Special Advisor - Karl Mehta

Karl Mehta is a serial entrepreneur, author, investor, engineer, and civil servant with over 20 years of experience in founding, building, and funding technology companies in the U.S. and international markets. He is currently Founder & CEO of EdCast Inc., a next-generation knowledge platform company and venture partner at Menlo Ventures, a leading VC  firm of Silicon Valley with over $4B under management. 

Previously, he was the Founder & CEO of PlaySpan Inc., acquired by Visa Inc. (NYSE:V), the world's largest payment network. Karl also served as a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow, selected by the Obama Administration during the inaugural 2012-13 term. He was recently appointed by Governor Brown to the Workforce Investment Board of the State of California. In 2010, Karl won the "Entrepreneur of the Year" award from Ernst & Young for Northern California. Karl is on the boards of Simpa Networks and on the advisory board of Intel Capital and Chapman University's Center of Entrepreneurship.

Karl is founder of several non-profit's including Code For India and Grassroots Innovation. He is author of upcoming book, 'Financial Inclusion at he Bottom of the Pyramid"(www.openfininc.org)

Special Advisor - Gordon Freedman

Gordon Freedman speaks and writes about education change, education technology and serves as an advocate for advanced information systems, smart technologies, and big data analytics as agents in transforming individual learning and institutional education to meet the myriad of 21st Century personal, social and economic challenges.

Freedman serves as president of the National Laboratory for Education Transformation, www.NLET.com, a Silicon Valley, CA non-profit corporation devoted to the redesign of public education systems and personal learning solutions, on par with corporate, consumer and governmental services. NLET believes that education lags far behind the digital, data and identity-based systems common in the social and commercial sectors. To remedy this imbalance, Freedman founded NLET in 2010 as an organization that partners with the most capable organizations and individuals across a broad base of expertise inside and outside education. The core partners of NLET are centers in the University of California, the University of Texas, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and with a number of technology, social media and media companies. NLET designs and participates in Federal, foundation and corporate grants as well as developing new non-profit incubated businesses to promote strategic and culture change in the education enterprise.

Freedman is also the owner and general manager of Knowledge Base, LLC, www.KB-LLC.com, a higher education strategy consultancy established in 1998 to help education technology corporations, publishers, research institutes, museums and government agencies manage their strategic transitions into technology and media-driven markets. Knowledge Base has a fifteen year history of providing strategy, business and market development services to a wide range of traditional, emergent and disruption organizations and corporations. Through his consultancy, Freedman is able to develop and maintain a substantial network of technologists, educators, business and government leaders.

From 2005 through the end of 2011 Freedman was Vice President Global Education Strategy for Blackboard, Inc., www.Blackboard.com, and Executive Director of the Blackboard Institute. In these capacities Freedman traveled to many countries and U.S. states exploring the boundaries of education change. Freedman was the leading international and domestic education speaker for Blackboard and author of numerous white papers and organizer, speaker or attendee at education conferences worldwide. During his service at Blackboard the company grew substantially, from a publicly traded company (2004) to a purchase (2011) by Providence Private Equity.

Prior his work in the education sector Freedman was a television and film executive in Los Angles, where he was executive producer of the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury award-winning documentary A Brief History of Time about Cambridge University physics professor Stephen Hawking. Earlier, Freedman was a network news producer and a national reporter based in Washington, DC. Freedman's career began in Washington, DC as a Congressional staff member and investigator serving on committees in both the US Senate and US House of Representatives. Freedman is a graduate of Michigan State University and is a Fellow at www.SRI.com and was a Fellow at University of California Berkeley's Center for Studies in Higher Education. He is co-author of Winter of Fire, Dutton, about one of the first terrorist acts on American officials and of Gifts of Deceit, Holt, Rinehart, Winston, about the Congressional scandals following Watergate.

National Laboratory for Education Transformation . 2505 Augustine Drive # 372 . Santa Clara, CA . 95054