HultBusinessSchoolSF

Confirmed Speakers

• Mark Nelson
  Former relief-worker, investment banker, and social entrepreneur, Mark Nelson is a founding member of Stanford’s Peace Innovation Lab, where he researches mass collaboration and mass interpersonal persuasion. Mark has described a functional, quantitative definition of peace, in terms of engagement quantity and quality across social difference lines; he has identified innovative, automated ways to measure peace, both at the neighborhood and global level; and he has developed a formal structural description for Peace Data. He leads the Social Energy Map project, and designs intervention systems to measurably increase positive, mutually beneficial engagement across conflict boundaries. Mark’s mission is to create an entire new, profitable industry, where positive peace is delivered as a service.
• Evan Bailyn
  Evan Bailyn is an internet entrepreneur, bestselling author, and child advocate. He is primarily known as a search engine optimization expert, having used his ability to rank at the top of Google to build and sell five businesses, including one of the largest children's websites online. His first book, Outsmarting Google, debuted to rave reviews in mid-2011. Its sequel, Outsmarting Social Media, comes out in April 2012. Evan is the founder of The Evan Bailyn Foundation, which promotes emotional awareness in children. His Facebook page, which encourages people to be true to themselves, gained over 100,000 fans in a year, making it one of the most popular non-celebrity pages on Facebook.
• John Montgomery
  John Montgomery is a corporate attorney, entrepreneur, executive coach and writer. He is the founder of Montgomery & Hansen, LLP, a corporate law firm in Menlo Park, California He is also the co-founder of Startworks, a technology incubator (www.startworks.biz), and Chrysallis, a human development company. John recently received a California Lawyer of the Year award from California Lawyer magazine for his work as a co-chair of the legal working group behind California’s new benefit corporation law.
• Lisa Katayama
  Lisa is a journalist who is best known online for the award-nominated blog TokyoMango and for founding the San Francisco-based design thinking boot camp The Tofu Project, which helps entrepreneurs from Japan bring their ideas more effectively to the rest of the world. She writes about Japanese culture for Wired, Boing Boing, The New York Times Magazine, and NPR and has spoken about Japanese culture and innovation at major conferences in Japan, Singapore, and the US. Her most recent project, We Are All Radioactive, is an online documentary film project about surfers who are helping to rebuild northern Japan.
• Noah Hellman
  Noah is a physicist and electrical engineer by training, but came to the field of synthetic biology because he wanted to do challenging science in a new field with the potential to change the world. When he made the transition from physics to biology he had never even held a pipette and hadn’t taken a biology course since high school. Since then, he has been fascinated with the many ways in which Nature has “solved problems”, as well as how difficult it is for humans to engineer biology.
• Richard Adler
  Richard Adler has been a leader in the field of aging for nearly two decades. He is principal of People & Technology, a research and consulting firm based in Silicon Valley. He is also a Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Future (IFTF) in Palo Alto, CA, where he recently co-led a project on Baby Boomers: The Next 20 Years. Richard’s primary areas of interest include aging and technology, the future of health care and new models of education and learning.
• Nikhil Arora
  Nikhil Arora is a co-founder of Back to the Roots, an urban mushroom farm in Oakland, California, growing gourmet mushrooms and mushroom kits sustainably on 100% recycled coffee grounds. Offers in hand, he and co-founder, Alejandro Velez, were headed into the corporate world during their last semester at UC Berkeley in 2009 when they came across this idea in class a few months before graduation, fell in love with the waste-to-food model and decided to forego careers in investment banking and consulting to become full-time urban mushroom farmers! Back to the Roots diverted 1 million pounds of coffee ground waste from Peet’s Coffee in 2011, has grown its team to 24 people, and now sells its Grow-Your-Own Mushroom Gardens at more than 1,500 retailers nationwide, including Whole Foods and Home Depot. Back to the Roots has been recognized in Forbes’ 30 Under 30, BusinessWeek’s Top 25 Entrepreneurs Under 25, and CNN’s 10 Next Gen Entrepreneurs. Alejandro and Nikhil are working to build a movement that can connect everyone with their food again—green thumb or not!
• Ganesh Vasudevan
  Before studying at the Hult International Business School in San Francisco, Ganesh was a project manager at a variety of Biotech companies. He has made and patented new mechanisms for detecting Lupus and kidney transplant success. At TEDxHult Ganesh will be sharing his passion for biotechnology by illuminating the rapidly increasing access to your very own genetic code and what the effects will be on the world.
• Alex Kane
  Alex Kane is a master of digital marketing candidate at the Hult International Business School as well as a musician, composer and producer in San Francisco. He has been playing music since he was eight, and producing since he was fourteen. Alex composes music for independent and action-sports films and recently completed his fourth CD. At TEDxHultBusinessSchoolSF he will be debuting a new type of performance art that integrates producing and performing on multiple mediums, while converging advanced technology with traditional styles of playing music.
• Dan Hou
  Dan Hou (Director of Strategy @ HUGE) guides the creation of compelling user experiences from concept through implementation, melding user needs, business objectives and technical constraints into a cohesive digital offering for clients such as CNN, Target and Four Seasons. Dan’s diverse prior experience at Microsoft and Motorola as a product manager ranged from building high end music devices to speech writing for Bill Gates. Dan holds degrees in economics and computer science from the University of Pennsylvania's Jerome Fisher Management & Technology program.
• Scott Sambucci
  Scott is a sales professional, entrepreneur, and data geek. He is current;y the Chief Operating Officer with Altos Research and Co-Founder of SalesQualia, a company dedicated to improving sales performance with technology and analytics. Scott is an author on both the Altos Research "How's the Market?" blog and his personal blog - "A Free Market Voice." He recently published his first book - "Start-up Selling: How to Sell If You Really Really Have To But Don't Know How." Scott started his career with Pearson Education, moving to Silicon Valley in 2002 to work with Aplia - an educational software company which sold later to Cengage Learning. He founded Economic Information Services, bridging investment capital and business opportunities in Central Asia. Scott is part-time faculty member at California State University-East Bay and Saint Leo University in the areas of Entrepreneurship, Strategic Management, and Economics, and has previously taught undergraduate and graduate courses in Finance at the University of San Francisco. He studied History at Winthrop University, earned MBA from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, and an MA in International Economics from the University of San Francisco. Scott has a craving for endurance events, completing two Ironman distance triathlons and several long distance running events.