Courses & Events

Ms. Asha Jadeja Motwani & Ms. Radhika Shah

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

04:15 pm - 05:30 pm

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Impact Investing and Scaling Social Ventures in South Asia

To round out our final session on “Entrepreneurship in Asian High-Tech Industries” this spring, we will feature Ms. Asha Jadeja Motwani (photo on right), Trustee of the Motwani Jadeja Family Foundation, and Ms. Radhika Shah (photo on left), Co-Founder and Chapter Leader of the Ashoka Silicon Valley Chapter.  Topics of discussion will include how impact investors evaluate social entrepreneurial startups in Asia, how  social ventures are deployed and scaled, and most importantly, how sustainable impact can be measured and achieved.  Our guest speakers will also provide us with their perspectives into general trends on impact investing and social entrepreneurship across Asia.

Ms. Asha Jadeja Motwani is an active philanthropist, tech investor and social impact investor who is focused on sustainability initiatives which yield social results in her investments.  She was one of the first women venture capitalists in Silicon Valley and was the Founder and Managing Director of Dot Edu Ventures along with her late husband Stanford Computer Science Professor, Rajeev Motwani.  Ms. Motwani founded the Motwani Jadeja Family Foundation and is continuing her work in India by fostering innovation in the social sector and leveraging technology to build a more global community – connecting innovators across the world via the RajeevCircle Young Entrepreneurs Fellowship.   RajeevCircle is a Silicon Valley mentoring group and community of 300 – 400 people including several Silicon Valley tech leaders – created in memory of Professor Rajeev Motwani.  Ms. Motwani pursued a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University and has received a Masters in Civil Engineering from UC Berkeley.

 

Ms. Radhika Shah is a high tech executive and entrepreneur in the information retrieval and social networking space.  She architected some of the first personalization and online community solutions at Broadvision in the early days of the internet.  Ms. Shah is passionate about leveraging technology for scalable social impact.  She mentors  social and tech entrepreneurs in the US and India and is deeply engaging  Silicon Valley with Ashoka Fellows from around the world. She is one of the founding volunteers of  the mentoring group, RajeevCircle, and a part of the SV Leadership Circle for Action For India – helping social entrepreneurs scale.  Ms. Shah was on the Steering Committee for StartX Mentor Labs, and is currently a mentor, venture advisor & judge at SkyDeck Labs – a U.C. Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley Labs collaboration for fostering innovation and entrepreneurship. She holds a Masters in Computer Science from Stanford University and an MBA from U.C. Berkeley, Haas School of Business.

Immediately following the session, we’ll have a short-networking reception from 5:30 – 6:15PM.  This is the final session in the US-Asia Technology Management Center’s series of public talks on “Entrepreneurship in Asian High-Tech Industries.”  Presented by the US-Asia Technology Management Center in Stanford’s School of Engineering, with series support from SunBridge Partners and Ideaspace Foundation.

Stanford University
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
4:15PM ~ 5:30PM
Gates Building, Room B01 – Hewlett Packard Auditorium