Nadeem Nathoo is the cofounder of The Knowledge Society (TKS), a human accelerator that focuses on exponential technologies like as artificial intelligence, virtual/augmented reality, nanotechnology, and the internet of things (IoT). His mission at TKS is to develop young people (age 13–17) to pioneer new industries using emerging technologies and sciences. TKS alumni have spoken at some of the world's largest conferences, worked at companies like IBM and Microsoft, raised money from some of the top investors in the world, and are building projects in areas including brain-machine interfaces, quantum computing, and genetic engineering.

Prior to his role at TKS, Nadeem was a management consultant at McKinsey & Company, where he advised Fortune 500 CEOs on their challenges in banking, mining, aerospace, telecommunication, and advanced industries, to name a few. Nadeem has successfully led turn-arounds and growth strategies that have had global implications, including facilitating a $500 million merger transition and a $2 billion strategic spin-off. He's also done development work in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Bangladesh, East Africa, and Honduras. In his spare time, Nadeem is an angel investor.

Ian Lockhart is an energetic entrepreneur and public speaker who started his own investment fund prior to joining TKS. During that time, he invested in dozens of young entrepreneurs to help them turn their ideas into profitable businesses, including multi-million dollar revenues. Early in his career, Ian was focused on a series of startups that raised over 15M dollars in funding. Ian has worked with Fortune 500 brands in media, manufacturing, automotive, and e-commerce. Previously, Ian was a part of a Private Equity Fund, managing portfolios and leading acquisitions. To this day he continues to invest in entrepreneurs financially and through advisory positions.

Kim is a serial entrepreneur that has been involved in a wide variety of ventures – from organizing conferences & events to TV hosting & production to founding, and later successfully exiting, a commercial cleaning company. Kim’s most recent venture was co-founding the data architecture startup Truebase. Using the internally developed, open source data notation “Truth”, Truebase works with many different types of companies across Canada, the US and Australia, to create highly structured data models in the form of ontologies. These ontologies are used to power various business systems such as knowledge graphs, semantic networks, intuitive search, recommendation engines and various machine learning models. Kim loves working with creative & curious individuals, specifically, the young ambitious ones. She has served as an entrepreneurship coach for organizations such as YES (youth entrepreneurship arm) and as a mentor to the startup incubator, Founder Institute. She works closely with educational institutions like Georgian College (Big Data Analytics Program) as an industry advisor, and helps provide students with real world project experience. She is a frequent speaker on technology topics and shares much of her entrepreneurial journey on her various social media accounts.

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Brandon is a passionate technology strategist, focusing on enterprise applications.  A mechanical engineer by training, Brandon has held a variety of technical and operational roles in his career.  Formerly, as the CEO/Co-Founder of JS Operations, he worked with clients in the consumer product space to integrate technology into their supply chain operations through developing novel applications of IoT systems.  An avid lover of applying technology to solve problems, Brandon also worked as a Product Manager for Bowery Farming, helping define and build the future of precision agriculture.  Brandon has worked at McKinsey, SpaceX, Raytheon, Li & Fung, and the US Army R&D center.  He received his MBA from MIT Sloan, his MS in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, and his BSE in Mechanical Engineering from Penn.  At MIT, Brandon was a Leaders for Global Operations Fellow, where he published work on leveraging technology to solve operational challenges in companies located in developing economies.  He is an avid endurance athlete, and loves to train for triathlons and ultramarathons.

Damian Matheson is an entrepreneur and EdTech veteran, passionate about helping young people make more informed decisions about their futures. But it wasn’t always this way. Like many of you reading this, in high school, he was unsure about what he wanted to do with his life. Like most students today, his family (and our society) encouraged him to pursue the conventional path; to do what has always been done. Life had other plans for Damian. He still didn’t know exactly what he wanted, but he knew it wasn’t what our traditional education was shepherding him towards. After leaving school, Damian co-founded FoodStory; a company that brought the farmers markets of Toronto online, allowing conscious consumers to support local growers with a subscription based grocery delivery service. Following that, he led business development efforts at myBlueprint, helping to scale it’s adoption across over 400 school boards nationally, which now helps more than 1 million students plan for life after high school.

Skylor is an educator turned entrepreneur with extensive experience in crypto, fintech, artificial intelligence, and venture capital. He grew the #1 Bitcoin exchange in Canada before being acquired in 2016. His research has led to investments in Starkware, NuBank, Discord, and Scale AI. Skylor started his career as an educator in Edmonton and Yellowknife.

Andrés is a engineer, scientist, designer, entrepreneur, coach, & musician. His mission is to empower young people to explore their curiosities and make positive, worldwide impact. He has built a career bringing tech hardware to life at the cutting edge of wearable electronics, cancer research, neuroscience, optogenetics, nanotechnology, renewable energy, agriculture, and space. Andrés is a proud Latino and is especially passionate about advancing the future of education for BIPOC learners everywhere. Most recently, he taught a course in Engineering Design at MIT and built a multi-million dollar analytical laboratory from scratch. His past collaborators include the National Institutes of Health, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory and NASA. Outside of TKS, you can find Andrés reading, hiking, cycling, fly fishing, skiing, making music, cooking, and practicing yoga.

Niloo has worked with prominent startups in San Francisco and Toronto, and was a founding member of Clearco (formerly Clearbanc), a billion dollar e-commerce lending platform run by Dragon’s Den judge, Michele Romanow. She's also worked as Head of Education at Blockgeeks, the world’s premier blockchain education platform, where she was a thought leader and advocate for blockchain technology. Her work in AI also led her to start her own company, Hello Iris, which was backed by leading startup accelerator, Techstars, and used Natural Language Processing to predict human behaviour.

Pranav is an Engineer turned Startup junkie/consultant. He is no stranger to taking unconventional pathway. He knew early on that although he loved science and engineering, he wouldn’t enjoy working traditional engineering jobs. And so, he decided to bring together his two passions together - engineering and entrepreneurship. He started his career working on the product team at Microdermics - delivering drugs through the skin through micro-needles. He then built his own AI consultancy firm where he helped universities leverage IBM Watson to better support prospective students. He then moved onto startup consulting at entrepreneurship@UBC, where he worked with inventors/founders to bring their technology inventions and ideas to life by building startups. Over the last 3 years, he has worked with over a 100+ founders to tackle problems in wildfire prevention, water treatment in remote communities, urgent care patient support, waste upcycling and more.

Aatik Chopra is a lifelong learner who has forged his career path one intentional step at a time. During university, he was told that the “dream” was to earn a role in management consulting, and so he did. After working at firms such as Deloitte, he was struck with the question, “is there more to life than this?” to which the answer was clear “yes.” So began his journey of self-discovery, leading him to a career in education, albeit an unconventional one (on purpose). He innovated within the public school system as a Teacher by guiding over 1,000 meditation workshops, as well as coaching students after-hours on mindsets such as Stoicism. Then as a Career Coach, he helped Inuit adults coming out of prison to reintegrate into society. More recently, Aatik led a national entrepreneurship program for coaching recent grads on how to contribute to Canada’s startup scene. Before joining TKS, he contributed as a Learning Facilitator at Synthesis, the learning platform created at SpaceX which has been backed by the likes of Balaji Srinivasan and Amjad Masad.

Mikaela is a creative turned data wizard, with extensive experience in data science, strategy, and visualization. Her unique ability to think both creatively and mathematically informed her educational and professional experiences thus far. Following her BA in Creative Industries, Mikaela moved to New York City to complete an MS in Data Visualization at Parsons School of Design. It was there that she discovered her interest in equity and equality in relation to data and technology. After receiving an acceptance to attend law school to study the intersection of social justice and technology, Mikaela decided to go down another route. She was offered the rare opportunity to join NYC-based consultancy, Data Culture, as employee number one. During her time at Data Culture, she worked with a variety of organizations including SaaS companies, non-profits, and venture capital firms, helping them translate critical business challenges into scalable data solutions. Her most treasured project was developing and scaling Kode with Klossy’s Data Science Camp, one of the largest all-female programs in North America, building the future generation of aspiring data scientists.

Steven spent 10+ years helping founders build digital products. Joining as the fourth employee, he helped scale his last agency to 40+ team members and 9-figures in revenue before the company was acquired in 2021. Steven has led client projects worldwide, such as launching a digital insurance company in Barbados, a neo-bank in Dubai, and a cryptocurrency exchange in Canada.

Ashley is an intensive mental health counselor turned customer experience enthusiast who’s worked at various tech companies from ultra-lean startups to large multinational corporations. After leaving the mental healthcare world and receiving a certificate in user experience design, she’s built and managed customer-facing teams from the ground up for companies like Rapid7, Dialpad, and Hootsuite in both the US and Canada. Ashley has spent the last few years focusing on implementing technology and processes to help solve the puzzle of improving how brands build relationships with their customers and coaching teams to bring authenticity to the support world.