Event Speakers

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Dina Apostolou is an award-winning marketing executive with 20 years of experience driving product marketing strategy and cross company go-to-market initiatives at Microsoft including LinkedIn and Adobe. Apostolou currently is the global marketing leader of Dynamics 365 applications that power businesses to engage customers throughout a digital lifecycle. Her team is responsible for the go-to-market development, execution and growth of in-market products and new AI applications working across the corporate engineering, sales and partner organizations.

David Drake, through his family office LDJ Capital, has acted as GP and LP investor with his partners in fund-of-funds, realty funds, venture capital funds, and hedge funds. Drake's investments currently have 50+ global directors that maintain relations with institutions and family offices with access to over a trillion in assets. Drake, through LDJ Capital, manages and co-invests in alternative assets with the top 30 family offices out of his 5,000 family office and institutional investor reach. These top 30 are 40% from Asia, 20% from Europe, 20% from the Americas, and 20% from the Middle East. Drake’s access with 100,000 investors is maintained through his media asset, The Soho Loft Media Group, which has produced & sponsored over 1500+ finance conferences since 2002 like the events with institutional media leader Thomson Reuters and with sponsors from NASDAQ, NYSE, KKR, and the Carlyle Group. Drake is a digital automation advocate for private equity as he lobbied the US Congress on the JOBS Act since 2011. He represented the US Commerce Department at the EU Commission in Brussels and Rome in 2012, was invited to the White House Champions of Change ceremony in Washington, D.C., and, was a speaker at the UK Parliament in 2013.

Lisa Rich is a lifelong, serial entrepreneur, strategist and active venture capitalist. Lisa is Managing Partner of Hemisphere Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm she founded in 2014, with her business partner and husband, Jeff Rich. Hemisphere is focused on frontier technologies - synthetic biology, robotics, drones and space; the firm has invested in 200+ early stage companies, including 17 in the space sector and 25 in biotech. Recent investments include Finless Foods, Clara Foods, Axiom Space, PlanetIQ, Elroy Air. Lisa works closely with early-stage companies to build their strategy, partnerships and funding rounds. Together with Jeff Rich, the two built BrainyQuote.com, the largest quotation resource on the internet. Separately, she is co-founder Xplore, a privately-funded space exploration company focused on expanding knowledge of our solar system. Lisa holds a B.S. in English from Loyola University Chicago and M.S. Marketing Communication from the Stuart Graduate School of Business at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. She is a member and supporter of the Planetary Society, B612 and The Keck Foundation and serves on the Board of Patrons at the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.