Community

The Forum of Young Global Leaders is a community of innovators from diverse backgrounds and experiences. Search current members and alumni by year awarded, sector or region.

Peter A. Thiel

Partner, Founders Fund, USA

Peter Thiel is President of Clarium Capital Management, a global macro hedge fund with offices in San Francisco and New York. He oversees the firm's research, investment, and trading strategies. He is also a partner in The Founders Fund, a US$ 50 million venture capital firm. In addition to managing Clarium, Thiel is active in a variety of philanthropic and educational pursuits. He sits on the Board of Directors of the Pacific Research Institute and on the Board of Visitors of Stanford Law School. He also serves on the boards of non-profit educational organizations, such as Stanford Law School, where he has also taught, and the Hoover Institution. Before starting Clarium, he served as Chairman and CEO of PayPal, Inc., an Internet company he co-founded in December 1998 that was acquired by eBay Inc. for US$ 1.5 billion. Thiel began his financial career as a derivatives trader at CS Financial Products after practising securities law at Sullivan & Cromwell. He won the Herman Lay Award for Entrepreneurship in 2005. He received a BA in Philosophy from Stanford University and a JD from Stanford Law School.

Dune Thorne

Partner; Head, Private Client Growth and Strategy, Brown Advisory, USA

BA from Dartmouth College, MBA Harvard Business School. Founder and Board Member of Invest in Girls, Board Member for Center for Economic Education, Board Member and Investment Committee Member for Milton Academy, Advisory Board and Investment Committee Member of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Board Member of the US Ski and Snowboard Team, Board Member Mass Bay Community College, Member of YPO, Tiger 21 and the Belizean Grove.

Lauren Tilstra

Executive Director; Chief Executive Officer, Communications; Chief of Staff, Verizon Communications, USA

Lauren Tilstra is a seasoned leadership communications advisor who’s spent her career launching and counseling Fortune 50 c-suite executives across technology and media. She currently serves as Chief of Staff and Executive Director of Strategic Communications to the Chairman and CEO of Verizon. She’s the first in the firm’s 22-year history to serve in both roles simultaneously.

Tilstra is a passionate advocate for digital inclusion and in 2020 she joined Verizon’s Chairman and CEO, Hans Vestberg and Chief Strategy Officer, Rima Qureshi in forming the EDISON Alliance with Professor Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum. In this role, she leads communications for the Alliance and is working daily to connect 1B lives to the promise of the digital world. She also serves on the Board of grassroots organization, Friends for Global Change and Is a founding member of the National Executive Communication Council. Tilstra is a PRWeek 40 under 40 and was named Penn State University’s College of Communications Outstanding Alumni of 2022.

Mamadou Kwidjim Toure

Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Ubuntu Group, USA

Inspired by the wisdom of his ancestors, Mamadou Kwidjim Toure believes that co-creating a better world is possible when diversity is nurtured and access to opportunities is evenly distributed. This philosophy was the driving force behind establishing Africa 2.0, a non-for-profit pan African civil society organization with the aim to create a sustainable vision for the transformation of Africa. Named one of the top 10 Most Influential Men in Africa by Forbes Magazine in 2014, Mamadou founded the Ubuntu Group in 2015 and built on his global network and investment savviness to launch socio-economic projects throughout the continent of Africa. His recent venture, Ubuntu Tribe, a digital platform promoting shared economy through tokenization of gold and other mineral ressources as a means for financial inclusion and wealth redistribution received in 2019 a distinction as finalist at the African Bankers Awards. In 2020, he was listed among the top 30 most influential in the world in blockchain technology. Over the past 20 years, Mamadou worked in instituons such as KPMG, BNP Paribas Investment Banking, IFC (World Bank Group) and finally General Electric as Managing Director in charge of Investments and Project Finance for Subsaharan Africa. He has worked on infrastructure, mining, banking, agriculture technology projects exceeding a combined value of US$ 25 billion, thus creating opportunities and hope for many people in Africa. Mamadou has been at the forefront of international high finance and remains a strong proponent for digital economy as an engine for emancipation and shared wealth creation.

Mamadou is a global citizen, passionate of culture, art and avid reader of history books, he continues to advocate for a bright future for humanity through pushing the boundaries. He believes in the power of collective action to build lasting enlightenment and prosperity. Mamadou went to the prestigious High School Lycee Louis Le Grand in Paris and holds MSc in Finance from EDHEC Business School (ranked global top 10 graduate school in Finance by Financial Times) and completed two education programs at Harvard Kennedy School on « Global Leadership and Public Policy for 21st Century » as World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2018 and « Public-Private Partnership » in 2010.
Mamadou completed program on artificial intelligence at MIT in 2020.

Maureen Trantham

Senior Vice-President; Head, Strategy and Social Impact and Philanthropy Operations, Sesame Workshop, USA

Maureen Tranthams diverse background spans media, education policy and business strategy. She currently serves as the Senior Vice President of Global Social Impact & Philanthropy Operations and a member of the Senior Leadership Team at Sesame Workshop. In her role, Maureen is responsible for the overall planning and coordination of strategic and financial results across Sesames global, philanthropically funded social impact efforts including the organizations work supporting displaced children in crisis contexts and children from marginalized communities in the U.S. She also oversees the organizations Compliance and Risk Management capabilities, working closely with teams to navigate the challenges of reaching children in conflict zones. A former international journalist with experience in Thailand and China, she has also led a Washington state education policy and advocacy nonprofit, as well as worked as a management consultant supporting global media and technology companies on a variety of strategic, operations and organizational issues. A committed mentor, particularly to early career professionals, she frequently coaches individuals hoping to transition sectors and contribute to social impact. Maureen holds a BA in Journalism and the Comparative History of Ideas from the University of Washington and an MBA from the New York University Stern School of Business. She also serves as an active Term Member on the Council on Foreign Relations.

Gregg Treinish

Executive Director, Adventure Scientists, USA

Gregg Treinish is the Founder and Executive Director of Adventure Scientists, an organization that has helped the scientific community design, build and execute on field data collection projects that address long-standing environmental threats. By galvanizing a global network of trained outdoor specialist volunteers, his work has enabled authorities to prosecute illegal loggers, created the largest dataset on Earth for microplastics pollution, advanced a new suite of interventions against antibiotic resistant superbugs, and doubled crop yields without fertilizers across 4 million acres of land.

Gregg became a National Geographic Explorer after becoming the first to trek the length of the Andes Mountain Range on a journey that covered more than 12,500km in just under two years.

Lila Tretikov

Deputy Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft, USA

Lila Tretikov is Chief Executive Officer of Terrawatt (TWI), a global organization that aligns corporate, financial, NGOs and political interests to alter the trajectory of Earth's ecology. TWI brings next-generation clean energy to humankind through innovative models rooted in shared economic value, enabled by technologies such as artificial intelligence and financial engineering.

Named one of the 21 Most Powerful Women in Bay Area Technology by San Francisco Chronicle, one of The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women by Forbes and invited by the World Economic Forum to join the Young Global Leaders in 2016. She has co-authored numerous articles, patents and inventions across areas of policy, management and technology.

Previously, Ms. Tretikov was Chief Executive of the Wikimedia Foundation, an organization supporting Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopedia available in 300+ languages and the fifth most popular internet media site. She transformed the organization to prepare for upcoming changes in the age of ubiquitous Internet and machine learning. She also led Wikipedia’s rapidly expanded regional presence to nearly 100 global organizations, doubled revenues and launched the Wikipedia Endowment to support modernization and expansion of knowledge access in perpetuity.

Ms. Tretikov is Board Director and CEO Advisor at numerous companies such as Rackspace, Onfido, PrivacyShell Corp., OpenEd (acquired by ACT), Zamurai (acquired by Join.me), Crunchbase and Bonsai. She advises leaders on identifying and navigating through major market and consumer behavioral shifts propelled by technical innovations.

Ms. Tretikov launched her first company, Grok, while attending college at UC Berkeley creating intelligent data mapping of the Human Genome Project. She founded and scaled several pre-IPO companies, as well as accelerated 10-100% YOY growth of strategic projects within multi-billion USD corporations. Her cross-discipline background has allowed her to play a seminal role in helping businesses and their leaders synthesize and operationalize successful, lasting strategies and paths of execution.

Born in Moscow, Ms. Tretikov started college at the age of thirteen and emigrated to the United States independently as a teenager. She has more than two decades of experience as a transformational leader in Silicon Valley companies where she honed her passion for harnessing human-focused technologies for global impact. She currently resides in Paris, France.

Vasudha Vats

Vice-President, Pfizer, USA

Vasudha Vats has grown several multi-billion dollar businesses in pharma and currently manages one of the highest selling small molecule medicines in the world. Her mission is to not only help patients by delivering high-quality medical therapies, but also to improve care delivery across the entire patient experience. As a leader in healthcare, she has forged and led partnerships across the industry to deliver better outcomes for patients, including patient advocacy groups like the American Diabetes Association, technology (Fitbit), pharmacy (CVS and Walgreens), and government (National Institutes of Health). She is an advocate of supporting emerging thinkers to fuel future societal improvement, actively mentoring emerging biotechnology firms with the New York City Entrepreneurship Lab and having helped to co-found the Chandini Foundation, a charity designed to provide underprivileged youths in developing nations with mentoring support to become ethical, impactful and entrepreneurially minded leaders.

Ayesha Vera-Yu

Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Advancement for Rural Kids (ARK), USA

CEO and Co-Founder of Advancement for Rural Kids (ARK) which co-invests with rural communities in the developing world on securing food, health, kids' schooling and their self-sustaining future.

In 2020, at the height of the pandemic that triggered acute hunger among farmers and fisherfolk who feed the world, Ayesha steered ARK to pivot its award-winning and the world’s only self-sustaining, 5-cent school lunch to a food security program that benefited everyone in the community.

ARK's Feed Back is a community-based vegetable exchange that is solving hunger in just 5 weeks. It creates a path for families to source food from their backyards, exchange excess produce with their neighbors, and sell to their own community, nearby villages and towns. It enables communities to work together, be food secure and resilient. It launches new entrepreneurs and new local, regenerative and equitable food systems. In the past 2 years, 35 communities across 6 provinces partnered on Feed Back. Together, we have secured 8,607 families captured 105% of at-risk families transformed over 76,000* lives.

Prior to ARK, Ayesha was Director at BNP Paribas where for 11 years she was involved in leverage finance, acquisition finance and loan syndications. She also restructured a farm in the Philippines making it the first one in the province to be organic, and to offer fair employment, revenue share, healthcare and continuing education to farmers/employees. Expertise - management, industry and business credit analysis, restructuring, natural farming, sustainable systems, social ventures.

Mark Vlasic

Executive Producer, Blood and Treasure, CBS Television Studios, USA

Mark V. Vlasic is a Senior Fellow and Adjunct Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, and leads the international practice at Madison Law & Strategy Group. A former pro bono advisor to the Director-General of UNESCO on “blood antiquities” issues, he is now an Executive Producer with CBS Studios, as his international work helped inspire the character “Danny” on the action-adventure social impact series BLOOD & TREASURE on CBS, Paramount, and AmazonPrime.

As public sector specialist at the World Bank Group, Mark served as the first head of operations of the StAR Secretariat, a joint United Nations-World Bank presidential initiative to help developing countries recover stolen assets from past dictators.

Before joining the Bank, he served as a White House Fellow/special assistant to the Secretary of Defense and advisor to the President’s Special Envoy to Sudan, and was awarded the Office of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service by Secretary Robert Gates.

Prior to his government service, Mark practiced law at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, and served on the Slobodan Milosevic and Srebrenica genocide prosecution trial teams at the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague. He has taught the Iraqi judges that tried Saddam Hussein, served on the U.S. Delegation to the Pan Am 103 “Lockerbie” terrorist bombing trial in the Netherlands, advised the Director-General of UNESCO, provided commentary to BBC, CNN, FOX, CBS and NPR, and is published widely.

Mark studied business, theology and government at Georgetown University while on an Army ROTC scholarship, and received his Juris Doctorate, cum laude, from Georgetown Law Center. He holds Certificates in International Law from The Hague Academy of International Law, conducted post-doctorate research at Universiteit Leiden as a NAF-Fulbright Scholar to the Netherlands, and completed the World Economic Forum's executive leadership programs at Oxford and Harvard.

As a U.S. Army officer, he has been attached to Capitol Hill and the Defense Attaché Office at the U.S. Embassy in The Hague, and was awarded the Army Commendation Medal.

Knighted by both the Vatican and Ethiopian Crown, and commissioned a Kentucky Colonel, Mark is a Fellow with the U.N. Alliance of Civilizations, a member of the Bars of California, the District of Columbia, and the Supreme Court of the United States, and is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, a Senior Peace Fellow by the Public International Law & Policy Group, and an ITAC advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, Mark is founding co-chair of the YGL SDG Advisory Council and has advised numerous boards, including the White House Fellow Foundation, Artemis Climate Partners, the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art, and the LAPD Leadership Advisory Board.

Hitesh Wadhwa

Enterprise Technology and Business Leader, Google Cloud, Google, USA

Hitesh holds a distinguished position as a seasoned leader in Enterprise Technology, Sales, and Business at Google within the United States. In his role, he leads growth and adoption of Google Cloud with large enterprises in Central US. His responsibilities are centered around elevating Technology, particularly in the domains of AI, web3, Cloud, Quantum Computing, and more, to the forefront of large-scale Enterprises and their associated communities. He is also a GenAI Ambassador at Google.

Before joining Google, Hitesh's career encompassed a pivotal role at Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the 'Principal, Enterprise Business' for a rapidly expanding region, where he orchestrated strategies to expand AWS adoption within substantial and medium-sized organizations.

Prior to his tenure at AWS, he occupied the position of Vice President at Tech Mahindra, the IT division of the Mahindra group. In this capacity, he orchestrated a range of strategic engagements and undertakings within the Telco, Media & Entertainment (CME) sector, leading to a noteworthy growth of Tech Mahindra's business by over $100 million through both organic and inorganic means. Hitesh played an instrumental part in Tech Mahindra's CME vertical, a business segment generating more than $2.5 billion annually. He was selected twice for the company's highly competitive "Shadow Board" program, an exclusive initiative where only six individuals out of over 130,000 employees are chosen each year to shadow the board of directors. As a Shadow Board member, he administered several impactful programs spanning digital transformation, diversity, culture, and sustainability.

Over the course of his extensive 17+ years of professional journey at the intersection of Technology and Business, Hitesh has demonstrated adept leadership in team management, business expansion, strategic endeavors, and effective management of Fortune 500 client relationships. Noteworthy clients include AT&T, USAA, Facebook, Verizon, Oracle, UnitedHealth Group, WarnerMedia, Rakuten, and iHeartMedia, among others.

Hitesh's enthusiasm for Technology is profound, driven by his belief in its potential to address significant global challenges when employed judiciously. In 2021, he was named as a 'Young Global Leader' (YGL) by the World Economic Forum
https://www.weforum.org/press/2021/03/ygl-class-2021/

He has also been chosen by Forbes for "Forbes Business Development Council", an invitation-only organization for Senior-Level Sales and Business Development Executives

Beyond his professional pursuits, he nurtures a penchant for fine Coffee and Bourbon. During his leisure moments, he cherishes quality time with his family - his wife and two children. Presently, he resides in Austin, Texas, USA.

David Alexander Walcott

Founder and Managing Partner, Novamed, USA

David is a Medical Doctor (MD., Ph.D. MSc.) and Entrepreneur with over 10 years experience as a Founder, Operator and Consultant to several businesses in the Caribbean & Latin America. Professionally, he is committed to attracting world-class healthcare resources into emerging markets through Novamed, a healthcare & real estate investment firm that actions best-practices and global insights through its portfolio companies. His firm invests in and develops hospitals, clinics, health technologies & commercial real estate. He is currently building a google campus’-type Smart business district in the first such commercial change-of-use project in the Caribbean, as well as a smart hospital on the legs on the first such acquisition in the English-speaking Caribbean. His work in healthcare has been recognized by Forbes, World Economic Forum, the United Nations and the IMF and his firm led the largest private donation of PPE into the Caribbean and has completed extensive public & private sector projects in emerging market healthcare. He is also Founding Partner of The Visionaries’ Summit & My Destination Experience, knowledge & opportunity exchange platforms designed to attract investment into the Caribbean convening a community controlling US$140 billion in equity that has seeded over US$300 million in investments in the region. A Rhodes Scholar, his academic profile includes Oxford, INSEAD & Harvard and he is the previous Co-Chair of the Global Shapers’ Covid-19 Steering Committee, and Young Global Leader & a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council.