Philly Tech Week 2020

Natalie W. Nixon, PhD is a design strategist and a hybrid thinker. She applies her diverse background in anthropology, fashion, service design and dance to change lives through ideas. In her consultancy, Figure 8 Thinking, LLC she helps organizations design smarter processes and systems, build strategy, and develop leaders by teaching and applying the strategic design process. Natalie is the Founding Director of the Strategic Design MBA program at Philadelphia University and is a published author: the editor of Strategic Design Thinking: Innovation in Products, Services, Experiences and Beyond and a regular contributor to INC.com online magazine on creativity and design thinking.

Her public speaking invitations have included the Business Innovation Factory, 360 Possibles (Saint Malo, France), Creative Mornings, TEDx Philadelphia, The Copenhagen Institute for Interactive Design, The European Innovation Academy (Nice, France), SEB Bank (Tallinn,Estonia), FUSE and the Mayo Clinic's Transform conference.

She serves on the boards of the Philadelphia Art Commission, the Arts & Business Council of Philadelphia, CultureWorks of Greater Philadelphia, and the Alumni Association of Vassar College.

Natalie earned her BA (Honors: Cum Laude) from Vassar College with a double major in Anthropology and Africana Studies; an MS in Global Textile Marketing from Philadelphia University (USA), Shenkar College (Israel) & Reutlingen University (Germany); and a PhD in Design Management from the University of Westminster, London.

Christine Raetsch currently serves as Duolingo’s first Head of People, building the company’s HR practice. Duolingo is the most popular language-learning platform worldwide, with over 300 million users and the mission to make education free and accessible to all.

Prior to joining Duolingo, Christine was a senior executive at Vanguard, where she spent the first 20 years of her career. In her last role at Vanguard, she served as the Global Head of Culture and Inclusion, where she created and led the center of expertise on culture, employee engagement, diversity, and inclusion for Vanguard’s 15,000+ global employees. In addition to HR, Christine had roles in client management (managing a $50B book of business), risk management (creating the risk management program for our largest division), operations management (leading a team of 250+ employees), and process improvement (earning a Six Sigma Black Belt designation). Christine received her M.B.A. and M.A. from Villanova University. She maintains the GPHR and SHRM-SCP HR professional designations.

Christine is passionate about making her community strong and vibrant. She is a member of the Board of Directors for the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy, and is a partner with Social Venture Partners Pittsburgh, a non-profit accelerator. She also provides HR consulting for many arts- and culture-focused non-profits in the Pittsburgh region. In what remains of her free time, she loves being outside: biking, running, playing tennis, and kayaking on all the great rivers in Pittsburgh. As a relative newcomer to the Pittsburgh area, Christine is enjoying all that Pittsburgh has to offer in terms of arts, culture, the outdoors, and so much more!

Keith Clinkscales CEO, KTC VENTURES

Media executive Keith Clinkscales — whose award-winning career has impacted media and urban culture across platforms — is highly regarded as an innovator, strategist, and thought leader.

Clinkscales has partnered with AT&T to create the “Humanity of Connection” series through his KTC Ventures. The partnership will pivot to deliver targeted content to the emerging field of streaming services currently impacting the media landscape.

That natural progression — relationships morphing into partnerships — has been a staple of Clinkscales’ career. His dedication to urban audiences has created never-before-seen outlets, like his brainchild The Shadow League, Since its inception in late 2012, The site has grown to become a leading destination for sports, race and culture.

An Emmy Award-Nominated and a two-time Peabody Award Winner, Clinkscales has earned over 60 credits as an Executive Producer of films and documentaries. Most notably Clinkscales was one of the creators of ESPN’s critically acclaimed “30 for 30” documentary series.

In 2013, REVOLT Founder and Chairman Sean Combs appointed Clinkscales as Chief Executive Officer of REVOLT Media & TV. With Clinkscales at the helm, REVOLT ushered in the third largest, independent network launch in cable television history.

In the 1990s, Clinkscales worked alongside the legendary Quincy Jones to launch Vibe magazine, the premier publication for hip-hop/R&B music, fashion and entertainment news. Clinkscales served as CEO of the publication and established Vibe’s successful digital presence, vibe.com.

Clinkscales earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and is a magna cum laude graduate

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.

Christopher Wink is the cofounder of Technical.ly, the network of local technology news sites, and one of the organizers of Philly Tech Week.

Tiffany is a dedicated leader passionate about creating sustainable social impact through social entrepreneurship and more importantly, empowering people. She's been nominated for the Greater Philadelphia Social Innovation Award and also recognized by Generocity, Social Innovation Journal, Philadelphia Citizen, Wharton Business Radio, and Penn News as a leader of social entrepreneurship. Tiffany is the Founder & CEO of Fulphil, which she created to empower the youth to pursue their passions through entrepreneurship on the micro scale within cities to create a collectively broader effect. She is also the Founder and Executive Director of Hult Prize Ivy.

She is a current graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, pursuing a dual degree in M.S. Nonprofit Leadership (Cl ‘19) while holding her B.A. in Sociology, concentrating in Health and Medicine (Cl ‘18). She has also worked for City of Philadelphia's Office of Innovation and Technology.

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.

Manav Thiara has more than 20 years' experience leading technology programs, managing profit and loss, and driving innovation across engineering and business programs. In his current role, he helps to make banking more human by designing and ensuring delivery of TD Bank's digitization and automation strategy.

Manav joined TD in September 2018 from First Data, where he served as Director of Global Infrastructure Software and Automation. In that role, he drove digital transformation through the robotic automation of processes and led work on a global asset repository and various data and analytics workstreams, including artificial intelligence and machine learning. Manav has also held technology leadership roles in the healthcare insurance industry, and earlier in his career he worked for Microsoft, where he was accountable for the organization's global data center strategy and led global finance teams.