Judges

Bethany Greer

Bethany Greer

Bethany is the Investment Manager at Bethnal Green Ventures, an early-stage VC fund based in London. She is responsible for leading investments into exciting tech for good startups and supporting portfolio ventures. Bethany previously worked at Centre for Fashion Enterprise, supporting retail tech startups to run and scale their businesses. Prior to moving to London, Bethany worked in fashion design at Jonathan Simkhai and ELLERY in New York and Sydney and for an early-stage startup fashion media company, The Coveteur, backed by Drake and BrandProject.

Eva Arh

Eva Arh

Eva Arh is a VC investor at 3VC partnering up with visionary European founders across the German speaking region and CEE. Her focus includes enterprise businesses, infrastructure and health tech where she has ledinvestments into Lokalise and a company in the healthcare sector.

Previously, she worked with founders at Austria’s biggest high-tech incubator, leading activities related to fundraising & internationalisation. She also served as a CFO and Investor Relations manager in tech startups.

Eva holds a MSc degree in International Management / CEMS from Vienna University of Economics andBusiness and has been recognised by Forbes 30 Under 30 Finance.

Francesca Baillieu

Francesca Baillieu

Following a degree in Biological Sciences, Francesca started her career at Evode, an e-commerce start up where she headed up their operations team.

Subsequently, she worked as an Investment Analyst at the Venture Capital firm Playfair Capital, and at the Private Equity Firm, True Global within their commercial division working with clients such as Primark, M&S, and TK Maxx. Francesca is currently an Associate at Project A, a Pan-European Seed and Series A generalist fund that invests between €1m-€7m and has a 100+ operations team dedicated to supporting their portfolio companies.

In her spare time, Francesca is also the co-founder of Associated Podcast, a podcast series that aims to make Venture Capital more accessible by interviewing some of the brightest minds within Venture Capital from around the globe.

Pavel Skalin

Pavel is a Product Director at Angels Den Funding, a digital investment platform that connects a network of 19,000+ investors with early-stage technology startups. He is also a Co-Founder of Savium, an early-stage FinTech that is automating spend management for small businesses. Outside of his day-to-day activities, he engages in mentorship schemes within Barclays, Level39 and UCL.

 

Panel Members

Daljit Bamford

Daljit Bamford

Daljit joined the company in July 2020 having worked in the technology sector for 19 years. Her

previous role as Chief Customer Officer (UKI) at Salesforce saw the Oxford graduate work with senior leaders across the business spectrum to help them transform their companies. Prior to her time with Salesforce, Daljit spent 13 years with digital foundation specialists Alternative Networks, and more recently volunteered as a Social Media Advocate with The Trussell Trust – an organization that aims to tackle poverty and hunger in the United Kingdom.

Haider Imam

Haider Imam

Haider is Founder and Director of Tao Leadership, a startup behaviour change consultancy. Tao leads its field with a fusion of analytics, tech & psychology for cultural transformation in just 12 weeks. Tao’s behaviour change programmes have won international awards for clients such as Sky, Accenture, Boston Consulting Group, Npower, and Domestic & General and generated more than £50 million in client-measured ROI in the last two years alone. Though Tao is a micro-enterprise with just ten employees, it has twice been runner up in the CIPD’s ‘Best Consultancy’ category, winning over global firms with thousands of employees. Find out more at TeamTao.uk. Author of the bestselling book, ‘Straight to Yes!’ Haider is also a former UK Sales Trainer of the Year, Systemic Team Coach, NLP Trainer, musician, & Geordie.

Poornima Luthra

Dr Poornima Luthra

Dr Poornima Luthra is the founder and CEO of TalentED Consultancy ApS and a member of the teaching Faculty at the Copenhagen Business School. She has spent the last fifteen years researching and teaching university courses in the field of talent management, with a focus on Diversity and Inclusion.

More recently, Poornima has taken her years of academic experience into the corporate world with the vision of making workplaces more inclusive for all. Poornima focuses on inspiring shifting mindsets and expanding the areas of diversity we look at through strategy consulting, corporate training, keynote sessions, talks, articles, blog posts and podcasts. Her book ‘Diversifying Diversity: Your guide to being an active ally of inclusion’ is due to be published in Spring 2021.

Keshav Murugesh

Keshav R. Murugesh

Based in Mumbai, Mr Murugesh is responsible for executing the business strategy and directing the overall performance and growth of the 44,000 people organization across 16 countries and 58 offices.

He has differentiated WNS as the first player in the outsourcing space to implement an end-to-end vertical approach, a technology-enabled offerings program and a unique client-centric client-partner program wherein Analytics, Robotics, Mobile, Social and Cloud solutions have been co-opted into operational models to deliver actionable insights to clients.

Mr Murugesh chaired the NASSCOM BPM Council for two consecutive term, and has led a massive industry rebranding campaign called ‘Become World Worthy’; created a conducive ecosystem for building the talent pool through closer ties between industry and the academia, and introduced first-of-its-kind NASSCOM BPM Pioneer Awards.

He introduced the first-ever Cyber Crime educational series for the Mumbai Police through WNS and NASSCOM; was closely involved with establishing a first-of-its-kind unrelated marrow donor registry in India; brought the Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE), now called Enactus, into Indian waters for the first time, and as its Chairman for six years, built an incredible connect between the student communities and businesses.

Mr Murugesh is also a Member on the Board of WNS Cares Foundation (WCF) that focuses on education for lesser-privileged children as the core medium of community outreach and uplift in WNS locations, globally.

Simone Koo Ishikawa

Simone Koo Ishikawa (Moderator)

Simone Koo Ishikawa is an angel investor and an advisor to a number of impact start-ups globally. She has a wide network across angels, VCs, investment banks, asset management, family offices, private banks, institutional investorys and corporates through years of experience in financial services. She is passionate about changing the world through education, diversity and creativity and look for founders who can deliver this mission.

Most recently she was Director of Customer Success at OakNorth – NextGen credit platform for SME lenders globally. OakNorth had a number of investors including Softbank and was the only profitable fintech unicorn in Europe in 2019. Her job was to delight customers through product innovation and to keep them happy and engaged so they come back for more.

Before this, she spent 15 years in asset management and investment banking trading floors at JPMorgan, Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. She worked as an ETF Sales Strategist, Chief Operating Officer in charge of divisions with over 2000+ people and +$10bn of revenues, Head of Strategy, Structurer and Trader.

She is a frequent speaker in fintech, banking, and women’s circles in London.

Speakers

Paul Polman

Paul Polman

Paul Polman is Co-Founder and Co-chair of IMAGINE, a social venture which mobilises business leaders around tackling climate change and global inequality. He is also Chair of The B Team, Saïd Business School and The Valuable 500, as well as Honorary Chair of the International Chamber of Commerce and World Business Council for Sustainable Development and Vice-Chair of the UN Global Compact. A leading proponent that business can – and should be – a force for good, he has been described by the Financial Times as “a standout CEO of the past decade”. As CEO of Unilever for ten years, he demonstrated that a long-term, multi-stakeholder business model goes hand-in-hand with excellent financial performance. He was a member of the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Panel that developed the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and he continues to be an SDG Advocate who works across industries to deliver the 2030 development agenda.

Tom Cummings

Tom brings a rich combination of experience, having consciously worked throughout his career from three perspectives: Entrepreneurial Founder of companies and inter-company alliances; Senior Executive in global companies; and an intellectual driver, adviser and board member in academe and charitable foundations. This experience gives him an unusual ‘pracademic’ perspective, and

he is known for his ability to translate abstract ideas and concepts into useful plans and actions, bring new insights, sharp contrasts and fresh perspectives to his client engagements. His mission is to lead transformation by transforming leaders.

During his experience as a change agent working in senior executive roles in Unilever, ABN AMRO Bank, and Shell International, Tom applied his expertise as a scenario planner and social systems thinker to design new forms of engagement for team and organization learning.

He has worked with leading systems shifters including the Tallberg Foundation, Rocky Mountain Institute, Active Philanthropy and today is a founding designer of the CEO roundtable of the Global Alliance for Banking on Values and serves on the board of the B Corp movement in Europe.

His research interests include ‘Leading technological and social innovation through interorganisational alliances and networks’; and ‘how scenarios and strategies work as an organization learning process’.

Tom is passionate about experimenting with new forms of insight generation, learning, and human engagement to foster and enable transformation that will lead to shared prosperity and sustainable business.

Sydney Price

Sydney Price

Sydney is an award-winning executive and the Founder + CEO at The Knew Purpose, a conscious leadership company with the vision to advance sustainability and innovation in business. She is a dynamic force at designing, developing, and implementing social and environmental impact programs while creating new revenue channels and profitability for companies.

Sydney is recognized as a catalyst in business transformation for her abilities to intertwine purpose, business, and social & environmental impact and, as a result, has been awarded “Most Influential Women” by CEO Connection, 2015. As an ICF certified coach and inspirational facilitator, Sydney continues to take her experiences to the next level by empowering other leaders, businesses, universities, non-profits, and social entrepreneurs.

Previously, as SVP of Social Impact at Kate Spade & Company (KSC), Sydney strategically developed, implemented, and led a new, profitable commercial channel within KSC value chain and built a women-focused Social Enterprise Supplier Model in Rwanda. Sydney’s innovative model was awarded “Best Economic Empowerment Program” from the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation in 2015 and was studied and endorsed by Georgetown University in 2017. Prior to this role, she was SVP of Direct to Consumer and Global Merchandising at KSC and held multiple leadership positions at Neiman Marcus Group.  Sydney holds a Bachelor of Arts, Psychology from San Diego State University, and is a part-time lecturer at Parsons School of Design in MPS Fashion Management.