Philly Tech Week 2020

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.

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!

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.

Angela Benton is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Streamlytics, a next-generation data intelligence ecosystem which helps everyday people and companies ethically access consumer data streams. Prior to her role at Streamlytics she founded the first accelerator for minorities globally in 2011, NewME was acquired in December 2018.

To date, Ms. Benton has received numerous accolades, some of which include Goldman Sachs’ 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs, Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business and their Most Influential Women In Technology, Business Insiders’ 25 Most Influential African-Americans in Technology, ADWEEK’s 2020 Women Trailblazers, and many more. She’s been featured in numerous national and international media outlets including CNN, MSNBC, Bloomberg, Inc, Forbes, Good Morning America, and the Wall Street Journal where she was a featured essayist for the paper’s 125th Anniversary edition on The Future of Entrepreneurship.

At the helm of Streamlytics, Angela continues to uncover untapped spaces in technology and innovation.

Jack Markell served two terms as Delaware’s Governor, completing his tenure in 2017. During his time in office, Delaware’s job growth was the best in the region and one of the best in the country. Under his leadership, Delaware won the top spot in President Obama’s Race to the Top competition and high school graduation rates saw some of the best increases in the country. Markell served as Chair of the both the National Governors Association and the Democratic Governors Association and as President of the Council of State Governments. He also served for ten years as Delaware’s State Treasurer.

Beginning his career in the private sector, Markell helped lead the wireless technology revolution as the 13th employee at Nextel, where he served as senior vice president for corporate development. His other business experience includes a senior management position at Comcast Corporation and work as a consultant with McKinsey and Company. Since leaving office, Markell serves on a variety of corporate and non-profit boards.

Markell was born and raised in Newark, Delaware, and graduated from Newark High School along with his wife, Carla. He went on to receive an undergraduate degree in economics and development studies from Brown University and an MBA from the University of Chicago. Markell is a Henry Crown Fellow and a Rodel Fellow at the Aspen Institute. He and Carla reside in Wilmington, Delaware. Their children, Molly and Michael, are in their 20s.

Christian is the Global Director for Savings Groups at CARE and the Founder and CEO of Chomoka, a start-up social enterprise unlocking economic opportunity for savings groups and their members through digital innovation. Currently live in Tanzania, Chomoka combines an Android-based record-keeping system with a digital marketplace to help people engage with the rapidly evolving digital economy. Over 10 years with CARE, Christian has served in a range of roles focused on program design, management, measurement and learning to support CARE’s efforts to eliminate hunger and food insecurity, increase access to finance and promote economic development. Christian has worked in the international development arena for 20 years across Asia, Africa and Latin America. He began his career as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Uzbekistan. Christian holds degrees from Boston College and the George Washington University. He lives with his wife and two young sons in Narberth, PA.

Ellen Weber joined the Fox School of Business as an Assistant Professor in the Strategic Management department. She serves as the Executive Director of Temple University’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Institute and Mid-Atlantic Diamond Ventures. Her areas of interest include funding early-stage companies, entrepreneurial ecosystems and women’s entrepreneurship.

She is also the Executive Director of Robin Hood Ventures, a leading angel group helping to fuel startup growth in the Philadelphia region.

Ellen has more than 25 years of experience creating strong teams and building strong leaders for emerging companies as well as Fortune 500 clients. She has been a Managing Director and Founder of Antiphony Partners, LLC, a strategic consulting firm that specializes in helping companies create sustainable value through innovation. Ellen was the COO and co-founder of VisionMine, which provides a specialized Open Innovation platform for large corporations.

She was involved in the growth of Investor Force, a provider of technology-based solutions for institutional investment professionals, where she created the company’s initial human resources department, facilitated strategic planning, and managed the organizational aspects of the company’s mergers and acquisitions. Additionally, she spent twelve years at Shared Medical Systems where she was responsible for initiatives encompassing organizational development, customer support and corporate communications. She was also a senior consultant for Andersen Consulting.

Ellen has been named one of the Philadelphia Business Journal’s Power 100, a guide to the region’s most influential people in 2017, 2018 and 2019. She was the 2018 recipient of the Alliance of Women Entrepreneur’s Iris Newman award, for demonstrating a strong commitment to advancing women, women’s entrepreneurship, and especially women’s high-growth entrepreneurship. She received the 2017 David Freschman award from the Pennsylvania Private Investors Group.

Ellen graduated from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania with a B.S. in economics.

Some individuals are going through life, just living the everyday ‘grind.’ Then you have those who live with a purpose, who honestly want to improve their surroundings in their community. Dr. Leslie Grace is one of these people in the city of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Professor Grace has always been self-driven and a little more mature than her peers in her thinking. Even as a young girl, she clearly knew what her life goals were going to be. A younger Leslie Grace was in newspaper articles at the age of 16/17 years old. She had well thought out opinions even then, wise beyond her years by today’s standards. She was a young lady with determination and big dreams to chase, which fueled her mind daily.

Professor Leslie Grace is an educator, social entrepreneur, philanthropist, and will be a new author this upcoming spring. This amazing single mom lives to empower the young people in her community. The Elements Of The Community Inc provides educational, media relations, financial literacy and entrepreneurship programming to communities around the United States. Dr. Grace has taught thousands of young children & adults how to open their own businesses and manage their finances. “Why do we teach our young people to be good workers, instead of teaching them to be good owners? We must stop limiting the potential of our youth.” Dr. Grace truly understands that real freedom comes from being financially free, because that is the only way that those from the inner cities will have a chance to live the “American Dream.”

The exposure that the young people are getting about today’s financial situation here in America, and how to avoid those landmines, will surely result in a financial behavior change, totally different from what their parents had experienced in their youth. Dr. Grace is truly dedicated to increasing the financial capabilities of young Americans and their immediate family members. She is so committed to teaching her young students about ownership over their lives, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Dr. Leslie Grace is well educated, but don’t be thrown off by how young this educator looks. She has definitely done her time in institutions of higher learning. She lives by the motto, “What Is The Point Of Having All The Degrees And You Are Not Helping Change Lives.” This young lady has more degrees than a thermometer and welcomes any information that will continue to educate her.

Dr. Grace has won numerous community and innovation awards from the business world locally in the city of Philadelphia. Dr. Grace was nominated to attend the United States Women Summit, hosted by the White House in 2016, because of her dedication to women and their families. The release of two books are on the horizon this spring for Dr. Leslie Grace, that will help change the landscape of children and their families globally. She is not afraid to step out in front and be the game changer in her community. She definitely won’t let grass grow under her feet (and that is just the way she likes it).