Gobi Dasu is a founder, traveler, HCI and ICT4D enthusiast. After completing a BSCS and MSCS from Stanford, he started LD Talent which is inspired by his travels and related to his PhD research in CS Education and the Future of Work at Northwestern. ldtalent.org is a network of diverse, vetted, and highly productive developers, financially incentivized to engage in lifelong learning. The globally distributed network of 300+ vetted developers has engaged 65+ customers including large companies (Infosys, Baidu Ventures), universities (Northwestern, Stanford, UW, ASU, Yale), and startups (funded by top venture funds). Currently, there is a need to train enough engineers to meet 21st century demand, but MOOCs only go so far. Gobi is interested in problems in this space from both a research and practical perspective, and has written about incentivizing technical upskilling, developer productivity, transparent ways of working, and the impact of the future of work on economic development. Overall Gobi hopes to connect with people who are also interested in technology to incentivize diverse collaborations, lifelong learning, productive ways of working, and economic uplift.
Joyce Zhang Gray is the Co-Founder and CEO of Alariss, a General Catalyst and VC-backed global expansion marketplace that connects emerging market technology companies to American sales and business development professionals. She was previously the first employee and VP of Sales for Human Interest (one of the top 100 most valuable YC companies of all time). In Asia, she worked for the President of Microsoft Asia-Pacific in Singapore and as a regional manager for Groupon China (JV with Tencent). And in Africa, she worked for the World Bank's International Finance Corporation in Nairobi developing the East Africa Community's Common Market Protocols as well as for a behavioral economics firm doing work in public health in Zimbabwe. In government, she previously worked for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on financial regulatory reform policy during the Global Financial Crisis and for the US Department of Labor. She was elected in a vote by all Harvard alumni to serve as a Director on the Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) Board of Directors. She received her BA from Harvard University, MPA from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, and MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.
