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.
Khaldoon Tabaza
Dr. Khaldoon is the Founder & Managing Director of iMENA Group. In the last 25 years, he has participated in the development of the regional technology venture capital ecosystem in the MENA region as a founder, investor, and advisor. Khaldoon was a founder at Arabia.com (first venture backed online business in MENA), Arab Advisors Group, NetAdvantage, OneCard, Riyada Ventures, and Impact MENA. Key funds that he managed include IDEAVELOPERS (first regulated regional VC fund), Riyada, and iMENA, while companies that he invested in include OpenSooq, SellAnyCar, Jeeny, ReserveOut, Telr, JRD, Hellofood, Akhtaboot, IdealRatings, and Rufoof. As an ecosystem builder, he has participated in the development of iPark, ABAN, Oasis500, PICTI, and Wamda. Khaldoon was recognized by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader. He is also a Kauffman Venture Capital Fellow and a member of the Young Presidents Organization. He holds a Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery from The University of Jordan and has completed the Young Global Leaders Leadership and Policy education program at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, and the YPO programs at Harvard Business School, Stanford, and London Business School.
Shoko Takahashi
Starting the bio venture in 2013 while a doctoral student in molecular bioscience at the University of Tokyo, Takahashi's company anlyzes saliva to see what a people's genetics can tell about their current and future health. Individuals send the same directly to the firm, and it returns the results in four to six weeks, all for around $400. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Sciences and Technology recognized her as one of the researchers who are contributing to major innovation in science and technology in Japan in 2016.
Kohey Takashima
Kohey Takashima is the Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Oisix, an online grocery store that has built its business delivering organic foods to individuals throughout Japan. The company went public in the FIrst section of Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2020.
October 2017, Oisix integrated their operations with "DAICHI WO MAMORU KAI CO., Ltd.", which is the pioneer of the organic chemical-free vegetables sales. In October 2018, we realized business integration with Radishbo-ya Co., Ltd., and he take assumed office as President of the new company "Oisix ra daichi".
He was nominated as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2007 and he also received the Porter Prize in 2008. He is one of founders of Table for Two, a non-profit organization which addresses the problems all over the world.
July 2018 he took office as Chairman of the Japan Wheelchair Rugby Federation that aims to take the gold medal at the Tokyo Paralympic Games in 2020.
Nick Talwar
Nick Talwar is a Senior Partner at K50 Ventures, a leading pre-seed venture capital fund which invests in access and affordability for SMEs and the mass market and below. . Nick has over 20 years of experience as an operator, builder, advisor and investor in financial technology, mobility, and marketplace businesses. Some notable roles in Nick’s career include running Visa’s credit card business for North America, launching and building Amazon’s embedded lending business into a 100M+ profit business around the world, scaling and running all vehicle supply globally for Uber, and serving as President and as CEO of CircleUp (USV, Canaan, Rose Park, GV).
Nick serves as an advisor and board member for a variety of other venture firms and private companies. Some of Nick’s investments, where he has also sat as a board member, include Payjoy, Shipper, Rapido, TravClan and AltBank. In 2013 the World Economic Forum named Nick a Young Global Leader in recognition of his work on financial inclusion and innovation, and he is a member of the Aspen Institute’s Finance Leaders Fellowship and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. Nick received a B.S. from Georgetown University and MBA from Wharton. Nick lives in Palo Alto with his family.
Nina Tandon
Master’s in Bioelectrical Engineering, MIT; PhD/MBA, Biomedical Engineering, Columbia University. Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, EpiBone, a company using stem cells and digital fabrication to engineer patient-specific skeletal implants. McKinsey Alum, Fulbright Scholar. Co-author, Super Cells, a book exploring how biology is powering the 4th industrial revolution. Interests: yoga, meditation, surfing, drinking wine and eating cheese, cats.
Donald Tang
Donald Tang is managing partner of Celadon Partners. Prior to that, he was the Chief Executive Officer of D. E. Shaw & Co. (Asia Pacific) Limited, in which capacity he oversaw the operations of the D. E. Shaw group’s main investment office in Asia. He started his career at Citadel Investment Group, L.L.C. Donald graduated with honors from Carnegie Mellon University with a bachelor of science degrees in computer science and business administration, and a minor in computational finance.
Tan Yinglan
CEO and Founding Managing Partner of Insignia Ventures Partners. Innovation & Enterprise Committee and Adjunct Associate Prof., National University of Singapore. Eisenhower Fellow (2018); Panel Member, Pro-Enterprise Panel, Ministry of Trade and Industry (Singapore). Author: The Way of the VC: Having Top Venture Capitalists On Your Board (2009); Chinnovation - How Chinese Innovators are Changing the World (2010).
Lucian Tarnowski
Lucian Tarnowski, Founding Curator, United Planet & UP.Game
The UP Game is a time traveling immersive reality to create mythologies from a thriving future. Lucian is spent 2 years designing a platform for a planetary unifying narrative to respond to the crisis of meaning and trust. This mission is to deliver on the decade of transformation and seed the vision for a Planetary Civilization in harmony with all life. Lucian believes we succeed by reverse engineering the story from the future. Lucian is a Gaian on a mission to serve the birthing of the Planetary Age.
Lucian has a decade of experience in designing and powering online communities that connect diverse stakeholders around a shared purpose. Communities support virtual and distributed teams to scale and achieve their collaboration, knowledge sharing and problem-solving goals. For 10 years he was Founder & CEO of BraveNew which enabled Fortune 1000 clients such as GE, and collaboratives such as Institute for Healthcare Improvement and Geinsinger Health to cooperate and collaborate around a shared purpose.
Lucian has been honoured as a Young Global Leader (YGL) by the World Economic Forum. He has been an active attendee of Davos and other World Economic Forum meetings for 14 years. He continues to research and experiment around the social science behind communities, knowledge sharing and societal transformation.
Since 2002, he has run Take Heart India, a 53-year-old no overheads charity started by his father that provides blind and handicapped people in rural India with the vocational employment skills to required to get lifelong employment.
He has spoken at gatherings such as Davos, various World Economic Forum meetings, TEDx, The China Digital Summit, Impact Summit and for companies such as Deutsche Telekom, Oracle, Pearson, IBM and PWC. He speaks to audiences around the world about communities and the convergence of talent, knowledge and capital and the impact on society.
Rodrigo Tavares
Founder and CEO of the London-based Granito Group, a company that advances the sustainable economy through strategy consulting, financial advisory, and policy & research. The Group has collaborated with multiple financial organizations (institutional investors, asset managers, family offices, regulators) in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and North America to enable their transition to a sustainable economy. In 2022 the Group won the “Best ESG Financial Advisory Firm” (Ethical Finance Awards) and the “Most Pioneering Thought-Leader in PE Investment & ESG Strategies 2021” (M&A Awards).
Invited Full Professor of Sustainable Finance at NOVA School of Business and Economics (Nova SBE), in Portugal.
He holds over 15 years of experience in government and international organizations working with foreign affairs and economic cooperation. In 2008-2010 he was invited by the UN Secretariat to write Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's annual reports on Africa's development. From 2011 to 2014 served as Head of the São Paulo State Government's Office of Foreign Affairs.
His academic path includes the universities of Harvard (Senior Research Fellow), Columbia (Research Fellow on a postdoc grant), Gothenburg (Ph.D.), and California, Berkeley (Visiting Research Fellow). Author of 4 books, including “Paradiplomacy: Cities and States as Global Players” (Oxford University Press).
He was nominated Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum (2017), and StartUp Portugal Ambassador (2018). Columnist at Folha de S.Paulo (Brazil) and Expresso (Portugal).
Sue Anne Tay
Sue Anne Tay is Managing Director, Chief of Staff to the Co-CEO for HSBC Asia Pacific, focusing on Greater China.
She was previously Head of Strategy & Chief of Staff for Singapore where she served on the local Executive Committee. Before Singapore, she was based in London as Director with the Group Strategy team, and in Shanghai where she worked on the bank’s organic business strategy in-country and subsequently led the bank’s planning and business implementation of its rural banking business in China.
In addition to her day-to-day responsibilities, she serves as Global Co-chair of HSBC’s Employee Resource Group Generations, focused on driving multi-generational engagement across the Bank.
Sue Anne is a World Economic Forum (WEF) Young Global Leader and an Asia Fellow of the Schmidt Futures International Strategy Forum. She is on the Board of Young China Watchers, a network of 5,000 China-focused young professionals across Asia, Europe and the US as future China thought leaders.
Dylan Taylor
Dylan Taylor is a global business leader, commercial astronaut, thought leader and philanthropist. Currently, Dylan serves as Chairman & CEO of Voyager Space, a multi-national space exploration firm focused on building the next generation of space infrastructure for NASA and other global space agencies.
Dylan has been recognized by Harvard University, SpaceNews, the BBC, the Financial Times, Pitchbook, CNBC, CNN and others as having played a seminal role in the growth of the private space industry. As an early-stage investor in more than 50 emerging space ventures, including Axiom, Kepler, York, Astrobotic, LeoLabs, Relativity, and Planet, Dylan is widely considered the most active private space investor in the world.
Dylan’s technical background, global business experience and unbridled passion for space make him a unique figure within his industry. As a thought leader and futurist, he has written many popular pieces on the future of the space industry for Forbes, FastCompany, Newsweek, SpaceNews, The Space Review, and Space.com. As a speaker, Dylan has keynoted many of the major space conferences around the world and has appeared regularly on Bloomberg, Fox Business, and CNBC.
Teh Hua Fung
Hua Fung Teh is the Co-Founder and Group President of Group ONE Holdings (ONE). He co-leads the company’s management team with a focus on group strategy, global partnerships and capital markets.
Prior to ONE, Teh was a Principal at global private equity firm TPG Capital (TPG), and was responsible for the origination, execution and portfolio management of growth and late-stage investment deals in Southeast Asia. He also served on TPG’s China and US teams. Before TPG, Teh was an aviator with the Republic of Singapore Air Force (RSAF) and held leadership positions both at the RSAF and at Singapore’s Ministry of Trade and Industry, where he served as the Ministry’s Formula One (F1) Project Team Leader. In this role he helped secure the F1 Grand Prix hosting rights for Singapore and coordinated efforts between government agencies and the private sector to execute the first night race in F1 history in 2008.
Teh holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and an MEng and BS in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he was a member of the men’s varsity basketball team. A Taekwondo black-belt holder, he was selected as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2015, and sits on the board of the Singapore Art Museum (SAM).