer for the Licensing and Evaluation Division of the FAA&rsquo;s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, where he gained valuable expertise in the regulatory environment of commercial spaceflight. Prior to this, he worked as an Engineer for Deep Space Industries&rsquo; Special Projects Division, where he designed cubesat subsystems for testbed missions. Eric holds a Bachelor of Science in Physics from Old Dominion University, most of a Masters of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Houston, a sport pilot certificate, and is working towards his SCUBA certification. Outside of the space industry, Eric proudly served as the President of the United States Wheelchair Rugby Association from 2016 to 2020, leading the USWRA to its largest budget surplus in its 30+ year history. Eric has competed in the sport of wheelchair rugby for 15+ years, competing domestically for several club teams, and internationally with the US Developmental team.Amit Aghara is the Chief Technology Officer at Fintech, LLC - the leading payment and data solutions provider for the alcohol industry. Amit is responsible for the development, maintenance, and security of the Fintech platform. Fintech processes over $43B in alcohol invoice payments annually servicing nearly 200,000 alcohol retailers, distributors, and suppliers which includes 70% of all major retail brands nationwide. It provides its clients automation for invoice payment, order processing, AP management, data insights, and market intelligence. Fintech is leading the transformation of the alcohol and beverage supply chain industry using its strategic positioning and innovative data collection process. Amit started his career at IBM building software products in an emerging technology group working on payments gateway, integration middleware, and mobile platforms. After IBM, Amit built two successful technology startups, Kore.ai and Kony. In the more recent position as Chief Technology Officer with Kore.ai, Amit effectively led the creation and implementation of a market-leading virtual assistant platform that contributed to significant company growth. Additionally, Amit has been granted five patents by USPTO and has been featured for his expertise in several technology publications.Senior Advisor for New Initiatives, Heliophysics, NASA GSFC/Program Scientist, NASA HQ For the past two decades, Dr. Guhathakurta has enabled the development of Heliophysics as an integrated scientific discipline from which fundamental discoveries about our universe provide direct societal benefits. As the Lead for the Living With a Star (LWS) program for 16 years since its initiation in 2000 she made possible the flagship missions (e.g. the Solar Dynamics Observatory, Van Allen Probes, Solar Orbiter Collaboration with European Space Agency and Parker Solar Probe), many other missions, including STEREO that would revolutionize our understanding of how the Sun shapes space weather in the solar system. To accelerate innovation and scientific discovery she created funding mechanisms to shepherd traditional domain scientists out of their comfort zones to create LWS system science known as the Targeted Research & Technology program and Focused Science Teams that foster competitive, yet collaborative environments that promote the crosspollination of science ideas and technology. To nurture the next generation of leaders in Heliophysics, she created the Jack Eddy Fellowship Program which has become an important channel for the professional growth of promising researchers. Since 2017, she has championed the growth of FDL, both in terms of the breadth of problem areas tackled as well as in the number of agency and industry partners. The types of innovative solutions include virtual telescopes, data fusion, edge computing, and autonomy and this approach will have an enduring imprint on the way science and exploration is carried out by future generations. She works at NASA and calls herself a (SHE)liophysicist.André Thiollier is a partner with Foley & Lardner LLP, based in the firm’s Silicon Valley office, where he is a member of the firm’s Transactions Practice.
André’s practice focuses on mergers and acquisitions, private equity, emerging growth and venture financings, and general corporate and business counseling. He represents a variety of clients ranging from late-stage private companies and strategic buyers to venture capital and private equity funds across various industries, including life sciences, technology, financial services, healthcare and outsourcing.
André’s extensive experience in multiple jurisdictions combined with fluency in different languages allows André to better advise clients in cross border transactions, particularly in Latin America, including Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Mexico.
Prior to joining Foley, André worked as an associate at the Silicon Valley office of a global law firm. With over 15 years of experience in transnational transactions André has practiced law in top law firms in São Paulo, New York, and Madrid.
Dr. Avantika Tomar is an Associate Partner at EY-Parthenon, and has over ten years of strategy (ex-BCG) and organizational (ex-Mercer) consulting experience across India, Australia, KSA and UK. She has deep expertise in business development, project delivery, and building stronger market presence across Financial Services, Public, Education, and Sports sectors. After 7+ years of living in Sydney and London, Avantika has recently relocated to India to follow her passion for the education sector - her focus areas at EY-Parthenon are Higher Education and EdTech, and she has a personal ambition to support policy related transformation, especially in India, Middle East and North Africa. Avantika is also a passionate academic with a focus on practical business learning and is currently Guest Professor at IIM Calcutta, IIM Tiruchirappalli and BITSoM. She is a keynote speaker and has presented on "Future of Work" related topics at many notable global conferences including World Economic Forum's industry conventions, Corporate Research Forum, Global Youth and Apprenticeship Networks, to name a few. As a part of the Leadership Team, she was responsible for establishing and managing Mercer's global Future of Work (FoW) solution focusing on establishing the practice in key markets (UK-Europe, China-Singapore-India, and US-Canada). Avantika has a PhD from IIM Calcutta in Strategy and HR Management. She is a sports and travel enthusiast and a theatre actor-director, with 15+ commercial productions in Sydney and India.Wendy served till recently as the Founding Executive Director of the Israel-based non-profit, Start-Up Nation Central. She built the infrastructure and founding professional team, and launched its core activity - connecting Israel’s innovation ecosystem with government and business leaders from around the world. Wendy previously spent 23 years at AIPAC, including as Director of the organization’s Israel Office, where she and her team curated educational seminars for visiting US Members of Congress. In addition, she served previously as a registered lobbyist for AIPAC on Capitol Hill focusing on foreign policy issues.Dr Sanjit Singh Dang has been a successful Venture Capitalist, Corporate Executive, Board Member, Speaker, and Writer in Silicon Valley for two decades. He is currently the Co-Founder and Chairman of U First Capital. They provide Venture Capital as a Service to Corporations by bringing Startups in the Corporate's specific areas of interest (dedicated model). U First Capital's clients include Hitachi, Dupont, Booz Allen Hamilton, Ricoh, a multi-national Telecommunications Company, FedEx Institute, etc. Prior to starting U First Capital, Sanjit was at Intel Capital where he led Venture Capital investments in AI and Enterprise Software. He has been an Investor and on the Board of several companies. Sanjit has an excellent track record of driving at least 1 Exit every year: Pensando (Acquired by AMD in 2022), Nextdoor (IPO 2021), Palantir (IPO 2020), Orb Intelligence (Acquired by Dun and Bradstreet in 2020), Pinterest (IPO 2019), DocuSign (IPO 2018), Body Labs (AI startup, Acquired by Amazon in 2017 within 2 years of leading Series A investment), Voke (Acquired by Intel in 2016 within 7 months of leading Series A investment), Maginatics (Acquired by EMC in 2015 within 1 year of leading investment) and Basis Science (Acquired by Intel in 2014 within 1 year of investment). Sanjit has been on US-level Tech/Innovation Policy Advisory team. He is on the Advisory Council of UN&rsquo;s World Artificial Intelligence Organization. He has also been on University of California President's Innovation Council. Sanjit has the fastest Engineering PhD from University of Illinois (2yrs 9mo after undergrad), which he received in 2000 with top research awards. He also attended the VC Executive program at Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. He&rsquo;s an invited Speaker at several top conferences, eg SURGE/WebSummit, Venture Summit West, TiECon, Collision, ShopTalk, McKinsey Leadership Summit, Silicon Valley Open Doors, Global AI conference, etc. He&rsquo;s a mentor at Stanford and Berkeley&rsquo;s Entrepreneurship programs. Sanjit has over a decade of Exec leadership experience in Product Design, Business Development and Strategy across several domains: Big Data, Natural Language Processing, 3D Camera/Apps, Supply-Chain Analytics and Flash Memory. He has managed $2Bill/year accounts and executed >30 partnership deals in $100M-$2Bill range. Always striving to be ahead of the curve, Sanjit worked on Big Data Analytics before industry created the term 'Big Data'. Similarly, he launched 2 online courses during graduate school in 1999 and published iconic papers on learnings, way before the MOOC revolution started.Aida Orphan is Vice President of Investor Relations at Levi Strauss &amp; Co. In this role, she serves as LS and COs liaison to the investor community, while working as a key advisor and resource to the company&rsquo;s senior management team. Prior to joining LS and Co. in 2011, Aida worked at Marsh McLennan where she was responsible for executing the global strategic risk management vision on behalf of publicly-traded and privately-held clients from multiple industries.&nbsp; Aida holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of California, San Diego.Kirthiga Reddy brings over twenty years of experience leading technology-driven transformations to her role as President, Athena Technology II, the third in a series of all women-led SPACs bringing leading talent, access to capital and transaction experience to enable a market leader to access the equity capital markets. She is Founding Investment Partner of F7 seed fund. She serves on the Board of Directors for WeWork and Pear. Previously, she was the first female Investing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers (SBIA), manager of the $100B+ SoftBank Vision Fund. At SBIA, Kirthiga focused on frontier, enterprise and health tech investments and managed a portfolio of $5B+. She served on the Board of Directors for Collective Health and Fungible. She also served on the Investment Committee for Emerge, global accelerator for brilliant companies led by underrepresented founders. Prior to SBIA, she was Managing Director, Facebook India and South Asia for over six years, starting as their first employee in India. Her subsequent experiences at Facebook focused on emerging and high-growth markets including Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa and the Middle East. She has also served as Chair, Stanford Business School Management Board. Kirthiga holds an MBA from Stanford University, where she graduated with highest honors as an Arjay Miller Scholar, an M.S. in Computer Engineering from Syracuse University and a B.E. in Computer Science from Marathwada University, India. She has been recognized as Fortune India&rsquo;s &ldquo;Most Powerful Women&rdquo; and as Fast Company&rsquo;s &ldquo;Most Creative People in Business&rdquo; among other recognitions.Dr. Ekta Dang is the Founder and CEO of U First Capital which provides Venture Capital as a Service to Corporations and invests in Software companies. Ekta has an excellent track record of driving at least 1 Exit every year: Pensando (Acquired by AMD in 2022), Nextdoor (IPO 2021), Palantir (IPO 2020), Orb Intelligence (Acquired by Dun and Bradstreet in 2020), Pinterest (IPO 2019), DocuSign (IPO 2018), etc.
U First Capital provides Venture Capital as a Service to Corporations by bringing Startups in the Corporate's specific areas of interest (dedicated model). U First Capital's clients include Hitachi, Dupont, Booz Allen Hamilton, Ricoh, a multi-national Telecommunications Company, FedEx Institute, etc.
Ekta is also an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at the University of California San Diego Chancellor's Office and on the Grants Approval Committee of the University of California Davis. Ekta has solid experience both in Venture Capital and on the Operating side at Intel. She has been a successful Corporate Executive, Speaker and Writer in Silicon Valley for two decades.
She brings a stellar network from the Venture Capital and Corporate world to the startups. She has been a mentor at Alchemist Accelerator, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Google Launchpad, etc. She has been a member of the US-level Technology Policy Advisory Committee. She is an invited Speaker at several top Venture Capital/Startup conferences, like TiECon, Silicon Valley Open Doors, etc. She has a Ph.D. in Physics and is a graduate of UC Berkeley Haas School's Venture Capital program. She has published several research papers in IEEE and other reputed international journals.
am an architect with a vision of creating spaces that feel good. My firm Elemental was founded in 2020 with the mission of creating climate-responsive architecture and promoting critical regionalism, a philosophy that preserves local architectural identity while rejecting its non-functional features. More recently, I have started leading online courses on Sustainable Architecture & Sustainable Interior Design in collaboration with educational platforms. Always interested in discussing impactful projects and mentoring aspiring architects &mdash; feel free to connect with a note for context!
TiEcon 2022 Tracks
Tracks
- AI & Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
All eyes on the business and human impact of AI
- Capital Markets
Capital Markets
Conversations from IPO to Exits, a 360 degree view on investments
- Cloud & SaaS
Cloud & SaaS
Exciting new paradigms in cloud and security with a zero-trust position
- Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship
Exploring the revolutionary future of entrepreneurship
- Global Connect
Global Connect
Scaling global connectivity post digital transformation
- Healthcare
Healthcare
Reinventing healthcare in the age of the global pandemic
- Media & Entertainment
Media & Entertainment
Convergence of Art and Technology
- Security & Fraud
Security & Fraud
Responding to Identity Theft, Fraud and Cybercrime
- Social Impact
- Supply Chain
Supply Chain
Recent Supply Chain Challenges - is there a Way Out?
- Sustainability
- TiE Youth
- Web3, Crypto & NFTs
Web 3, Crypto & NFTs
Bringing together the trends and the practical applications of Web3
-
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
All eyes on the business and human impact of AI
-
Capital Markets
Conversations from IPO to Exits, a 360 degree view on investments
-
Cloud & SaaS
Exciting new paradigms in cloud and security with a zero-trust position
-
Entrepreneurship
Exploring the revolutionary future of entrepreneurship
-
Global Connect
Scaling global connectivity post digital transformation
-
Healthcare
Reinventing healthcare in the age of the global pandemic
-
Media & Entertainment
Convergence of Art and Technology
-
Security & Fraud
Responding to Identity Theft, Fraud and Cybercrime
-
Social Impact
Dare to Change the World for Good
-
Supply Chain
Recent Supply Chain Challenges - is there a Way Out?
-
Sustainability
Sustainability
-
TiE Youth
Fostering youth entrepreneurs
-
Web 3, Crypto & NFTs
Bringing together the trends and the practical applications of Web3