“This is my first time working for a company that I haven’t owned. Being addicted to the fast paced and creative environment of a start up – I never thought I’d find it within an organization. But, it’s all here and the challenges are of a magnitude that I’ve never been exposed to before. Working with a team of entrepreneurs to change systems … Seriously, what could be better?”
Benjamin Wald is a successful entrepreneur and technology investor having founded and sold several web-based tech companies. In 2008, he was named Business Week’s Top 25 Young Entrepreneurs after founding and securing several rounds of financing for his first company that built online education software. Currently, he has a portfolio of companies that range from building enterprise systems & mobile applications to exporting cashmere from Mongolia. Benjamin attended Babson College and now serves as the Chief Executive Partner for the Changemakers team.
“Ashoka offers the best environment and challenge for a true entrepreneur – a need to be highly innovative, the freedom to pursue dreams, think system change and best of all the opportunity to collaborate with entrepreneurs as part of the team! I get to solve some of the world’s largest problems by finding new collaborative solutions – what more can I ask for?”
Vishnu Swaminathan was a successful digital entrepreneur based in Singapore. After selling one of his companies, he moved back to India to head a Leadership school and created new centers for social development before joining Ashoka. At Ashoka, he heads the Housing for All program which aims to increase the supply of affordable housing using collaborative models – Hybrid Value Chains. To date, the program has catalyzed supply of over 10,000 homes and is now gaining national scale.
“As a business entrepreneur you rarely get the opportunity to use your experience in supporting social change. Ashoka allows me to do just that, by becoming a resource to some of the brightest social entrepreneurs. These are the visionaries who understand the challenges of tomorrow’s world and find the right solutions to solve society’s toughest problems. Bringing my expertise to bear is deeply satisfying and impactful.”
On September 18, 2006, Anousheh Ansari captured headlines around the world as the first female private space explorer travelling to and staying onboard the International Space Station for 10 days. Afterwards, back on Earth as a successful serial entrepreneur, Anousheh returned to her job as Co-founder and Chairman of her latest technology company, Prodea Systems. In her previous endeavor in 2001, Anousheh had served as Co-founder, CEO and Chairman of the board for Telecom Technologies, Inc. In 2004 Anousheh and her family provided the title sponsorship for the Ansari X Prize, a $10 million cash award for the first non-governmental organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks.
“Ashoka is giving me the opportunity to take the work I have been doing on rural connectivity and healthcare to scale. Its belief in entrepreneurship and its global network of Ashoka Fellows and funders are wonderful assets to help catalyze the sector transformations that I and my colleagues at Ashoka are striving for.”
Al Hammond is the co-founder and CEO of eHealthpoint, an innovative social business that provides first class healthcare services and drinking water to bottom of the pyramid customers, with financial and social return. He works with Ashoka advancing the Full Economic Citizenship initiative by creating partnerships between companies and citizen sector organizations to unleash competitive low-income markets on a global scale. Prior to joining Ashoka, Al was Vice President for Special Projects and Innovation at the World Resources Institute, where he worked with foundations, development agencies, and corporations to further the use of business strategies and digital technologies in development. In 2007, he was lead co-author of the definitive study of the size and scope of BoP markets, “The Next 4 Billion: Market Size and Business Strategy at the Base of the Pyramid.”
“Ashoka is a reliable touchstone for entrepreneurs: it provides tough critique, insightful help, connections, ideas and a culture that requires you to be the best changemaker you can be.”
Sushmita is the founder and Chair of Ashoka Changemakers, the world’s first open source problem-solving platform for social innovation. A former journalist, she began her career as the Executive Editor of Maneka Gandhi’s national Indian news magazine, “Surya”, before launching her own freelance journalism service that covered big ideas of any kind. She met Ashoka with the intent of writing about the organization and ended up joining it, to scale up Ashoka’s social entrepreneurship program in India. She later co-launched its activities in Latin America, launched Changemakers and served as Ashoka’s President for five years. She currently serves on Ashoka’s leadership team.
“Leading the Full Economic Citizenship Initiative at Ashoka is my dream job. Sometimes I even joke that I should pay Ashoka to have it! I get to work with leading social and business entrepreneurs around the world and together create new business models that have the potential to deliver major social impact. My role is that of an enabler: one who connects the business and the citizen sectors to help them see new possibilities and how they could add value to each other through commercial partnerships.”
Before joining Ashoka in 2003, Valeria worked for over 25 years in 22 countries worldwide to create and expand new businesses with social impact. Prior to coming to Ashoka, Valeria was the Chief Operating Officer at Appropriate Technology International, a founding Vice-President for Latin America at Endeavor, and a Vice President for New Initiatives at BDA, a California-based consulting firm specializing in business process redesign and technology innovations for private sector clients worldwide. She was born in Chile and educated as an industrial engineer.
