Chris Anderson

Chris Anderson

Chris Anderson is the curator of TED, a nonprofit media organization that leverages the power of ideas to make a better future. Born in 1957, Chris spent most of his early life in  Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan. In 1985 he launched Future Publishing, which ultimately expanded to more than 130 magazines and 1,500 employees. In 2001, Chris took over leadership of the TED Conference. Under his stewardship, over 3,600 talks and animated lessons have been released free on the TED website, with 100,000 more on YouTube. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller TED Talks and has overseen the introduction of  TEDx, TED-Ed, TED Fellows, and the Audacious Project, a new form of collaborative philanthropy. He is a founding partner of Countdown, a global initiative to champion and accelerate solutions to the climate crisis, turning ideas into action.

James Buckhouse

James Buckhouse believes story, art, and design can bend the arc of humanity’s progress, if you do it right, and brings that idea into everything he does: from movies to startups to paintings to books and to ballets. 

As Design Partner at Sequoia, James Buckhouse works with founders from idea to IPO and beyond to help them design their companies, products, cultures, and businesses. Buckhouse got his start in film, lensing shots, crafting character arcs, and punching up story for some of the biggest film franchises, including the Shrek, Madagascar, and Matrix series. Today he is a sought-after writer and collaborator for some of Hollywood’s most creative producers and directors. 

As an artist, he has exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, the Solomon R. Guggenheim’s Works & Process Series, The Institute of Contemporary Art in London, The Berkeley Art Museum, and the Dia Center. He has collaborated with leading choreographers at the New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, LA Dance Project, Oregon Ballet Theatre, and Pennsylvania Ballet. 

Buckhouse regularly guest lectures at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Yale School of Architecture, Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and Stanford’s d.school. Prior to joining Sequoia in 2014, he was the Senior Experience Architect at Twitter, with patents for single-tap emoji replies, opinion polls on social, and more once-novel interactions that are now commonplace. He has a B.A. in Visual Art from Brown University.

Jim Coulter

James (“Jim”) Coulter is a Founding Partner and Executive Chairman of TPG, Managing Partner of TPG Rise Climate, and Co-Managing Partner of The Rise Fund. He serves or has served on over 40 corporate and charitable boards, including the Stanford University Boards of Trustees and the Dartmouth College Board of Trustees. Jim holds a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College, where he graduated summa cum laude, and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he was named an Arjay Miller Scholar.

Sophie Hamilton

Sophie Hamilton

Sophie’s work with music and mental health started at age nine after she discovered music’s therapeutic power through her father’s battle with bipolar disorder. In addition to writing her own music, Sophie worked to bring music therapy programs to children with mental health struggles and served as a suicide hotline operator. Sophie developed a first of its kind peer-to-peer support network at Providence Hospital and worked on CS+ Mental Health initiatives at Stanford, leveraging tech for preventative mental health intervention. 

After being diagnosed with leukemia at 19, Sophie worked with the Leukemia and Lymphoma society to raise over 800K for cancer research. Her diagnosis made her attuned to the way we define a meaningful life and inspired her work with Dr. Jennifer Aaker, gleaning insights from the regrets of the dying to define a framework for living fully. While attaining her M.S. in sustainability at Stanford, Sophie worked on sustainability programs for better childhood health outcomes at Nike and an optimized healthcare payment interface in Kenya through Mastercard.  

Now, Sophie works at Spotify working to define the next generation of audio experiences, democratize the creation and consumption of music and podcasts, and integrate sustainability and inclusion initiatives into Spotify’s core business agenda. Her current focus is on working with Google and other leading AI companies to define fair AI experiences that promote the discovery of artist and creator content and a future where human art is protected. Sophie is working with Dr. Aaker on a new body of research that determines how AI can unleash human potential to create more sustainability at the self, relationship and planet level. She is passionate about how we leverage the AI revolution to promote better mental and physical health outcomes, human creativity, and conscientious innovation. 

Tadia James

Tadia is the founder and Managing Partner of ALIGNED GENERATION.

She is most known for her ability to bring control to chaos, catalyze connections to drive high-value impact, and get capital where it is needed most. Throughout her career, Tadia has been an early employee on both a newly formed corporate teams and VC Fund – gifted in building processes and teams from the ground up and bringing big visions to reality.

Tadia was previously an early employee at GingerBread Capital, a Venture Capital family office fund that invests capital in female founders and fund managers at the Seed to Series C stage. She built and managed the initial operational strategy and conducted investment due diligence resulting in millions of investment capital allocation for diverse tech founders. She was instrumental in developing and leading “Women Investing in Women”, a strategic event initiative with partnerships across top VCs, law firms, founders, and ecosystem influencers to educate and facilitate investment from women with capital to women-founded startups; facilitating many new first-time investors.

Tadia began her career on Wall Street at J.P. Morgan’s Corporate & Investment Bank where she worked in Product Development and Latin America Sales Strategy. She identified opportunities that resulted in over $1 Billion in new balances and $20mm in annual revenue leading her to be consistently ranked in the top 5% of her analyst class. Tadia later joined a newly developed team, Cybersecurity Threat Intelligence, as the first business hire serving as the functional COO responsible for operationalizing and managing the distribution strategy of threat intelligence data to all lines of businesses (IB, Asset Mgmt, Operations, and Consumer Bank). Tadia was the youngest person nominated for VP promotion in Cybersecurity at J.P. Morgan.

It was during her Wall Street career that Tadia saw intimately the disparities in Financial Literacy specifically amongst communities of color. She began to teach at DREAM Inc, a financial literacy organization for inner-city youth. She taught Financial Literacy classes at Rikers Prison (NYC) to juvenile female inmates, raised scholarship funding, and served as the Director of Mentorship exposing students of color to careers in Finance.

Tadia earned her MBA at The Stanford Graduate School of Business serving on the founding team and later Chair of Stanford’s Black Business conference. She built and managed a 21-person team across 5 verticals for programming and operational execution ultimately leading to $2mm+ in investments for Black-owned businesses.

She has been featured in numerous publications including Forbes and 31 under 31: The Future of Venture Capital as well as many interviews, panels, and keynotes on topics ranging from business management and venture capital to diversity and leadership.

Tadia is an avid reader, Barry’s Bootcamp aficionado, Transcendental Meditation (TM) practitioner, and crystal collector. She spends the majority of her time between Los Angeles, New York, and Costa Rica – living her most balanced, ambitious, and joy-filled life which you may see her doing on her Instagram @tadiajames.

Emily Ma

Emily Ma leads a cross-functional team at Google with the mission of organizing the world’s food information in service of building a future food system that is sustainable, nourishing and equitable for all. Her work on food systems started at X, Alphabet’s moonshot factory. There, she led a number of early stage moonshots before working on food systems moonshots inspired by the Google Food team, focusing on reducing food waste and food insecurity and increasing data openness in the food system. 

Prior, Emily helped bring a range of breakthrough technologies into the world including Loon internet balloons and Glass smart glasses. Emily started her career as a mechanical engineer at IDEO, a global design and innovation consultancy, during which she came to embrace the equal importance of human-centered design, engineering and business. With this, she returned to Stanford University to pursue her MBA and continues to actively teach entrepreneurship at the School of Engineering. She is the holder of seven patents spanning medical devices to consumer electronics.

David Solomon

David is chairman and chief executive officer and a member of the Board of Directors of The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.

Previously, he was president and chief operating officer and prior to that, he served as co-head of the Investment Banking Division from 2006 to 2016. Before that, David was global head of the Financing Group, which includes all capital markets and derivative products for the firm’s corporate clients. He joined Goldman Sachs as a partner in 1999.

Prior to joining the firm, David held leadership roles at Irving Trust Company, Drexel Burnham and Bear Stearns.

David is chairman of the Board of Trustees of Hamilton College and serves on the board of The Robin Hood Foundation. He also serves on the Board of Trustees of New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

David earned a BA in Political Science from Hamilton College.

ZEM JOAQUIN

Zem is the Founder and CEO of Near Future Summit, scaling solutions in food, transportation, metabolic health, energy, built environment, healthcare, aerospace, and beyond. The Near Future community is comprised of top CEOs, industry leaders, university researchers, and venture capitalists working to scale world positive solutions.

Zem also founded Ecofabulous. A founding board member of the Cradle to Cradle Product Innovation Institute, she founded and chaired the Gorgeous and Green Gala for Global Green where she served on the board for 10 years.

Zem is, or has been, an advisor to Obvious Ventures, Kittyhawk Ventures, Diamond Foundry, Vitro Labs, Ecofashion Corp, NRG, eBay, Whole Foods, Anthem Digital Health, and many others. She is an avid equestrian, a lifelong learner, and a trailblazer in the sustainability world.

JAMES JOAQUIN

James works with creative founders to define new consumer categories across food, consumer goods, and modern work.

He leads Obvious’ investments with a plant-forward approach to food like Beyond Meat (IPO) and Miyoko’s Creamery, “good for you goods” consumer visionaries like Olly (acquired by Unilever) and Welly, and companies at the forefront of how we find and do our best work with Incredible Health and Gusto.

James has been working in venture capital since 2007, and has invested in a wide range of mission-driven startups including Plum Organics (acquired by Campbell’s Soup), TenMarks Education (acquired by Amazon), Opower (IPO), and Seventh Generation (acquired by Unilever). Prior to investing, James served as President and CEO of Xoom.com (IPO). He was previously President and CEO of Ofoto from its early beginnings through acquisition by Kodak in 2001, leading its growth into the world’s largest online photo service. James also co-founded When.com, an Internet calendar and events service (acquired by AOL). He began his entrepreneurial career while studying computer science at Brown University, co-founding Clearview Software which was acquired by Apple, where he spent six years in engineering and marketing roles.

James grew up in a Portuguese fishing community in southeastern Massachusetts. He is a drummer, photographer, and master of puns.

Halim Flowers

Halim Flowers

In 1997, Halim A. Flowers was arrested at the age of 16 and given two life sentences. His experiences were filmed in the Emmy award-winning documentary Thug Life In DC. In 2005, he started his own publishing company, through which he published 11 books.

In 2019, Halim was released from prison after serving 22 years. Upon his release, Halim was awarded the Halcyon Arts Lab and Echoing Green fellowship awards. In 2020, he signed to be represented by DTR Modern Galleries as a visual artist. His visual art has been commissioned for the Queen of England Platinum Jubilee and Warner Brothers centennial celebration. 

Michelle Kaufmann

Michelle is an architect with a passion for thoughtful, sustainable, accessible design utilizing a cross-section of digital tools, prefabrication and systems building approach. Prior to joining Google as the Director of R+D for the Built Environment, Michelle worked with X on a moonshot for architecture, Flux, Frank O. Gehry and her own practice Michelle Kaufmann Studio.

Michelle’s practice won the TOP FIRM AWARD by Residential Architect and has been featured on the Sundance channel, HGTV, Discovery, Planet Green and in numerous magazines including Town+Country, Dwell, Sunset, Time, and the Smithsonian.

Michelle has been called “the Henry Ford of green homes” by the Sierra Club and was named “Green Advocate of the Year” by the National Association of Home Builders, was included in Business 2.0 magazine’s list of “100 People Who Matter Now”, and was listed as one of the “The Green 50” by INC magazine. A full-size replica of Michelle’s home was built at the National Building Museum as part of the exhibit and was featured on PBS show “10 Homes that Changed America”

A fully-functioning 3-story home designed by Michelle is on display at the Museum of Science and Industry. Her work has also been on display at MOCA, the Walker Art Center, and the Vancouver Art Center.

Michelle received her Masters of Architecture from Princeton University and Bachelor of Architecture from Iowa State University. She has been a lecturer and keynote speaker for numerous events.