Pascal Finette

Emcee

Pascal is Singularity University’s Chair for Entrepreneurship & Open Innovation and Co-Founder at radical Ventures. His work focuses on the intersection of technology, global impact, and culture; inspiring, educating and empowering entrepreneurs, corporate irritants and change makers to tackle the most intractable problems of our time.

He has spent his career pushing the boundaries of technology and passionately believes it can profoundly impact the betterment of humankind. He got started on the net before there was a web browser, founded a series of technology startups, led eBay’s Platform Solutions Group in Europe, launched a consulting firm helping entrepreneurs with their strategy & operations, and invested into early-stage tech startups. Pascal led Mozilla’s Open Innovation Lab, created Mozilla’s accelerator program WebFWD, and headed up Mozilla’s Office of the Chair. As Principal at Google.org, he invested into social impact organizations around the globe. Further, he founded the nonprofit organizations Mentor for Good and The Coaching Fellowship; the “GyShiDo” (Get Your S%#& Done) movement and publishes the opinionated newsletter, “The Heretic”, which is read by tens of thousands of change-makers globally. He’s the author of the published book “The Heretic – Daily Therapeutics for Entrepreneurs”.

Pascal frequently speaks and writes about the magic and potential which happens at the intersection of technology, culture & global impact. He is also a trained Co-Active executive coach working with clients on achieving their full leadership potential. Most of all – Pascal loves to work with change makers who want to, and can, make things better.

Steve Wozniak

Keynote Speaker

A Silicon Valley icon and philanthropist for more than thirty years, Steve Wozniak has helped shape the computing industry with his design of Apple’s first line of products, the Apple I and II. He also influenced the popular Macintosh. In 1976, Wozniak and Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer Inc. with Wozniak’s Apple I personal computer. The following year, he introduced his Apple II personal computer, featuring a central processing unit, a keyboard, color graphics, and a floppy disk drive. The Apple II was integral in launching the personal computer industry.

In 1981, he went back to UC Berkeley and finished his degree in electrical engineering/computer science. For his achievements at Apple, Wozniak was awarded the National Medal of Technology by the President of the United States in 1985, the highest honor bestowed on America’s leading innovators.

In 2000, he was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame and was awarded the prestigious Heinz Award for Technology, The Economy and Employment for single-handedly designing the first personal computer and for then redirecting his lifelong passion for mathematics and electronics toward lighting the fires of excitement for education in grade school students and their teachers.

Through the years, Wozniak has been involved in various business and philanthropic ventures, focusing primarily on computer capabilities in schools and stressing hands-on learning and encouraging creativity for students. Making significant investments of both his time and resources in education, he adopted the Los Gatos School District, providing students and teachers with hands-on teaching and donations of state-of-the-art technology equipment. He founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and was the founding sponsor of the Tech Museum, Silicon Valley Ballet and Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose. In 2014, he was awarded the Hoover Medal, a prestigious honor given for “outstanding extra-career services by engineers to humanity,” and was inducted into the IndustryWeek Manufacturing Hall of Fame.

Wozniak is a published author with the release of his New York Times best-selling autobiography, iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon by Norton Publishing. His television appearances include: ABC’s Dancing with the Stars and The Big Bang Theory, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Conan, and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. In October 2017, Steve co-founded Woz U.

Leonard Brody

Recently named one of the top 30 up and coming management thinkers in the world, Leonard Brody is known as “a leader of the new world order”. He is an award-winning entrepreneur, venture capitalist, bestselling author, and a two-time Emmy-nominated media visionary. In his compelling, customized talks — for clients ranging from the United Nations to Visa and Pepsi — Leonard addresses the rapid pace of change, innovation, and disruption facing us all, and what to do about it.

Over his career, Leonard has helped in raising hundreds of millions in capital for startup companies, been through one of the largest internet IPOs in history taking a company to a six billion market cap, and has been involved in the founding and successful exit of numerous companies to date.

Leonard is currently the co-founder and executive chairman of Creative Labs, a joint venture with CAA (Creative Artists Agency in LA), the largest sports and entertainment agency in the world. Leonard oversees the building of new ventures for some of the most well-known celebrities and political leaders in the world. He was previously the president of the Innovation and Digital Group for the Anschutz Company, which he took after selling his company in 2009. Leonard is also one of the proud owners of the professional soccer team Coventry City in England.

A highly sought-after public speaker, Leonard has lectured at institutions such as the G8 and the United Nations. His work has also been featured in such publications as Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, BBC and the New York Times. Leonard is currently writing a new book in partnership with Forbes, called The Great Re:Write, based on the successful documentary series Leonard and Forbes produced. It has already garnered of more than six million views in the last year. Leonard holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts from Queens University, a law degree from Osgoode Hall and is a graduate of the Private Equity Program at the Harvard Business School.

Session Description:

The Great Rewrite

We are living in a unique moment in history, when revolutionary change in all sectors is occurring at a frenzied pace.

This massive scale of disruption has understandably left organizations on shaky footing, struggling to engage consumers and employees alike and stay relevant.

Those that learn to adapt, those that allow themselves to be “rewritten” for the modern day, will survive and prosper. Those that do not will collapse.

Leonard Brody explains how to deal with the questions the future holds, and how organizations can harness the uncertainty they’re faced with and turn it into excitement, innovation and success.

Takeaways coming soon

Daniel Epstein

Daniel’s life has been shaped by a fundamental belief that entrepreneurship is the answer to nearly all the issues we face today. By the time he received his undergraduate degree in philosophy, he’d already started three companies. He has been recognized by Inc. Magazine as a “30 under 30 entrepreneur” and by Forbes as one of the “top 30 most impactful entrepreneurs” of the year. In 2013, he received the prestigious “Entrepreneur of the World” award along with Richard Branson & the President of Liberia at the Global Entrepreneurship Forum.

Today, this passion for entrepreneurship has led to Daniel becoming the founder and CEO of Unreasonable (www.unreasonablegroup.com). Unreasonable is dedicated to supporting entrepreneurs positioned to bend history in the right direction. Part accelerator, part impact investment firm, part media house, and part a global private network of luminaries and business leaders, Unreasonable partners with some of the largest institutions and respected brands to support entrepreneurs in solving the grand challenges of our time. Unreasonable operates across so many industries and geographies because the organization is dedicated to doing whatever it takes to break down barriers and drive resources into entrepreneurs solving seemingly intractable social and environmental challenges of our time.

On a personal level, Daniel believes in militant transparency and truthfulness in his everyday life and in all of the projects he is part of. He also has an overt love for his hometown of Boulder Colorado and for his dog, Kaya.

Session Description:

Today, the Unreasonable Group is actively supporting more than 160 entrepreneur-CEO’s who have collectively raised over $3B in financing, generated over $2B in revenue, and are actively impacting the lives of more than 200 million individuals across the globe. Whether it’s atmospheric water generation technologies, the fastest growing distributed solar company in India, the most efficient hydrogen cell powered vehicle in the world, or advanced robotics companies positioned to solve our most pressing challenges — Unreasonable supports entrepreneurs who strive to “bend history in the right direction.”

Join this talk to hear from the CEO of Unreasonable about what trends in technology and entrepreneurship he believes will define the “new economy.” Daniel and his team at Unreasonable are on a mission to prove that the world’s most valuable and influential companies will be those solving our most meaningful global challenges.

In this session, you will learn:

1. Entrepreneurship is a tool to solve problems. Let’s leverage it to solve the most important challenges of our generation.
2. It’s not just that you can do well by doing good. In the “new economy” You will outperform the market by doing more good than your competitors.
3. Breakthrough innovation is no longer relegated to the lucky few in Silicon Valley. The smartest and most promising entrepreneurs and technologies know no borders. It’s a global phenomenon.

Yat Siu

Yat Siu is founder and CEO of Outblaze, a conglomerate specializing in cloud, gaming, and mobile software. He is also co-founder and chairman of Animoca Brands, an ASX-listed company leveraging popular brands, gamification, AI, blockchain, and mobile technology to make engaging apps ranging from games to fitness solutions. He is a director for TurnOut Ventures, a partnership between Outblaze and Turner Entertainment that brought to prominence the hugely popular emoticon character Tuzki. Yat is co-founder of the Dalton Learning Lab, which emphasizes divergent thinking and design thinking for children.

A classically trained musician, Yat is a member of the advisory board of BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) and a director of the Asian Youth Orchestra.

Neville Sanjana

Neville Sanjana, PhD, is a Core Faculty Member at the New York Genome Center and Assistant Professor in the Departments of Biology and of Neuroscience and Physiology at New York University. As a bioengineer, Dr. Sanjana creates new tools to understand the impact of genetic changes on the nervous system and cancer evolution. His lab has harnessed high-throughput gene editing to pinpoint which regions of the genome are involved in diverse diseases.

Dr. Sanjana is a recipient of the AAAS Wachtel Prize for Cancer Research, the NIH’s New Innovator and Pathway to Independence Awards, the DARPA Young Faculty Award, the Sidney Kimmel Scholar Award, the Melanoma Research Alliance Young Investigator Award, and also is the Leichtung Family Investigator of the Brain and Behavior Foundation. Previously, he was a Simons Postdoctoral Fellow at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. Dr. Sanjana holds a PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from MIT, a BS in Symbolic Systems and a BA in English from Stanford University.

Session Description:

Promises and challenges of gene editing in the age of CRISPR

We have developed advanced tools to manipulate the written word, digital information, and computer code. But, until recently, we have had few tools for easy manipulation of DNA — the programming language of all living things.

In this talk, I will explore the scientific frontiers in DNA manipulation using a new tool called CRISPR that is transforming biomedical science. I will explain how CRISPR is used to precisely modify genomes, including human genomes, and what are the broader implications of this new capability. This includes the ability to address pressing global problems, including food security through engineered plants, battling infectious diseases like malaria and designing new cellular therapies for cancer.

I will also present an example of genome editing in action from our lab’s research at the New York Genome Center and NYU. In our work, we take advantage of the easy programmability of CRISPR to target not just one or two genes but all of the approximately 20,000 genes in the human genome. In this manner, we can efficiently “hunt” for genes responsible for relapse in cancer and, using this information, engineer new therapeutic strategies to overcome cancer drug resistance.

In this session, you will learn:

1. DNA scissors such as CRISPR enable easy, programmable modification of complex genomes, like human genomes. This ability to modify our own genome is a major milestone in human intelligence and capability.
2. CRISPR is the Model T of writing DNA: It has made a complicated process into something that is cheap, easy and accessible to biomedical researchers worldwide.
3. The biggest gene editing stories are often not the ones you hear about. CRISPR has had a far bigger impact on global food security and cancer research, but almost all recent news has focused on designer babies.

Rachel Sibley

Rachel Sibley is a futurist, artist, and strategist who specializes in immersive technologies—primarily Augmented and Virtual Reality.

As AR/VR Faculty at Singularity University, she helps Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurs worldwide ramp into exponential mindsets and strategically deploy immersive technology. Formerly a VP at Leap Motion (the company that allows people to interact in the digital world with their bare hands) Rachel led go-to-market efforts to bring physical interaction to augmented and virtual reality. Before that, she helped scale IBM Design, opening 29 global design studios in one year, catalyzing culture change, and creating a more design-centric ethos at one of the world’s oldest and largest technology companies. Rachel has been named by WIRED as a “Women to Watch” in VR and AR, co-authored a Diversity Manifesto featured in VentureBeat and showcased her choreography at SXSW and the Cotton Bowl. As we move into the cyborg generation and technology becomes increasingly intimate, personalized and kinesthetic, Rachel’s background as an award-winning dancer and choreographer afford her a unique perspective on the possibilities and perils of embodying this complex new digital world.

Through consulting, speaking and senior leadership roles at companies both large (IBM) and scrappy (Leap Motion), Rachel helps envision, identify and design how exponential technologies will shape our future.

Hod Lipson

Hod Lipson is a professor of Engineering and Data Science at Columbia University in New York and a co-author of the award winning book “Fabricated: The New World of 3D printing” and “Driverless: Intelligent cars and the road ahead”, by MIT Press (translated into 7 languages). Before joining Columbia University in 2015, Hod spent 14 years as a professor at Cornell University. He received his PhD in 1999 from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, followed by a postdoc at Brandeis University and MIT.

Hod Lipson’s work on self-aware and self-replicating robots challenges conventional views of robotics and has enjoyed widespread media coverage. He has also pioneered open-source 3D printing, as well as electronics 3D printing, bio-printing and food printing. Lipson has co-authored over 300 publications that received over 14,000 citations to date. He has co-founded four companies and is a frequent keynoter both in industry and academic events. His TED Talk on self-aware machines is one of the most viewed presentations on AI and robotics. Hod directs the Creative Machines Lab, which pioneers new ways to make machines that create and machines that are creative.