Survival of the fittest, fastest or first

At Oriente, Geoffrey is responsible for global business strategy, strategic partnerships, brand, and investments. He has nearly 20 years of experience founding, scaling and investing in technology companies across international markets.

Before this, Geoffrey spent seven years as a founding Partner at Atomico, a leading global VC firm with over US$2 billion in assets under management where he focused on sourcing new investments and working with portfolio companies on their global business development and expansion initiatives.

In 2002, Geoffrey co-founded Skype, where he also served as Chief Strategy Officer. At Skype, he worked with a small team to build a leading global telecommunications platform company and oversaw its expansion into Asia and Latin America in addition to driving its initial business plan development and fundraising activities. He also played an instrumental role in the $3.1 billion exit to eBay Inc in 2005.

Geoffrey holds a Bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan.

Adrian Cheng is a renowned entrepreneur who adopts a unique business model by incorporating commerce, art and culture that is a blueprint for tomorrow’s interconnected and sustainable society.

As Executive Vice-chairman of New World Development (HKEX:0017), Executive Director of Chow Tai Fook Jewellery Group (HKEX:1929), and the founder of the K11 brand, Adrian’s expertise and his vision as a changemaker, makes him a champion for transformation and development of contemporary and human-centered enterprise, backed by people, art and nature.

Running New World Development, Adrian oversees strategic direction for the company’s property development and investment activities, infrastructure and services creation, and their retail and hotel projects. He is currently spearheading some of New World’s most ambitious projects, including Victoria Dockside (K11 MUSEA, K11 ATELIER, K11 ARTUS, Rosewood Hotel and Rosewood Residences), a US$2.6 billion development. Scheduled to fully open in Q3 2019, Victoria Dockside is well positioned to be a global art and design landmark, and Skycity, a US$2.5 billion mega development complex attached to Hong Kong’s airport and linked to the HK-Zhuhai-Macau bridge.

Mr. Pearson Poon is the Executive Director of Dickson Concepts (International) Limited, the Executive Director of Harvey Nichols and Company Limited, and the Vice-Chairman of the Supervisory Board of S.T. Dupont S.A.

Since joining the Group, Pearson led the full launch of Harvey Nichols' e-commerce operations in Hong Kong, driving triple digit growth in online fashion sales in 2018 and again in 2019. He also led the development of Harvey Nichols' new retail format combining online and offline, and re-launched Harvey Nichols Pacific Place in September 2019 as the first Harvey Nichols store globally built around the Group's new omni-channel model.

In London, Pearson spearheaded the negotiation of the strategic partnership between Harvey Nichols and Farfetch, and also negotiated the direct investment and strategic tieup between Harvey Nichols and Hero, enabling Harvey Nichols to become the first luxury department store in the UK to offer live shopping online via instant messaging, photo sharing, and video streaming.

Prior to joining the Group, Pearson worked as part of the Consumer and Retail, Technology, Media, and Telecommunications Investment Banking team at Goldman Sachs (Asia) LLC. He graduated from the University of Cambridge obtaining a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Economics, where he was awarded the Prince Philip Scholarship.

Alistair Crane is CEO and Co-Founder of HERO^®, the technology company pioneering an entirely new way to shop by connecting online customers browsing a retailers website live with expert sales associates in-store. At the touch of a button, an online customer can connect from anywhere in the world and through photos, videos and livestreams, instantly feel like they're shopping in store, humanizing eCommerce for the very first time.

HERO^® has rapidly forged multi-year partnerships with leading groups including Harvey Nichols, Nike, LVMH, adidas, Levi’s and Richemont. With notable investors including S28 Capital, Vectr Ventures, and Yasunobu Kyogoku, former COO of Uniqlo.

Prior to HERO^®, Alistair launched Grapple, Europe’s largest app development agency that was acquired by Monetise PLC in 2013 for $100m. He has held board level positions at Monetise PLC, Grapple (acquired by Monetise PLC), NAVTEQ (acquired by Nokia) and Blyk (acquired by France Telecom). He regularly appears in trade and international media including The Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, BBC World News, Forbes, Business Insider, and The Guardian.

Curtis Hickman is co-founder and chief creative officer of The VOID, a critically-acclaimed global leader in immersive entertainment, where his visionary work continues to shape the world of mixed reality, bringing consumers closer to stories, characters and places than they’ve ever been before. With more than a decade of experience producing award-winning visual effects and motion graphics for film and television, Hickman’s devotion to digital art went hand in hand with his other passion -magic. Prior to co-founding The VOID, Hickman made a name for himself as an award-winning magician. He was one of the select few designers to develop theatrical illusions for top ranked magicians around the world such as David Copperfield and Criss Angel.

His background in illusion design and digital magic is not only interesting, but quintessential to the technologies behind The VOID and its multi-sensory immersive experiences that transcend the limitations of reality such as Ghostbusters Dimensions, Nicodemus: Demon of Evanishment, Ralph Breaks VR and Star Wars™: Secrets of the Empire.

By incorporating age-old magic principles and the power of virtual reality, Hickman created a fundamentally new way for people to interact with each other. The VOID’s ability to create a digital representation of the physical world continues to inspire and evolve the future of immersive experiences and entertainment.

Hickman has spoken on the future of entertainment at SXSW, The Future of Storytelling Summit and has been quoted in Fast Company, Forbes, Rolling Stone, Entrepreneur, Wired, TIME, Variety and more. The VOID was named Most Innovative Company by Fast Company in 2018 and won a silver Clio Entertainment award in 2017.

Mike has over 15 years of product and technology experience working in mobile/social games and online media. He co-founded Fusion8, which was acquired by popular social media company RockYou in spring of 2016. Mike was previously VP of product at GREE and executive producer at Funzio when it was acquired by GREE in 2012. Before mobile, he was employee five at YuMe (NYSE:YUME), an online video advertising technology company. Mike is also a restaurateur working with notable chefs like Dominique Crenn of Atelier Crenn.

Petr is an entrepreneur and business leader; he has been working in marketing services and the design industry for over twenty years. His businesses are currently based in the Czech Republic and Russia and operate across Europe. In his former company Cocoon, he worked with corporate clients such as Nestle, P&G, Molson Coors on packaging and product innovation projects.

In 2015 Petr found MIWA, a technology company driven by a mission to prevent the creation of waste from single-use packaging. MIWA has developed a standardized reusable packaging with RFID for distribution of dry and liquid products in bulk; this packaging works in tandem with unique electronic dispensers that are placed in shops. Thanks to data-driven operational efficiency and focus on brand/product quality tracking and communication, the system enables so called packaging-free sales for large brand owners and retailers.


MIWA’s technology was awarded numerous innovation and social impact prizes and is used as “best practice” in materials published by the UN and EU. With the involvement of both global and local producers and retailers, pilot operations started in several countries in 2019. Further development of the technology includes solutions for consumer packaging and household management to reach a maximum convenience for shoppers.

Andras Forgacs, Co-Founder and CEO of Modern Meadow, is a serial entrepreneur in deep tech and life sciences. He is leading the company into a new age of biofabrication, working to transform the world of materials by unlocking the power of nature to offer new design possibilities. Andras is also co-Founder of 3D bioprinting company, Organovo. Previously he held positions with an international technology-focused venture fund, McKinsey & Co. and Citigroup. Andras is founding chairman of the international non-profit Resolution Project and was a Kauffman Fellow with the Center for Venture Education. He holds an MBS from The Wharton School and a Bachelor of Arts with honors from Harvard University. Named as a 2018 Tech Pioneer by the World Economic Forum, Modern Meadow enables new design and performance possibilities and partners with some of the world’s thought-leading brands to transform the material world and design for a healthier planet.

Stephen Mayfield is CEO of Algenesis Materials at San Diego, California based start-up company dedicated to developing world class polyurethane products that are sustainably sourced and biodegradable.

Steve is also a Distinguished Professor of Biology at UC San Diego. Steve received BS degrees in Biochemistry and Plant Biology from Cal Poly State University in San Luis Obispo, and a Ph.D.in Molecular Genetics from UC Berkeley.

Following a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Geneva Switzerland here turned to California as an assistant professor at the Scripps Research Institute where he remained for 22 years becoming the Dean of Biology there, before joining UC San Diego in 2009.

In addition to running his research group and university research centers, Steve has been the Chief Executive Officer of Algenesis since it was founded in 2016. Prior to Algenesis, Steve also founded Rincon Pharmaceutical in 2005, Sapphire Energy in 2007,and Triton Health and Nutrition in 2013.

David Perry is President, CEO, and Director of Indigo Ag. He is a serial entrepreneur who has founded and built three innovative companies in the last 20 years, leading the last two through successful IPOs and to multi-billion-dollar market capitalizations and raising over $1.2 billion while generating significant returns for investors.

David was most recently CEO and Co-Founder of Anacor Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ANAC), a biopharmaceutical company discovering and developing novel small-molecule therapeutics to treat infectious and inflammatory diseases. The company was acquired by Pfizer Inc. (NYSE: PFE) in 2016 for approximately $5.2 billion. David previously co-founded and served as CEO of Chemdex (NASDAQ: CMDX),later creating its parent company Ventro Corporation (NASDAQ: VNTR), a business-to-business marketplace focused on the life sciences industry. Ventro was valued at $11 billion and was later sold to Nexprise.

David is Founder and Chairman digital health start up Better Therapeutics (f/k/a FareWell) and a Board Director of Evelo Biosciences.

In 2000, David was named Entrepreneur of the Year in Northern California by EY. He holds an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and a B.S. in chemical engineering from the University of Tulsa. He attended the United States Air Force Academy, where he was a National Merit Scholar.

Daniella Russo is the CEO and Co-founder of Think Beyond Plastic™, the leader of a global action to harness the forces of innovation and entrepreneurship to eliminate global plastic pollution.

Think Beyond Plastic leads a multidisciplinary effort to identify and commercialize upstream innovations that eliminate plastic pollution, with focus on innovative product delivery systems, application specific packaging, bio-benign materials and sustainable chemistry. To secure a rich pipeline of innovation, it is building an innovation eco-system connecting industry, investors and innovators.

Daniella Russo believes that intractable environmental challenges can be addressed by harnessing the forces of innovation and entrepreneurship, and the power of the markets to do good. She is a serial entrepreneur. She has started and ran numerous high-tech businesses, and her experience includes executive management from start-up phase through an IPO (Frame Technology, Infoseek and others), Fortune-500 companies (Sun Microsystems and Xerox -- PARC).

Daniella Russo is a member of the Founders Board of Advisors at StartX Stanford Student Startup Accelerator. She is an Associate Professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies Graduate Program in International Policy and Management. She serves on the Board of numerous NGOs and businesses.

Mark Luo, founder and CEO of Huohua Siwei (Spark Education), former co-founder and CTO of Ganji.com.

In December 2017, Mark Luo launched the online education institute named Spark Education, with core members from well-known companies such as Ganji.com, Tencent, Microsoft, TAL Education Group and New Oriental.

Spark Education takes mathematical thinking as the entry point to cultivating logical thinking and overall character education of children from age 3 to 12. With years of successful entrepreneurial experience and a keen awareness of the industry trend, Luo led Spark to a great start. Spark has received an overwhelming positive feedback from students as well as their parents. With its brand reputation and competitive product, Spark has been favored by many top domestic and foreign investors, with a total financing amount exceeding 160 million US dollars.

Currently, Spark has more than 3000 employees, including over 1,800 full-time teachers and advisors. Due to its high-quality courses and public reputation, Spark is proud to be able to serve more than 60,000 current students, with a renewal rate of 80% and a referral rate of 75%.

Zvi Schreiber ("tzvee shryber") is a British-Israeli serial entrepreneur and the Founder and CEO of Freightos, the Internet marketplace for the trillion dollar international freight industry. Previously Zvi was CEO of Lightech (acquired by GE), and Founder and CEO of Unicorn (acquired by IBM) and Tradeum (acquired by VerticalNet) and G.ho.st. Zvi has spoken widely and written many articles and patents. Studying in Cambridge and Imperial College, Zvi holds a PhD in computer science and is author of Fizz which tells the history of physics as a novel. Zvi has been active in building the Palestinian high-tech industry.

Sundeep Gantori is an equity analyst responsible for covering the global technology sector and the Asia ex-Japan Focus 20 list, which features CIO's highest conviction ideas in the region.

Sundeep joined UBS Global Wealth Management as an equity analyst in February 2007. His coverage primarily focuses on global technology sectors including internet, semiconductors, software and services, and hardware. Additionally, Sundeep is also responsible for managing the Asia ex-Japan Focus 20 list, covering Taiwanese equities and developing other thematic ideas. Before joining UBS, Sundeep worked as an equity analyst at PCS Securities, an Indian brokerage firm where he was covering the Indian IT and telecom sectors.

During the past few years, Sundeep has authored many thought-leadership pieces on topics like AI, automation, cryptocurrencies, blockchain, etc., and his views regularly appear across high-profile media outlets.

Yuanqing LIN is the founder and CEO of Aibee, a leading company on AI total solutions. He was the former Head of Baidu Research, which includes Baidu’s Silicon Valley AI Lab (SVAIL), Institute of Deep Learning(IDL), Big Data Lab (BDL),and Augmented Reality Lab(ARL). Prior to Baidu, he was the former Department Head of Media Analytics at NEC Labs America.

Yuanqing LIN is one of the thirteenth group of the Recruitment Program of Global Experts. He has rich research experiences and achievements in machine learning and computer vision.

He was the Area Chair of Neural Information Processing Systems(NIPS)and the Co-Chair of International Workshop on Large Scale Visual Recognition and Retrieval.

He has led his team to achieve top performance in several international computer vision benchmarks including the first-year ImageNet Challenge(2010).The technology from his team has widely deployed in many industries.

Tony Zhao is founder and CEO of Agora.io. He believes that communication is ubiquitous and more and more so in the mobile era. To provide ubiquitous real-time communication with audio and video, everywhere for any device, browser or anyone with an Internet connection, he started Agora.io in January 2014.

Previously, Tony was CTO and board director at YY.com, which is a more than $3 billion NASDAQ-quoted social, gaming and entertainment company running on top of a real time audio/video communications platform over the public Internet.

At YY, Tony’s technical efforts supported 400 billion+ VoIP minutes a year of person-to-person real-time communications, mostly group sessions between many users.

Before YY, Tony was the founding engineer and first VoIP & video communications engineer at WebEx, acquired by Cisco in 2007 at $3.2 billion. Tony Zhao is a series entrepreneur and has working experience in both China and US corporations.

Billy Boyle is an engineering graduate from Cambridge University. He is one of the original co-founders of Owlstone Inc, spun out of Cambridge in 2004, which has raised $28M in investment and won >$25M in defence contracts. He initially worked with silicon foundries in the design and fabrication of the core microchip technology and is co-inventor on 19 patents. He then assumed a commercial role with P&L responsibility for the Scientific Instruments and Industrial business units; responsible for sales of FAIMS products and contracts with >150 clients globally, including Agilent, Thermo, Roche Diagnostics, Samsung, GSK, 4D Pharma, Mayo Clinic and the NHS.

Billy started to focus on the medical applications of FAIMS technology after his wife, Kate, was diagnosed and later died of colon cancer as a result of a late diagnosis. He worked closely with clinical partners who integrated FAIMS technology across a broad spectrum of clinical trials in cancer, inflammatory disease & infectious disease.

After positive clinical trial results he headed up the newly formed Medical business unit, which won a £1M NHS contract for LuCID to use FAIMS technology in the early detection of lung cancer. With ongoing clinical and commercial success, Billy led the process to spin out Owlstone Medical Ltd and became the founding CEO upon the close of a $7M investment in March 2016. The mission of Owlstone Medical is to save 100,000 lives and $1.5B in healthcare costs.

Billy is also a judge for the Cancer Research UK (CRUK) Pioneer award and a trustee of the Linacre Institute.

Dr. Ricky Chiu is the CEO, founder and lead inventor of PHASE Scientific’s underlying technology. Prior to PHASE Scientific, he was a former project manager at Alere (now Abbott), where he took several rapid point-of-care diagnostics from concept to market; amongst his most successful products is the first FDA approved drug-of-abuse diagnostic that utilized oral fluid.

Leveraging his experience at Alere, Ricky pursued his Ph.D. in bioengineering at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), with a focus on cutting-edge diagnostics development.

His doctorate research led to his invention of a revolutionary sample-preparation technology that can improve the performance of most diagnostic tools. Ricky founded the company in 2014 with the goal of commercializing his invention.

Since then, he and the company have been the recipient and principal of multiple grants and awards, including from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

For the past five years, Ricky has successfully raised over USD$14 million in funding from governments, non-profit organizations and investors, to support the development of the best and first in class technology and products. Currently, PHASE Scientific has 35 employees, over 30 patents granted or filed, and operations in the U.S.A., China, and Hong Kong.

Shaokang Wang graduated from the University of Chicago with a master's degree in statistics. He has worked in the United States for three years in business recommendation algorithm, and applied large scale machine learning to provide sales and market decision making solutions for Fortune 500 companies In 2015, Shaokang returned to China to start Infervision as a Co Founder and devoted himself to the application of artifici al intelligence technology in medi cal imaging. Since then , he has continuo usly explored and innovated in th e new model of medical AI and has applied for 4 international AI patents and published 6 research papers. At present, more than 300 medical institutions worldwide have been using the Infervision AI products. More than 40,000 cases have been evaluated daily by Infervision AI for quality control and lung cancer screening.

Dr. Antonin (Tony) de Fougerolles joined Evox Therapeutics as CEO in late 2017 and oversees the management of the company. Evox is engineering exosomes, the body’s natural delivery system, to enable a wide variety of drugs to reach previously inaccessible tissues and compartments, such as crossing the blood brain barrier to deliver drugs to the CNS, intracellular delivery of biologics, and extra-hepatic delivery of RNA therapeutics. Evox was founded in 2016, raised $46M in Series B funding in September 2018, and is developing a proprietary pipeline of exosome therapeutics in the rare disease space and expects its first IND in 2020.

Tony has over 20 years of biotech R&D experience in building out drug pipelines, and he has played a key role in developing and advancing 3 new drug modalities towards the market (RNAi, modified mRNA, single domain antibodies). Prior to joining Evox, Tony was CSO of Ablynx, where he led the company’s non-clinical R&D operations, including Discovery, Pharmacology, CMC, and Clinical Trial Supply. Prior to Ablynx, Tony held several posts including founding CSO at Moderna Therapeutics, CSO at Tolerx, and VP Research at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals. In addition, Tony has been Principal Investigator on over $80M in grants, has over 60 scientific publications, and is an inventor on over 90 issued U.S. patents. He earned his Ph.D. in Immunology from Harvard University.

Matt Reid is an entrepreneur with a successful group of businesses across three primary verticals; consumer products, hospitality and media. Each business symbiotically draws from the other; all grounded in core areas of passion. Disruptive ideas harnessing creativity, content, branding, strategy and design.

Whilst based out of Hong Kong there is a strong focus on the US & European markets particularly with the RESET Bioscience and Mott 32 brands.

Environmental entrepreneurship through content creation and inspiring change is major focus. Matt was part of the team that produced A Plastic Ocean; one of the most awarded environmental documentaries in 2018, and is currently producing his next film; The Last Glaciers, which focuses on the global warming awareness.

At 13, Rylie Maedler has accomplished more than most of us midway into adult hood. Not only is this teenage powerhouse the CEO of her own cannabinoid company and non-profit foundation, but she has also helped pass five laws granting children in her home state of Delaware access to medical cannabis.

She travels the world speaking at conferences to advocate for the legal and safe access to medical cannabis.

Rylie has found a way to live a full and happy life, despite having rare bone tumors and Epilepsy. Clinical research is also a big part of Rylie’s mission since the lack of research holds back patient care.

Rylie has chosen specific targets that her team agrees need to be pushed to the forefront. While the word "inspirational" is grossly overused, there is no other word to describe the young cannabis activist and daily medical cannabis user. Rylie is an honors student who loves singing, going to the beach and her cat Toby.

Wang Lei, Ph.d., associate researcher. He has successively studied in electronic engineering and information science at University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), and Chinese Academic of Sciences (major in Microwave Remote Sensing). He used to serve as the director of Satellite Remote Sensing Department, National Disaster Reduction Center of China (NDRCC) of Ministry of Civil Affairs. He participated in the planning and construction of disaster prevention and mitigation system using remote sensing technology in China, participated in the design and development of ground disaster reduction application system of small satellite constellation for environment and disaster monitoring as the core personnel, and was responsible for the cooperation with UN-OOSA, UN-SPIDER, UNDP, APSCO and other international organizations as the Chinese experts. He has undertaking over 30 national scientific research projects, published more than 30 academic papers, 5 national standards, 3 academic monographs and 3 invention patents.

In 1981, aged just 15, he constructed and built one of the first skateboard halfpipes in Germany together with a few friends. Whilst studying for his degree in civil engineering he developed his first patent and in his capacity as ‘Serial Entrepreneur’ and self-made man he is now an entrepreneur through and through. With his enthusiasm and his firm belief in his vision regarding mobility of the future in the third dimension he brings much innovative buzz to the whole team.