Tech4Democracy | Silicon Valley Venture Day

Please join us on November 29 at Stanford University for Silicon Valley Venture Day, a competition for North American innovators working on democracy-affirming technologies, jointly hosted by Stanford’s Global Digital Policy Incubator, IE University, the U.S. State Department, and Microsoft. The competition is part of the Global Entrepreneurship Challenge, a major initiative stemming from the U.S. Summit for Democracy at which President Biden convened world leaders in December 2021 to renew democracy globally.

The Global Entrepreneurship Challenge is an IE University-led initiative comprised of five Venture Day competitions across five continents: Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe, North America, and South America. The Venture Day competitions will bring together researchers, innovators, investors, and entrepreneurs to identify and highlight key innovations as well as to give shape to the global effort to develop technology for democracy. The winner of the North American Silicon Valley Day competition will receive a $1,000 prize. Regional winners will then compete for a monetary prize.

Agenda

• 12:30 pm – Registration and Lunch

• 1:00 – 1:10 pm – Welcome Remarks by the following:

o Eileen Donahoe, Executive Director, Stanford University’s Global Digital Policy Incubator

o Irene Blázquez, Director, Center for the Governance of Change at IE University

o Lila Tretikov, Deputy CTO of Microsoft (formerly, head of Wikipedia/Wikimedia Foundation)

• 1:10 – 1:30 pm – Opening Comments by Judges moderated by Eileen Donahoe

• 1:30 – 2:30 pm – Competition – Innovator Presentations

• 2:30 -2:45 pm – Keynote Remarks (v) and Live Q&A with audience by Administrator Samantha Power, U.S. Agency for International Development

• 2:45 – 3:00 pm – Closing Remarks by Scott Busby, Deputy Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, US Department of State and Announcement of Winner

Location: Oberndorf Event Center, Stanford Graduate School of Business, 655 Knight Way

Judges:

• Aimee Sentmat, President & General Manager, Banistmo, S.A.

• Allison Bhusri, Founder of Lemonade Capital

• Geoff Ralston, President, Y Combinator

• Juan Jose Gomez Camacho, Former Mexican Ambassador, Senior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS)

• Lourdes M. Turrecha, Founder & CEO of PIX LLC, Privacy Tech & Law Fellow and Adjunct Professor of Privacy Law at Santa Clara University School of Law

• Peter Loewen, Director, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto

• Rana Sarkar, Consul General of Canada in San Francisco | Silicon Valley

• Steve Blank, Serial Entrepreneur, Creator of the Lean Startup