Darlene served in leadership, strategy, operational, and expert roles with Singularity University, Ashoka, the World Bank, nonprofits in Vietnam and Myanmar, and has spoken about impact technology at the United Nations, the World Food Programme, SXSW, Google, Salesforce, Intuit, WalMart, Sony, LG, Aramaco and delivered TedX talks in Vilnius and Budapest.
She has written articles for Harvard Business Review, Forbes, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Spiceworks, the OECD Forum, the Qatar Foundation and GRIT Daily. A number of news outlets including TechCrunch, Fast Company, Venture Beat, Wired, Popular Science, Aviation Week, NPR, Gigacom, Forbes, MoonandBack, engadget, The Denver Post, Le Monde and 60 Minutes have covered her work in drones, rocketry and Singularity University impact technology projects.
Darlene received her bachelor’s degree from Stanford University, her master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS), was a fellow with Japan-US Community Education and Exchange, is an advisor to the UN World Food Programme Innovation Accelerator, was a mentor with Google’s impact accelerator, a judge for Stanford BASES, and served on the Biden Administration’s Working Group on Cross Border Trade. She holds patents in drone technology and Authority Magazine featured her as a social impact hero.
Sample Topics
The Impact Technology Revolution
If you are in the workforce today, you grew up in the Industrial Era and likely think about social impact as nonprofit work or corporate social responsibility. In 2020, during the midst of the pandemic, we entered into the Fourth Industrial Revolution. While the Industrial Era, the last 300 years, built modern society by extracting as much as possible from the planet and workers, the Fourth Industrial Revolution will be about using the most advanced technologies on earth to heal the planet and help workers and humanity thrive. We are already seeing tens of thousands of impact technology companies emerge in climate tech, health tech, ed tech, ag tech, gov tech, fem tech and more. These companies are also creating millions of new high paying meaningful jobs. One can even argue that soon, the most profitable companies on the planet will also be those doing the most good for society. Are you ready to leave behind the Industrial Era and the problems of the past once and for all and create a better future?
Industry Building Workshop
In the Industrial Era, it often took entrepreneurs decades if not centuries to launch new industries. Now that we are in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, industries are being built in less than a decade and sometimes even a few years. Yet most of us are still thinking and operating like our ancestors who ran companies 300 hundred years ago. Industry building requires more than simply launching a new product or even a new company – it requires seeing ten years into the future, understanding converging industries, helping the world around you see what you see, and working with regulators and policymakers (and sometimes even your competitors) to create the social, ethical and regulatory environments to succeed. While launching an industry is more risky and requires more work, if you can do it the payoff is huge. This workshop draws from Darlene’s experience co-founding Matternet, which launched the drone transport industry and coaching hundreds of entrepreneurs who were the first in the world or in their country to launch a new industry.
