Philly Tech Week 2020

Kareem is the Director of Outreach and Partnership at the Collective Success Network. This organization provides mentoring to First Gen and Low Income (FGLI) college students by matching them with mentors in their chosen professions.

He is also an IT Auditor at Chubb Limited and sits on the finance and audit committee for the Philadelphia Youth Network.

Kareem is a graduate of Drexel University with a BSBA in Management Information Systems and enjoys all things gaming in his off time.

Lisha is a venture builder and investor, startup advisor, and business strategist and operator who has served on all sides of the business table. She is the founder of Arable Ventures LLC., a boutique innovation consulting and advisory practice helping organizations develop full scale operating models to deliver innovative solutions. Prior to launching Arable Ventures, Lisha was the founder and head of Vanguard’s Innovation Studio, where she led the vision for enterprise innovation and owned the ongoing delivery of a venture portfolio focused on addressing white spaces with the potential to transform businesses and disrupt the financial services industry.

Throughout her work, alongside crafting effective strategy and operations enabled through technology and data wherever possible, Lisha has always placed high emphasis on growing the best functioning teams and company culture. She is an active investor with 37Angels, an early growth stage women's syndicate focused on increasing representation of diverse founders and funders, and serves as mentor and advisor to startups across the consumer, enterprise, and fintech sectors. She is also an adjunct professor @ Temple's Fox School of Business, teaching on open innovation & strategic partnerships. Lisha currently lives in Brooklyn and travels often in pursuit of new adventures.

Gavin Roy is currently the Interim CTO at AWeber. With over 25 years of experience in the Internet industry, Gavin is responsible for the technical architecture and operational stability of several large-scale web properties. He is the author of “RabbitMQ in Depth,” and actively contributes to several open source projects and communities, including Erlang, Python, PostgreSQL, and RabbitMQ. Gavin is a member of several professional organizations, including the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation (EEF), Python Software Foundation (PSF), and the IEEE.

Member of House of Delegates since January 30, 2017. Member, Ways and Means Committee, 2017- (finance resources subcommittee, 2017-19; racing & gaming subcommittee, 2020-; chair, election law subcommittee, 2020-, member, 2017-); Marijuana Legalization Work Group, 2019-; Rules and Executive Nominations Committee, 2020-. Member, Legislative Black Caucus of Maryland, 2017-. Associate member, Maryland Legislative Latino Caucus, 2019-. Member, Pimlico Community Development Authority, 2019-.

Member, City Council, Baltimore, representing District 7, December 8, 2011 to December 8, 2016. Member, Education Committee, 2011-14. Vice-Chair, Labor Committee, 2011-16. Member, Executive Appointments Committee, 2011-16; Public Safety Committee, 2011-16. Vice-Chair, Housing and Community Development Committee, 2014-16 (member, 2011-14). Member, Budget and Appropriation Committee, 2014-16; Land Use and Transportation Committee, 2015-16.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, 1978. Attended Baltimore Polytechnical Institute, Baltimore, Maryland; Tuskegee University, B.S. (electrical engineering), 2001. Former video network engineering manager, Verizon Communications, Inc.; senior project manager, Baltimore Gas and Electric Company. Member, Baltimore City Democratic Central Committee, 2008-10. Member, Omega Psi Phi Fraternity. VIP List, Daily Record, 2012. Lifelong member, St. Matthew Catholic Church, Baltimore, Maryland. Married; two children.

Jordan DiPietro has been working in the financial industry for 15 years and spent the last decade as a marketing and growth specialist at The Motley Fool. He has a passion for creating quality content and building digital products that focus on individuals, entrepreneurs, and business owners. He loves copywriting, his two young kids, skimming old swipe files, and all-things-Philadelphia.

A past columnist for both The New York Times and The Washington Post, Gene now writes regularly for The Hill, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Forbes, Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine and The Guardian.

Gene has written 5 books on business management, specifically geared towards small and medium sized companies. His most recent is In God We Trust, Everyone Else Pays Cash.

Nationally, Gene appears regularly on MSNBC and Fox News as well as The John Batchelor Show and SiriusXM's Wharton Business Channel where he talks about the financial, economic and technology issues that affect business leaders today.

Through his keynotes and breakout sessions, Gene helps business owners, executives and managers understand the political, economic and technological trends that will affect their companies and—most importantly—the actions they can take to continue to grow and profit.

Gene owns and operates the Marks Group PC, a highly successful ten-person firm that provides technology and consulting services to small and medium sized businesses.

Prior to starting the Marks Group PC Gene, a Certified Public Accountant, spent nine years in the entrepreneurial services arm of the international consulting firm KPMG in Philadelphia where he was a Senior Manager.

Alex Campbell is a full-stack software engineer at AWeber, working on everything from legacy PHP sites to automated Slack bots in Python. After getting his undergraduate degree in Cognitive Science with a focus on artificial intelligence at Vassar College, he self-taught programming and was awarded the Developer Scholarship from Google to study Android app development at Udacity. Never a moment not in thought, you can find him pondering self-describing function names during the day, and pondering counters to mind-bending swing manipulations in the slasher game Mordhau at night.

Adam Grant has been Wharton’s top-rated professor for 7 straight years. As an organizational psychologist, he is a leading expert on how we can find motivation and meaning, and live more generous and creative lives. He has been recognized as one of the world's 10 most influential management thinkers and Fortune's 40 under 40.

He is the author of 4 New York Times bestselling books that have sold over two million copies and been translated into 35 languages: Give and Take, Originals, Option B, and Power Moves. His books have been named among the year's best by Amazon, Apple, the Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal, and praised by J.J. Abrams, Richard Branson, Bill and Melinda Gates, Malcolm Gladwell, and Malala Yousafzai.

Adam is the host of WorkLife, a chart-topping TED original podcast. His TED talks on original thinkers and givers and takers have been viewed more than 20 million times. He received a standing ovation at TED in 2016 and was voted the audience's favorite speaker at The Nantucket Project. His speaking and consulting clients include Google, the NBA, Bridgewater, and the Gates Foundation. He writes on work and psychology for the New York Times, serves on the Defense Innovation Board at the Pentagon, and has been honored as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He has more than 3 million followers on social media and features new insights in his free monthly newsletter, GRANTED.

Adam was profiled in The New York Times Magazine cover story, Is giving the secret to getting ahead? He was tenured at Wharton while still in his twenties, and has received the Excellence in Teaching Award for every class that he has taught. He is the founder and host of the Authors@Wharton speaker series, and co-director of Wharton People Analytics. He curates the Next Big Idea Club along with Susan Cain, Malcolm Gladwell, and Dan Pink, handpicking two new books each quarter for subscribers and donating 100% of profits to provide books for children in under-resourced communities. He and his wife Allison have published a children's picture book on generosity, The Gift Inside the Box. Adam is also the cofounder of Givitas, a knowledge collaboration platform that makes it easy to give and receive help in 5 minutes a day, and an angel investor in startups in HR and culture, technology, and consumer products.

Adam earned his Ph.D. in organizational psychology from the University of Michigan, completing it in less than 3 years, and his B.A. from Harvard University, magna cum laude with highest honors and Phi Beta Kappa honors. He has received awards for distinguished scholarly achievement from the Academy of Management, the American Psychological Association, and the National Science Foundation, and and been recognized as one of the world’s most-cited, most prolific, and most influential researchers in business and economics. His pioneering research has increased performance and reduced burnout among engineers, teachers, and salespeople, and motivated safety behaviors among doctors, nurses, and lifeguards. He is a former magician and Junior Olympic springboard diver.