Before joining UC Berkeley, he co-founded StartSomeGood.com, which has helped over 1,000 changemakers in 50 countries raise over $10 Million USD. He’s written about leadership for FastCompany and the Guardian and his work as a changemaker and educator has been featured in publications including Forbes and the Washington Post.

A Silicon Valley native, Budak spent three years living in Stockholm, Sweden where he served as Country Director at Reach for Change, running its social innovation incubator. Through this role, he traveled throughout the Nordics giving talks on leadership and innovation and encouraging the development of a Nordic social entrepreneurship model and movement.

He received a Master of Public Policy degree from Georgetown University and a BA from UCLA. UCLA honored him as its Recent Graduate of the Year in 2017 and he’s been named a “top 100 visionary leader" by Real Leaders Magazine and a top under-40 North American leader by Friends of Europe.

Leena Lankoski has been working with questions of corporate responsibility and sustainability for almost 30 years in Finland and elsewhere, both as an environmental consultant, at the United Nations, and lately in the academia. During her years in the field Leena has looked at questions at the interface between business and society from a number of perspectives, ranging from strategies and competitiveness issues for single firms and sectors to macro-level and policy questions in a globalized economy. Her academic research spans across several topics such as the relationship between a firm’s sustainability performance and financial performance, the different meanings that ‘sustainability’ can take in a business context, behavioural and organizational change for sustainability, and sustainability and ethics in a digital economy. She has taught corporate responsibility and sustainability for university students at all levels as well as for executive audiences for 20 years.

Dr. Lankoski holds a D.Sc. in Industrial Engineering and Management from Aalto University and an MBA from Cass Business School, London.
 

Sepúlveda has more than 20 years of experience in engineering, management consulting and investment banking at companies such as Lucent Technologies, A.T. Kearney, and J.P. Morgan.

He teaches Venture Formation and other courses at the Aalto Ventures Program and Aalto University Executive Education. He cofounded eyescubed, a startup in automotive technology, and also cofounded Courage Ventures Advisory, which provides entrepreneurship training and development to leading private and public organizations. He is also a cofounding Partner of Courage Ventures Management, a fund investing in health & wellness, education, and environment verticals.

Sepúlveda has a PhD in International Business (Entrepreneurship) from Aalto University, an MBA in Finance and Financial Management Services from Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (Netherlands) and a BSc in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from North Carolina State University (USA).

Robert was first drawn to the Nordics as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Norway out of desire to understand how the Nordics were achieving such strong and balanced economic, environmental, and social performances at the macro country level – and he wanted to understand the role of business in this. He soon identified a heightened focus on cooperation rooted in democratic ideals as a fundamental reason among other related institutional and cultural factors. 

Prior to joining academia as a professor with the Copenhagen Business School, Strand spent a decade in industry with IBM and Boston Scientific in a range of roles in manufacturing, supply chain, marketing, strategy, and investor relations. He holds a PhD in corporate social responsibility from the Copenhagen Business School, an MBA in international business from the University of Minnesota (completed at HEC-Paris), and a BS in industrial engineering from the University of Wisconsin.