Advisors

Ken Banks Founder, Kiwanja.net
Bruce Cahan Ashoka Fellow
Melissa Lau Associate, Revolution Ventures
Emeka Okafor Director, TED Global
Kristy Lagle Previously Director of Strategic Services at LiveOps
Premal Shah President, Kiva.org
Robert Hockett Associate Professor of Law, Cornell University
Tim Ferriss Entrepreneur, Author
Katherine Barr Partner, Mohr Davidow Ventures

A Closer Look

Ken Banks, Founder, kiwanja.net : Ken Banks, founder of kiwanja.net, devotes himself to the application of mobile technology for positive social and environmental change in the developing world, and has spent the last 16 years working on projects in Africa. Recently, his research resulted in the development of FrontlineSMS, an award-winning text messaging-based field communication system designed to empower grassroots non-profit organisations. Ken graduated from Sussex University with honours in Social Anthropology with Development Studies, and was awarded a Stanford University Reuters Digital Vision Fellowship in 2006, and named a Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellow in 2008. In 2009 he was named a Laureate of the Tech Awards, an international awards program which honours innovators from around the world who are applying technology to benefit humanity. Ken's work has been supported by the MacArthur Foundation and Open Society Institute, and he is the current recipient of a grant from the Hewlett Foundation

Bruce Cahan, Founder and CEO, Urban Logic Inc : Bruce is currently establishing a Sustainable Resiliency (SR) bank that measures the ability of a region or city to cope with change, looking at different areas of social concern from global warming to disaster preparedness. The bank translates this measure into monetary terms, giving the financial services industry a practical tool for understanding how investing in sustainability and resiliency is good for business. Bruce was selected as an Ashoka Fellow in 2007.

Kristy Lagle : Kristy was formerly the Director of Strategic Services at LiveOps.

Melissa Lau, Associate, Revolution Ventures : Melissa Lau is currently working with Revolution Ventures, a venture capital firm investing in education companies. Previously, Melissa was a consultant with McKinsey & Company and a full-time member of its Social Sector practice where she focused on international development issues. While at McKinsey, she worked with various arms of the UN throughout Sub-Saharan Africa and with Bono on issues related to the financing of development in Africa. In addition, Melissa has worked with a number of entrepreneurial ventures including MySpace China and a variety of mobile technology companies with a footprint in the developing world. Melissa received an MBA from Harvard Business School where she focused on social enterprise, and a BA magna cum laude in Economics from Yale University.

Emeka Okafor, Entrepreneur and Director, TED Global 2007 : Emeka Okafor is an entrepreneur. He was the Director of the recently concluded TED Global 2007 Africa: The Next Chapter. He is the founder and author of the blog, Timbuktu Chronicles, which covers the confluence of entrepreneurship, science and technology in Africa and Africa Unchained, a blog examining issues that include governance, policy, education, and institution building in Africa. He is also the director of research for the Direct Expatriate Nationals Investment initiative, a Poverty Reduction and External Resource Mobilization Program for countries that have received massive debt cancellation from the HIPC Program. Mr. Okafor is a founding member of the IPE Group and sits on the Global Entrepreneurship X PRIZE Advisory Board. He is a partner in Caranda Fine Foods, a manufacturer of a line of gourmet, naturally harvested fair trade beverages developed and produced in several African countries. Mr. Okafor is also a member of the global advisory board for Students for the Advancement of Global Entrepreneurship (SAGE) and a principal at the Makeda Fund.

Premal Shah, President, Kiva.org : Premal leads Kiva’s efforts to scale its partnerships and member base. Prior to Kiva, Premal was a Principal Product Manager at PayPal, an eBay company. During his 6 year career at PayPal, Premal drove a number of key initiatives including a year long project defining eBay’s role in economically empowering the global working poor. A number of corporate initiatives have come out of this effort, including PayPal’s support of Kiva. Prior to PayPal, Premal was a strategy consultant at Mercer Management Consulting in New York. Premal has had a long standing interest in microfinance. In 1997, he was awarded a grant from Stanford University to research microfinance in Gujarat, India. More recently Premal co-founded the Silicon Valley Microfinance Network and spent 2 months in India working to refine / validate Kiva’s model. In 2006, Premal was a featured speaker at the Clinton Global Initiative and Global Microcredit Summit. Premal graduated with a B.A. in Economics from Stanford University.

Robert C. Hockett, Professor of Law : joined the Cornell Law School faculty in 2004. His principal research and teaching interests lie in the fields of organizational and financial law and economics, particularly as these bear upon and are borne upon by economic "globalization" and distributive justice concerns. Prior to entering full-time academe he worked for the International Monetary Fund and clerked for the Hon. Deanell Reece Tacha, then Circuit Judge, now Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit. While a graduate student and as a judicial clerk he taught respectively at Yale, Harvard, the University of Connecticut, and the University of Kansas.

Tim Ferriss, Enterpreneur and Author : nominated as one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Business People of 2007,” is an angel investor (StumbleUpon, Digg, Twitter, etc.) and author of the #1 New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek bestseller, The 4-Hour Workweek, which has been sold into 35 languages.

Katherine Barr, Partner, Mohr Davidow Ventures (MDV): Katherine is a member of the investment team at MDV focused on Internet-enabled companies. Prior to joining MDV, she was a Senior Consultant at Vantage Partners (spin-off of the Harvard Negotiation Project) helping Fortune 500 clients such as IBM, Cisco and HP to better negotiate and manage their critical business relationships (including customers, suppliers, outsourcing service providers/buyers, and alliance partners). Before Vantage, she worked as a Senior Product Development Manager at HSA, an education technology startup in Boston, leading a team that developed multi-media products and online learning systems. Katherine teaches a yearly Professional Education Negotiation program for the School of Engineering at Stanford. During her graduate studies at Stanford, she was a research and teaching assistant for the US-Asia Technology Management Center in the School of Engineering. She was also involved in running the E-Challenge business plan competition for BASES (Business Association of Stanford Engineering Students), and founded the Social Entrepreneur branch of the business plan competition when she was a BASES VP. Katherine received her B.A. from McGill University, and completed an M.A. and the M.S. core curriculum in Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University.