TEDx SV

Sekou Andrews

Motivational Poet & Strategic Presenter

Talk: Trilogy: Innovation + Social + Change

Sekou will present three original spoken word poems reflecting the three pillars of TEDx SV, Innovation, Social and Change.

Motivational Poet & Strategic Presenter Sekou Andrews is inspiring the business world one poem at a time with The Sekou Effect. As an award-winning and internationally acclaimed spoken word artist, playwright, actor and musician, Sekou has mastered the art and business of creating original, custom-written spoken word pieces that electrify the messages and accelerate the missions of corporations and non-profits worldwide. Sekou does not inspire you with his story, he inspires you with your story.

An ex-elementary schoolteacher turned national poetry slam champion, any given day may now find Sekou presenting an original piece for European marketing executives, giving a keynote speech at a healthcare conference, or presenting passionate poems for Barack Obama at a party in Oprah's backyard. His work has been featured on such diverse media outlets as ABC, MSNBC, HBO, Showtime, MTV and BET, and he has performed privately for such prominent individuals as Quincy Jones, Maya Angelou, Norman Lear, Hillary Clinton, P-Diddy, and Coretta Scott King and family. Companies that have experienced "The Sekou Effect" include Kraft Foods, Kaiser Permanente, Nike, Time Warner, eBay, Microsoft, ACLU, Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, Wieden-Kennedy, NBA, Eliza Corp, Global Green, NCAA, and Ferrazzi Greenlight to name but a few.

With inspired audiences from the HBO US Comedy Arts to The Pasadena Pops Orchestra under his belt, Sekou is now emerging as a powerful voice for healthcare, routinely evoking tears, cheers, and standing ovations at multiple cutting edge conferences, including TEDMED, IHI Forum, Big Task Weekend, and Health 2.0. With impressive versatility, and inspiring insightfulness, Sekou Andrews is a powerful storyteller telling your powerful your stories.

Daniel Berkman

Musician

Daniel Berkman is a San Francisco based composer, multi-instrumentalist and innovator of the kora (a 21-stringed harp/lute from West Africa). His early recordings for kora highlighted his use of electronic devices and loop boxes to transform his kora in real time in live performance. His first three cd's, "Heartstrings", "Feverdreams" and "Headlands" mark this period between 1996 and 2000 which feature Daniel creating other worldly soundscapes and a playing technique drawing on his myriad influences, including that of the great kora masters of our time.

Prof. Clayborne Carson

Professor, Stanford University

Talk: Dr. King and the Other Visionary

In 1963, when the speaker was nineteen, he attended the March on Washington, and his life became intertwined with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s still-unrealized Dream. Later that same year, he also heard a talk by little-known Mississippi voting rights organizer, and his profound understanding of how oppressed people can liberate themselves transformed the speaker’s life and the lives of many other people who have heard of Dr. King – but never heard of the Other Visionary.

Dr. Clayborne Carson has devoted his professional life to the study of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the movements King inspired. Since receiving his doctorate from UCLA in 1975, Dr. Carson has taught at Stanford University, where he is now professor of history and founding director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute. His first book, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, remains the definitive history of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In 1985 the late Coretta Scott King invited Dr. Carson to direct a long-term project to edit and publish the papers of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Under Dr. Carson’s direction, the King Papers Project, a component of the Institute, has produced six volumes of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Leila Chirayath Janah

Founder, Samasource

Talk: Crowd vs. Poverty

The international aid industry, ranging from multilateral banks and financial institutions to large Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), has come under fire for pumping billions into fragile economies in poor countries – with few results. Despite this surge in aid, many of the world's poor are worse off than they were 20 years ago. 1.4 billion people get by on less than $1 a day in income. Yet at the same time, human capacity is expanding dramatically -- the world has seen a surge in literacy and public schooling, and a reduction in infant mortality and premature death. In this context, the world's poorest people don't need our good intentions: They need new ways to earn money.

Leila followed an unusual path; at age 16, she used a scholarship from the Lorillard Tobacco Company to move to Ghana and teach English in a rural school. After 10 years navigating the development industry as a consultant to NGOs and at the World Bank, she founded Samasource, a nonprofit that connects women, youth, and refugees to digital work. Samasource began with an initial investment of $35,000, several sympathetic friends with couches, and heaps of "Jugaad" (a Hindi term for doing more with less, MacGyver-style). In just over a year, Samasource has provided work benefiting over 550 people through innovative uses of technology. The company's "Give Work" iPhone application, launched in partnership with CrowdFlower, was hailed as "one of the best and most useful iPhone applications around today" by Mashable.

David De Rothschild

Founder, Adventure Ecology

Talk: Out There

Ever since the Industrial revolution, the barometers of success within society have been measured by our lack of interaction with the natural world: The more we force nature into the background, the more evolved our society will become. Nature is no longer perceived as ‘natural’ unless it comes in a glossy plastic package with an instruction manual. The result: “Fake nature.” However, if we can change the perception of our role within the web of life, we can slow and even reverse the alarming environmental damage occurring around the planet. Meeting this challenge doesn’t even need to be a chore: It can be an honest-to-goodness, swashbuckling adventure, the kind that gets you out of your car or your office into nature, so you understand exactly what it is that you’re trying to save.

David de Rothschild is a British adventurer, environmentalist and head of Adventure Ecology, an expedition group raising awareness about climate change. His commitment to the environment has sent him on adventures to some of the world's most remote and fragile regions. In 2006, he became one of only 42 people, and the youngest British person, to ever reach both geographical poles. David is planning to sail to Plastic Island, a floating pile of plastic and garbage debris in the South Pacific, on a catamaran made from reclaimed post-consumer plastic bottles called the Plastiki. He was awarded the accolade of "Emerging Explorer" by National Geographic, and nominated as a "Young Global Leader" by the World Economic Forum.

Di-Ann Eisnor

Chairman, Platail

Community Cartographer, Waze

Talk: War Peace and Borders

What is the point of one person crossing a border? We think of borders in a geographic sense: They look permanent on CNN. But up close, there are fluid and personal layers. We all create our own borders, and limit our movement by them. Those who draw the map, are represented on the map, and conflict over borders will only increase in the next decades as they are redrawn based on access to natural resources. As a neogeographer, Di-Ann studies borders, creating tools to scale participation in mapmaking, and encouraging us to look at our own borders – and consider a humble act of diplomacy…crossing.

Di-Ann is a neogeography pioneer and serial entrepreneur employing all means to increase the world’s citizen mappers. Di-Ann functions as both Chairman of Platial, The People's Atlas, and as Community Geographer at Waze. Platial is a widely adopted mobile and online social mapping service funded by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Ram Shriram and others with approximately 15 million unique users. Waze is free crowd-sourced navigation and real-time traffic. Started in Israel and well past critical mass, Waze now has top quality map, navigation and traffic data in the country. Di-Ann is setting up US operations and crafting the cartography of "live mapping".

Thomas Goetz

Executive Editor, Wired Magazine

Talk: The Decision Tree and The Future of Healthcare

When it comes to healthcare, we live in an age of too much information and too little explanation. We all know what we are supposed to do for our health; we just lack a way to actually do it. But there is an answer: Compelling new research shows that people who are engaged in their healthcare – who have a sense of control – are much more likely to have better outcomes. Mindfulness matters. There’s a new framework for personalized medicine: a decision tree rooted in data rather than drugs, and controlled by patients rather than providers.

Thomas Goetz has been a journalist for more than 15 years, first reporting on media and business at the Village Voice, then at the Wall Street Journal, followed by a crazed two years at the Industry Standard. Most recently, he's Executive Editor of Wired Magazine where Thomas oversees all editorial efforts. He describes that job as being "a trend spotter or zeitgeist watcher." Thomas is the writer of the forthcoming book, "The Decision Tree: Why Taking Control of Our Health Is the Smartest Way To Better Health." In 2005 he returned to school and picked up a Master of Public Health degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

Eoin Harrington

Musician

Born and raised in Dublin, Ireland and surrounded by music since the age of 4, Eoin Harrington has travelled the globe and now resides in San Francisco where his music is causing quite a stir. This award winning songwriter has grabbed the attention of numerous heavyweights in the bay area and across America. Grammy award winning producer Scott Mathews has labelled him as one of the best artists he has seen here in the bay area in the last 10 years: "Classic music, this guys gonna be around for a long time…". KFOGS Rosalie Howarth says, "Kids a star, plain and simple, I've been in this business 25 years and it's a real pleasure to listen to someone with pure, raw talent."

Andrew Hessel

Pink Army Cooperative

Talk: The End of Cancer

A paradigm shift is approaching that will revolutionize the way we understand and treat cancer, open a path to breakthrough therapies made at record speed, and fundamentally change the dynamics of the present day biotechnology industry.

Andrew is a founder and the managing director of the Pink Army Cooperative. After earning degrees in cellular biology and bacterial genomics, he joined the Amgen Institute in Toronto, where he learned firsthand the challenges of novel drug development. A champion of open source synthetic biology, he advises leading groups on strategies for open innovation, including open source drug development. His work is enabling a new generation of researchers and entrepreneurs to address major bioengineering challenges, including renewable energy production, environmental preservation and remediation, and curing human disease. Andrew is also co-chair of the biotechnology and bioinformatics track at the Singularity University, whose focus is prepare humanity for accelerating technological change.

Peter Hirshberg

Gray Area Foundation for the Arts

Talk: Tenderloin Reinvented

Peter Hirshberg is a veteran Silicon Valley executive and co-founder and chair of The Conversation Group, and acts as chair of the advisory board of Technorati. Peter served as president and CEO of Gloss.com, and was founder and CEO of Elemental Software (sold to Macromedia in 1999). During his nine-year tenure at Apple Computer, Peter ran enterprise marketing, where he grew Apple's large business and government revenue to $1 billion annually. Peter earned his bachelor's degree at Dartmouth College and his MBA at Wharton. Peter co-founded GAFFTA with Josette.

Josette Melchor

Gray Area Foundation for the Arts

Talk: Tenderloin Reinvented

Josette Melchor is the Executive Director of Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (GAFFTA), a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization dedicated to building social consciousness through digital culture. By funding and curating projects that offer insightful perspective on the information of our age, using the technologies of our time, GAFFTA provides a means to decode and humanize the evolving global database. Josette’s previous projects include Gray Area Gallery and Gray Area Beacon, a new media arts program that she founded in 2008 with Peter. She has facilitated many large- and small-scale events up and down the west coast including notable pioneering media artists.

Reid Hoffman

Founder, LinkedIn

Talk: iMovements

The Internet powers a variety of new philanthropic products and business models, ranging from open source projects and micro-lending sites to hybrid organizations like Mozilla and the philanthropic extensions of large corporations. Reid will show how the internet allows significant new patterns for sustainably changing the world.

Reid Hoffman, an entrepreneur and angel investor based in the Silicon Valley, is Executive Chairman and a co-founder of LinkedIn, and in 2009 joined Greylock Partners. Prior to LinkedIn, Reid was Executive Vice President of PayPal where he led business and corporate development. After working at Apple Computer and Fujitsu, Hoffman co-founded his first company, SocialNet. Reid serves as Director of Mozilla, SixApart, Kiva.org, Tagged, and Zynga. Reid has also been an investor in Facebook, Flickr, Digg, Nanosolar, Care.com, and Last.fm. He graduated with distinction from Stanford University with a BS in Symbolic Systems and from Oxford University with a Master’s degree in philosophy and a Marshall scholarship.

Drue Kataoka

Sumie Artist

Talk: Art as Social Bridge

Progress, including social progress, feeds on creativity. Creativity comes from unexpected connections, parallels and imagination. Through its power to inspire and engage, Art is uniquely positioned to build new links between the logical and the imaginative, science and inspiration -- and to multiply creativity in our lives. The speaker will discuss her experience as an artist in Silicon Valley who builds social bridges, and make the case for a socially-engaged art -- a "corpus callosum" of society.

Drue Kataoka is a modern artist based in Palo Alto, CA. Her artistic vocabulary incorporates both the refined techniques of her ancient Zen art form and cutting-edge conceptual innovations inspired by life in Silicon Valley. She creates expressive, experiential works of art that convey highly nuanced products and ideas or uniquely powerful portraits. Her projects have been covered by CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC affiliates, and by the San Jose Mercury News, San Francisco Chronicle, Entrepreneur Magazine, CNET and many others. Drue’s non-private commissions include cover art for Wynton Marsalis, original estate wine labels for Au Bon Climat, and numerous high-profile projects for clients like Nissan, Cisco, SUN Microsystems, Nordstrom, Stanford University and the Hoover Institution. Drue recently participated in the first zero-gravity art exhibition in space at the International Space Station. Through her art, she has raised tens of thousands of dollars for numerous charitable organizations.

Yvonne Lee Schultz

Artist

Talk: 2Sweet2Kill

Touching the senses, here are some artistic objects that are strangely serving the pleasure for sweets, while emphasizing the irresistible thrill of the toy.

Born in Berkeley, Yvonne lives and works as an artist in Berlin and San Francisco. As a Master of Fine Arts of Markus Lüpertz she received the Letter of Academy (Diploma) from the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf. Her artworks have been shown for more than 10 years in German and international museums, exhibition projects, art fairs and galleries, such as the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Sprengel Museum Hannover, State Museum Baden- Württemberg, Stuttgart, CAMK, Museum of Contemporary Art Kumamoto, Japan or the Sydney Biennale, Australia. Her work includes site specific art installations, which are related to the given architectural context, challenged by location and space as well as content, purpose and function of a building, and are present in collections, institutions and companies such as Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, Robert Bosch GmbH in Stuttgart, Nord/LB in New York or in the European Patent Office in Munich.

Yvonne Lee Schultz

Founder, Nancy Lublin

Talk: Don’t Just Sit There

Have we become a nation that loves the next new thing... too much? Do we love entrepreneurship at the expense of appreciating execution? The speaker sees the need for a cultural shift on the horizon, and spells out a three-part plan for getting there.

Nancy Lublin is the CEO and Chief Old Person of DoSomething.org, the largest organization in America for young people and social change. She is also the founder of Dress for Success, the organization that helps women transition from welfare to work. She created Dress for Success with a $5,000 inheritance she received from her “Poppy Max.” Dress for Success now exists in 96 cities in 8 countries and has helped nearly 1 million women reclaim their destinies. Nancy received her BA from Brown University, an M.Litt. from Oxford University where she was a Marshall Scholar, and a law degree from NYU where she was a Root-Tilden Scholar. She writes a column for Fast Company magazine, and is the author of “Doing More with Less: 11 Things Big Business Can Learn from Not for Profits” to be published in April by Penguin. Nancy is proud to have been selected a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and to be the mother of two young children who love broccoli.

Peter Thiel

Thiel Foundation

Talk: All We Need is a Singularity

Will the Singularity happen or not? And will this be good or bad for society? Most economic decisions today implicitly count on a technology singularity — and the consequences of being wrong will be worse than people think.

Peter Thiel, best known as the founder of both PayPal (sold to eBay in 2002) and hedge fund Clarium Capital, in 2009 launched the Thiel Foundation, a private foundation based in NYC that defends and promotes freedom in all its dimensions: political, personal and economic. Peter sponsors the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Seasteading Institute, and the Human Rights Foundation, and funds the artificial intelligence research of the Singularity Institute. He aids work against violence through the Oslo Freedom Forum, occasionally teaches on globalization and sovereignty at Stanford, and serves on the board of overseers of the Hoover Institution. He co-produced the film Thank You for Smoking, and was rated a master by the United States Chess Federation. He serves on the board of directors of Facebook and several other companies.

Victor Tsaran

Musician and Accessibility Lead, Yahoo!

Talk: Dis/Ability

Often times, when we talk about innovation and social change, we rarely include or consider the needs of certain large segments of the society – such as people with disabilities, approximately 650 million around the world. While we do believe in numbers and readily trust statistics to justify our business decisions, we close our eyes to the opportunities presented by this unexplored audience of contemporary and demanding consumers. This is about a journey through several islands of the speaker’s life where he witnessed society's attitudes, labelling and stereotypes, and about the story of how computers and a handful of open-minded people helped to overcome them.

Victor was born in Vilnogirsk and grew up in Drohobych, Ukraine. Beginning the age of 8, he learned music studying the bayan (chromatic squeeze-box). At 12, a friend showed him a few guitar chords and since that time the instrument has not left his hands for long. Along the way, Victor also learned to play the sopilka, a Ukrainian folk wind instrument and some piano. Victor's own unique style of music brings together Bossa Nova, Pop and Acoustic Folk genres, to name a few. He also runs Yahoo!’s accessibility program, helping to ensure that computer users with disabilities are able to use Yahoo!’s web sites. Prior to his work at Yahoo!, Victor worked for a number of international organizations, and taught computers to visually impaired kids and adults in South East Asia, Middle East and Europe.

Alberto Vollmer

CEO, Ron Santa Teresa

Talk: Ganging Up

Project Alcatraz is a reinsertion program for gangs (and their members) based in Venezuela – which today is the deadliest country in the world (73 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants). Project Alcatraz has been successful in reducing the homicide rate peacefully from approximately 120 per 100,000 inhabitants to 27 per 100,000 inhabitants in the community where it operates. Identity, amnesty, foresight and purpose drive the process of change within the individual.

Alberto C. Vollmer is Chairman and CEO of Rum Santa Teresa, Venezuela’s leading premium rum manufacturer. He entered the company as a third shift production supervisor in 1996, was later assigned to the export department and since 1999 - due to a financial crisis - lead the company turnaround as its new CEO. Since, the company has grown both in business and in social development initiatives. In 2003, after gang members assaulted the company, he founded Project Alcatraz, a reinsertion program for criminals. Alberto is a Young Global Leader, a member of the YPO, and sits on several boards. Prior to his entry to Rum Santa Teresa, Alberto practiced as a civil engineer dedicated to alternative construction in the slums of Caracas and as a photographer. He is married to Maria Antonia Capiello, is an avid traveler, rugby player and Enduro addict.

Youth Speaks

Talk: Spoken word and poetry jams

Founded in 1996, Youth Speaks is the leading nonprofit presenter of Spoken Word performance, education, and youth development programs in the country. Presenters of local and national youth poetry slams, festivals, reading series, and more, Youth Speaks also offers a comprehensive slate of literary arts education programs during the school day and the after-school hours, and conducts numerous publications and youth development programs. All told, Youth Speaks works with 45,000 teens per year in the Bay Area alone, and has created partner programs in 36 cities across the United States.

Robert Strong

Comedy Magician

Robert has been crisscrossing the world since 1985, entertaining audiences large and small, young and old, formal and casual, and everything in between! Recently voted “San Francisco’s Funniest Prop Comedian” and the “Bay Area’s Best Performer,” Robert has appeared on CBS This Morning, performed for the U.S. Congress, and taken his act to more than 30 different countries. Although Robert specializes as a corporate entertainer, he regularly appears at a broad range of events: trade shows, conventions, product launches, cruise ships, colleges, comedy clubs, private parties, political events, and much more.

TEDx SV

Innovation for Social Change

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