In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized (subject to certain rules and regulations).

Schultz Cultural Arts Hall at the OFJCC
3921 Fabian Way
Palo Alto, California, 94303
United States

Amy Wilkinson

Amy Wilkinson is founder and CEO of Ingenuity, a lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business and author of The Creator’s Code: The Six Essential Skills of Extraordinary Entrepreneurs. She advises executives and emerging leaders around the world on how to master the skills that underlie entrepreneurial success. Wilkinson’s career spans leadership roles at McKinsey & Company, J.P. Morgan and as founder of Alegre, a foreign-based export company. She has also served in the White House as a senior policy advisor to the United States Trade Representative and a White House Fellow. Fascinated by how leaders must reinvent their approaches to excel in an entrepreneurial age, Wilkinson interviewed 200 of today’s top entrepreneurs including the founders of Airbnb, LinkedIn, eBay, PayPal, Yelp, Dropbox, Tesla Motors, SpaceX, Chipotle, Under Armour, Spanx, Jetblue and Revolution Foods to distill what it takes to go from start-up to scale in our rapidly changing economy. She conducted this work while a senior fellow at Harvard University and public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center. The Ewing Marian Kauffman Foundation awarded Wilkinson a grant for her groundbreaking research on high growth entrepreneurs. Wilkinson has been a keynote speaker for corporations, institutes and universities around the world. Recent speaking events include the World Economic Forum at Davos, Consumer Electronics Show, NASSCOM (India’s Leadership Forum), Microsoft, IBM, TD Ameritrade, National Governor’s Association and Federal Reserve Board of Governors. She is an expert for The Wall Street Journal and has been featured by CNN, Fox News, CNBC, Bloomberg TV & Radio, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Fortune, Forbes, Inc. TIME, The Washington Post and USA Today. Wilkinson earned BA, MA, and MBA degrees from Stanford University. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and an Eisenhower Fellow.

Joan C. Williams

As an expert in the field of social inequality, Joan C. Williams is Distinguished Professor of Law and Founding Director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law. She has been described by The New York Times Magazine as having “something approaching rock star status” in her field. Her work has been covered everywhere from Oprah Magazine to The Atlantic and Slate to Fox News. She has authored 11 books and over ninety academic articles. She is one of the ten most-cited scholars in her field. Her work on social class includes her election-night essay “What So Many People Don’t Get About the US Working Class,” published online in Harvard Business Review, which has been read over 3.7 million times. She has also written White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America, the prize-winning Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It (Oxford, 2000) and widely-read reports such as The Three Faces of Work-Family Conflict (co-authored with Heather Boushey) that have influenced policymakers, the press and activists. Her 2014 book (co-written with her daughter Rachel Dempsey) What Works For Women at Work was praised by The New York Times Book Review: “Deftly combining sociological research with a more casual narrative style, What Works for Women at Work offers unabashedly straightforward advice in a how-to primer for ambitious women.” Following its success, Sheryl Sandberg and LeanIn.org asked Joan to create short videos sharing the strategies discussed in the book. The videos have been downloaded over 975,000 times and are featured by Virgin Airlines as in-flight entertainment, seen literally around the world.

Kevin Buckler

Kevin Buckler has a knack for building innovative and successful companies. He is an entrepreneur, professional racecar driver and the founder and CEO of The Racers Group, a multifaceted motorsports operation and Adobe Road Winery, one of the top boutique wineries in Northern California. Both are operated from headquarters in Petaluma, California—the starting line to Wine Country. Buckler’s can-do attitude extends well beyond the track, where he counts a win at the 24 Hours of Le Mans and two Rolex 24 Hours at Daytona victories as a driver (4 as a team owner) among many in his storied career. Kevin built upon that legacy of success, molding his racing team, TRG, into a results-oriented racing and entertainment business, well-established as one of the most celebrated (and winningest) racing teams in North American sportscar racing, with seven championship titles and over 75 wins in 25 years of top-level professional racing and marques including Porsche, Aston Martin and Lamborghini. He balances this love of speed with another driving passion—wine. Adobe Road Winery has solidified its reputation as one of the nation’s most award-winning producers of small-lot, handcrafted wines in the country, sourcing fruit from the most exclusive vineyards in Napa and Sonoma counties. The winery will soon break ground on a game-changing state-of-the-art winery facility, events and entertainment space in the thriving downtown Petaluma waterfront district. Constantly breaking new ground, Kevin’s annual Partnership Summits at venues like Daytona International Speedway, bring together titans in business, technology, motorsports, lifestyle and media to explore how the motorsports and lifestyle spaces can go well beyond traditional platforms for business and corporate entertainment and has made him an in-demand motivational speaker at a variety of forums around the U.S.

Rajesh Anandan

Rajesh Anandan is an intrapreneur, entrepreneur and growth architect. He is the SVP of UNICEF Ventures and co-creator of UNICEF Kid Power, a wearable-for-good named one of TIME’s 25 Best Inventions in 2016 and one of the largest ed-tech programs serving high-need elementary schools in the U.S. He is also co-founder and CEO of ULTRA Testing, a neurodiverse technology company named one of Interbrand’s Breakthrough Brands in 2017 and one of the nation’s largest employers of individuals on the autism spectrum. Having started his career at Microsoft as a program manager, Rajesh then joined Bain & Company where he focused on business incubation and growth strategy for technology, media, financial services, healthcare and retail clients. For the past decade, he has worked in the impact sector, including running the Private Sector Division at the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and malaria, and setting up UNICEF Ventures, an incubator for digital, social enterprises. Rajesh grew up in Sri Lanka, has worked in Asia, Africa, Europe and North America, and has a B.Sc. and M.Eng. in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with concentrations in Artificial Intelligence, Systems Dynamics and Economics.

Salon Panel

Moderator: Amy Wilkinson

Sophie Robinson

Sophie Robinson is a filmmaker, social justice activist and philanthropist. Sophie is the Executive Producer and Director of Outreach for The Age of Consequences, a documentary about how climate change impacts national security. She organized and coordinated with The Better Future Project and 350 Massachusetts for two years, spearheading one of the leading statewide climate networks in the country. Sophie has Psychology and Environmental Science degrees from Williams College and is currently finishing a masters degree in Sustainability and Environmental Management from Harvard.

Thor Halvorssen

Thor Halvorssen is a Venezuelan-born human rights advocate and film producer. He began advocating for human rights as an adolescent in 1989 in London by organizing opposition to South African apartheid. Described by The New York Times as a “champion of the underdog and the powerless,” he is president of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation (HRF), an organization devoted to liberating political prisoners and promoting tolerance globally. He became involved full-time in the promotion of due process and individual rights after his father became a political prisoner in Venezuela. Thor founded HRF after his mother was shot during a political protest in 2004. In February of 2014 Thor's first cousin, Leopoldo Lopez, a Venezuelan politician, became a political prisoner of the government of Nicolas Maduro. Thor is founder of the Oslo Freedom Forum, an annual global gathering described by The Economist as a “human-rights equivalent of the Davos economic forum.” He is the Patron of the Czech-based Children’s Peace Movement, On Own Feet. Thor has lectured at universities across the world on matters of liberty, and his opinions and views have appeared in numerous venues, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Washington Post, National Review, National Public Radio, TIME, The Daily Telegraph, New York Post and GQ, as well as televised outlets such as Al Jazeera, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, BBC, HBO and many others. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with concurrent undergraduate and graduate degrees in political science and history.