A Platform For A Better Japan

Geoff Brooks leads Business Operations at Notion. Since joining in 2023, he has led cross-functional strategic programs spanning corporate strategy, process design and implementation, and performance management.
Geoff has 18 years of Business Operations experience across technology companies at a variety of growth stages. Prior to Notion, he held a senior leadership role at Coinbase, where he served as Senior Director of Business Operations, leading Biz Ops, Program Management, Technical Program Management, and Sales Operations functions. He has also held business operations roles at Meta, where he led product strategy and insights for a variety of consumer businesses, as well as at NerdWallet and LinkedIn. Earlier in his career, he spent nearly a decade at Monitor Deloitte, including building the company’s strategy practice with Deloitte Australia. Geoff holds an MBA from Kellogg School of Management and a BSBA from Washington University in St. Louis.

Jenny Chatman is the Bank of America Dean of the Haas School of Business. Prior to becoming dean, she held the Paul J. Cortese Distinguished Professorship in the Management of Organizations Group.
In her research, teaching, and consulting work, she focuses on how organizations can leverage culture for strategic success and how diverse teams can optimize performance. Her award-winning research has shown, for example, how emphasizing innovation in the context of a strong culture increases firms financial success, how narcissistic leaders create organizational cultures lower in collaboration and integrity, and how norms to cooperate can cause members to blur differences among them, even if those differences are useful for group performancesuggesting that collaboration should be calibrated in diverse teams. In 2023, Chatman received the lifetime achievement award from the Academy of Management Organizational Behavior Division for her pioneering work that has changed the field.
Chatman is the Co-founder of the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation. She runs the Leading Strategy Execution Through Culture executive education program and co-hosts the podcast The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer with Sameer Srivastava. She has served in many leadership roles at Haas and UC Berkeley over the years, including Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, Acting Dean, and Interim Dean from August 2024 to July 2025. 
Chatman earned her PhD at UC Berkeley Haas, and her BA in psychology from UC Berkeley.

Tatsuo Kawasaki is one of the founding Partners of Unison Capital, which was founded in 1998. His investment experience ranges from retail, food and beverage, financial services, to manufacturing sectors. Prior to starting Unison, he worked for Goldman Sachs, McKinsey & Company, and NextCard. He holds a B.A. in Economics from Keio University and an M.B.A. from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration.

Olaf Groth, PhD is an internationally recognized global futures-strategist, inventor, analyst, adviser and professor, who counsels leaders and investors on transformation at the intersection of AI, data, compute, energy and minerals with business strategy, national competitiveness, and geopolitics.

At UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Olaf serves as Professor of Practice for Strategy, Futures, Innovation & Policy. He is a Senior Advisor at the Institute for Business Innovation (IBI), a Visiting Scholar at the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy (BRIE), and Honorary Adjunct Professor at UT Malaysia.

Olaf is Chief Analyst of the GeoTech Radar newsletter, founding CEO of Cambrian Futures, a globally networked analysis and business diplomacy firm for GeoTech, and of Cambrian Labs, a design studio for GeoTech governance solutions. Over three decades and 40+ countries, he has guided leaders at Fortune 100 firms, venture and private equity funds, and governments. He serves on the AI Council of the President of Kazakhstan and the National AI Office of the Prime Minister of Malaysia. He has advised the Prime Minister’s Office of the United Arab Emirates and provided feedback on the national AI strategy of Germany. He has also been serving on advisory boards for companies like Astrum Drive Technologies, HaydenAI, EchoTwin, Phillips 66 and Globalstar.

He is lead co-author of The Great Remobilization (MIT Press, 2023), The AI Generation (2021), and Solomon’s Code (2018), has 60+ articles to his name and is a frequent commentator in US, European and Asian media.

Olaf earned his PhD and a Master’s from Tufts University’s Fletcher School and holds a Bachelors and a second Master’s degree from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.  He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and daughters.

Noriyuki Kojima is the co-founder and CEO of Kotoba Technologies, a Japan-based speech GenAI startup developing AI-powered simultaneous translation to break language barriers. Previously, he co-founded Fugaku-LLM, a Japanese national project focused on training LLMs using Fugaku, once the world's fastest supercomputer. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University and received the EMNLP 2022 Best Paper Award during his PhD.

Known for her inception stage investments that range from marketplaces to highly technical companies, Ms. Miura-Ko's investments have earned her repeat appearances on the Forbes Midas List and The New York Times list of top twenty venture capitalists worldwide. At Stanford Universitywhere she received her Ph.D. for her work on mathematical modeling of cybersecurityshe is a lecturer in engineering, teaching on topics from blockchain to intelligent growth for startups. In addition, she is a co-director of the Stanford Mayfield Fellows Program, which helps train undergraduates to become technology leaders. Ms. Miura-Ko is a co-founding member of AllRaise, an organization dedicated to increasing the success and prevalence of female funders and founders. Ms. Miura-Ko received a B.S. in electrical engineering from Yale where she served on the Board of Trustees from 2019-2025.

Alexander Wortmann is a Partner at TCV, where he focuses on investment opportunities in the enterprise software and fintech sectors globally. He joined TCV in 2016 and has supported TCVs global coverage of the technology industry out of Europe, APAC, and the US during his tenure. His investments include RELEX Solutions, Revolut, Cognite, Allica Bank, Neara, Employment Hero, as well as TCV's first investment in Japan with LayerX. Prior to joining TCV, Alexander was an Analyst in Bank of America Merrill Lynchs Technology, Media, and Telecoms group in London. He received his BSc and MSc in aerospace engineering from the Delft University of Technology.

Emre is General Partner at Globis Capital Partners. He invests primarily in domestic IT startups focused on industrial transformation (digital transformation), typically from the Pre-A/Series A funding rounds and provides hands-on support, partnering closely with portfolio companies throughout their growth. Emre graduated from Harvard Business School (MBA).

Dr. Tina Seelig is Executive Director of Knight-Hennessy Scholars at Stanford University, which supports graduate students from across the university, and prepare graduates to address complex challenges facing the world. She is also Director Emeritus of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. She also teaches courses on leadership, innovation, and entrepreneurship at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school) at Stanford. Dr. Seelig earned her PhD in Neuroscience at Stanford Medical School, and has been a management consultant, entrepreneur, and author of 17 books, including inGenius, Creativity Rules, and What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20. She is the recipient of the Gordon Prize from the National Academy of Engineering, the Olympus Innovation Award, and the Silicon Valley Visionary Award.

Catherine Porter is a technology executive with more than 20 years' experience in global consumer and enterprise software companies (e.g., Oracle, Google, LinkedIn, Meta). She specializes in strategic business development and commercial objectives for globally scaling companies.

Stephen is an award winning senior executive with a track record in leading large scale digital transformation and running businesses across banking and insurance. He has lived in Japan, India, China, and Singapore running global and regional Technology and Operations teams.
He has held various senior leadership roles in technology for world leading financial institutions and is an experienced independent board director for NGOs, corporates and industry bodies.
Also, he has a passion for innovation and has run and sat on panels covering topics such as Digital Health, and AI in financial services, he is an early stage investor and VC advisor.

Founder & CEO of Shizuku AI, Inc. UC Berkeley Ph.D., Research Scientist at Luma AI, PhD Research Intern at Meta Created StreamDiffusion (OSS, 10k GitHub star), StreamDiT (real-time video diffusion model), and AI Vtuber Shizuku (5k followers on YouTube and 6k followers on Twitter)

Blaise Agera y Arcas is a VP and Fellow at Google, and Googles CTO of Technology & Society. He leads an organization working on the foundations of AI and evolution. In his tenure at Google he has innovated on-device ML for Android and Pixel, and is the inventor of Federated Learning. An External Professor at Santa Fe Institute and a frequent public speaker, Blaise has given multiple TED talks and keynoted NeurIPS. He has also authored numerous papers, essays, op eds, and book chapters, as well as several books: Ubi Sunt, Who Are We Now?, What Is Life?, and What Is Intelligence?.

Mizuki Oka is the Founder and Managing Director of the Artificial Life Institute, the world's first research organization dedicated to artificial life, launched in Kyoto in October 2025. She is also a Professor at Chiba Institute of Technology, where she serves as Graduate School Director leading a new AI-focused bilingual program launching in 2026. Her research bridges artificial intelligence and artificial life, exploring how principles of living systems  emergence, self-organization, and open-endedness  can reshape the future of AI. She has spent over 15 years collaborating across Tokyo's leading AI and complex systems laboratories, and serves as a Project Manager for Japan's IPA Exploratory IT Human Resources Program. Her books include ALife: Toward a More Lifelike AI and Prompt Literacy for the AI Era. She holds a Ph.D. in Engineering.

Ken Stanley is an AI expert in open-endedness, author and former leader of the Open-Endedness team at OpenAI, known for creating the Neuroevolution of Augmenting Topologies and novelty search algorithms. Ken leads Lila’s open-endedness effort, building methods for continual, open-ended discovery and creativity in AI systems at Lila Sciences. His book, Why Greatness Cannot be Planned: The Myth of the Objective, examines the ideal conditions for catalyzing innovation, including the existence of the “objective paradox,” which highlights the danger that some objectives can stifle innovation. He demonstrated this ability to unleash creativity and fuel innovation as co-founder of Geometric Intelligence, an AI and machine learning firm acquired by Uber and renamed Uber AI Labs, where he led core (basic) research. Stanley was also a professor of computer science at the University of Central Florida and co-founded Maven, an AI-run serendipity “social” network.

Emmett Shear is the co-founder and CEO of Softmax, an independent research lab building a massively multiplayer benchmark for social intelligence and alignment. Before Softmax, he co-founded Twitch, was a partner at Y Combinator, and briefly served as interim CEO of OpenAI. He studied computer science at Yale and reads a lot of books.

Dr. Richard Dasher has been Director of the US-Asia Technology Management Center and Adjunct Faculty at Stanford University since 1994.  His research focuses on the impact of new technologies on industry value chains, open innovation management, and regional innovation ecosystems in different countries.  He concurrently served as Executive Director of Stanford’s Center for Integrated Systems (1998 - 2015) and as an outside Board Director and member of the Management Council of Tohoku University (2004 - 2010).   Dr Dasher is also a Founding Partner of Global Hands-On Venture Capital (GHOVC), and he advises business accelerators, startup companies, and think-tanks in the U.S., Canada, and several Asian countries. He is on the evaluation and review committees of several major science and technology funding programs, such as the WPI Program of MEXT/JSPS.  He received the Japanese Foreign Minister’s Commendation in 2023 for long-term promotion of economic relations between Japan and the U.S.A.

Suzanne Basalla is a Partner at Geodesic Capital, where she works on the Geodesic Alliance Fund, an early-stage venture fund focused on backing transformative technology companies and strengthening innovation collaboration among the United States and its allies, particularly Japan. Her work sits at the intersection of venture capital, geopolitics, and emerging technology, drawing on decades of leadership across government, industry, and nonprofit sectors.

Previously, Suzanne served as President & CEO of the U.S.-Japan Council, where she advanced flagship initiatives including the TOMODACHI Initiative and the Silicon Valley Japan Platform, deepening people-to-people and technology ties between the two countries. Earlier in her career, she was Chief of Staff at Toyota Research Institute and a Naval officer, with assignments in Japan, the Pentagon, and Diego Garcia. Following her naval service, she was Director for Japan in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in Washington, DC, and later served as Senior Advisor to John Roos, U.S. Ambassador to Japan, from 2010 to 2012.

Suzanne holds a bachelors degree from the University of Virginia and a masters degree from George Washington University. She also studied at the Naval War College and at Keio University as an Olmsted Scholar.

Mark Kennedy is Director of the Wahba Initiative for Strategic Competition at New York University, where he leads global policy initiatives advancing freedom through geoeconomic statecraft, trusted technology alliances, and strategic infrastructure. A former U.S. Congressman and President of both the University of Colorado and the University of North Dakota, he has led at the intersection of government, business, and academia.

Kennedy served on the President's Advisory Council on Trade Policy and Negotiations and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a U.S. Air and Space Forces Civic Leader, and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Naval Analyses. Earlier, he helped Pillsbury acquire and expand Hagen-Dazs and served as Treasurer of Macys.

He is the author of Shapeholders: Business Success in the Age of Activism (Columbia University Press), has taught in 20 countries, and been quoted in the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and CNN.

KONO Taro, 62, is a 10th-term Member of the House of Representatives. 
Among positions he has held in the past are Foreign Minister; Defense Minister; Digital Minister; Minister for Cybersecurity; Minister in charge of COVID-19 Vaccine Roll-out; Minister for Administrative Affairs; Chairman of the National Public Safety Commission, or Minister in charge of the National Police Organization; Minister for Civil Service Reform; Minister for Disaster Management; Minister for Consumer Affairs and Food Safety; and Chairman of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives. He is a graduate of the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. He was Chairman of the Japan Race Horse Association and Chairman of the Shonan Bellmare Football Club, the 1995 Asia Champion Soccer Club. He is married to Kaori and has a son, Ippei.

Matt Spence is a Managing Director and the Global Head of Venture Capital Banking at Barclays, where he also leads the firm’s Defense and Dual-Use Technology Investment Banking team. In this role, he advises innovative companies on IPOs, mergers and acquisitions, and capital raises.
Prior to joining Barclays, Matt was a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Before transitioning to the private sector, he spent seven years in senior national security positions within the U.S. government. His roles included serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Senior Advisor to Secretary of Defense Ash Carter during his confirmation and transition, and holding senior positions at the National Security Council at the White House.
Matt has also been a lecturer at Stanford, Yale, Oxford, and Arizona State University. He holds a doctorate in International Relations from Oxford University, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and both a B.A. and M.A. in International Policy Studies from Stanford University.

Kenji Kushida is Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Asia Program directing Japan programming, and he leads the Japan-Silicon Valley Innovation Initiative @ Carnegie (J-SV).  Senior Advisor at Macro Advisory Partners, a global strategic consultancy. Previously a Research Scholar at the Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) at Stanford University, he spearheaded the Stanford Silicon Valley-New Japan Project (SV-NJ). He is also an International Research Fellow at the Canon Institute for Global Studies (CIGS). He holds a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, an MA in East Asian studies and BAs in economics and East Asian studies, all from Stanford University.

Paul Bakaus is the founder of an AI startup exploring the cutting edge of generative UI, creative design agents, and next-generation AI tools. Previously, as EVP of Product at Spotter, he built AI-powered tools for top YouTube creators. At Google, he led developer experience for Chrome DevTools, launched AMP and Web Stories, and served as Head of Creator Relations, shaping how millions of creators build and publish online. Before Google, Paul sold his startup to Zynga and served as Studio CTO. He is also the creator of jQuery UI, one of the most widely adopted open-source interface libraries, still used on millions of websites. With over 20 years of experience building at the intersection of technology, design, and creativity, Paul is driven by craft, taste, and making complex technology feel effortless.

 Mitchell Baker co-founded Mozilla to built the open Internet and ensure open technology offers opportunities for everyone. She served as CEO and / or Chair of Mozilla since its founding through 2025. She has been responsible for organizing and motivating a massive, worldwide, collective of employees and volunteers building the internet as a global public resource, open and accessible to all. Mitchell wrote the key documents that continue to guide Mozilla's enduring mission and commitments the Mozilla Public License in 1998, the Mozilla Manifesto in 2007 and the Mozilla Manifesto Addendum in 2018. Mitchell is a strong advocate for the open internet, open source, openness in AI, and the importance of connecting technology to its impact on individuals and society. She is highly regarded as one of the pioneers of the web and bringing the open internet to consumers. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Advisory Boards of the Oxford Internet Institute, and the G1 Silicon Valley. She is a Board Member of OpenMRS, Inc., which develops open source medical records systems for use in resource-constrained environments.

Shane Gu is a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, engaging in the research and development of next-generation models within the Gemini Thinking team. Previously, as a Senior Researcher on the ChatGPT team at OpenAI, he contributed to the model's development while simultaneously leading the company's entry into the Japanese market. He is also a founding member of the Google Brain robotics team. His work spans from foundational research, including the co-invention of Gumbel-Softmax and Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought, to the implementation of state-of-the-art products like Gemini and ChatGPT. As a Japanese-born Chinese-Canadian, he is well-versed in the cultures and talent ecosystems of Japan, China, and the West. He is pioneering the future of AI from the perspectives of both advanced technology and global business.

Born in San Diego, the son of a Navy carrier pilot whose deployments took my family all over the United States before returning to San Diego for high school and college. BS Physics, UCSD '92.
Fell in love with coding in middle school, and started a software company in high school which helped me pay for college. Moved to San Francisco in '94, discovered the Internet, and created FreeVue, a videoconferencing app that worked over dialup with the earliest web cameras. Acquired by RealNetworks in late '95, where I led the creation of RealVideo and became CTO.
In '99, I left RealNetworks and founded Linden Lab to create Second Life and fulfill my dream of building a virtual world. After 10 years running Second Life as CEO, I started several experimental new companies with two co-founders, including LoveMachine, Worklist.net, and Coffee & Power. In 2013, after experimenting with the mems gyro chips that would enable the Oculus Rift, we started High Fidelity to build a new open-source virtual world platform for VR Headsets. In 2019, with VR failing to gain wide consumer acceptance, refocused High Fidelity on spatial audio.
In 2022-2024 created a lab in San Francisco working on several new projects, including FairShare, which aims to provide a basic income and reduce wealth inequality using a group-based digital currency. Also helped create CIMC.AI, which is exploring consciousness in machines.
Rejoined Second Life in October 2024 as CTO to help with several new initiatives!

Cory Ondrejka is the CTO for SmartNews, where he is responsible for delivering quality news to millions of people in Japan and the United States. He was previously VP of Product Management and Technical Advisor to the CEO  at Google, where he led the Core Experience team, responsible for improving the product experience across all of Google’s products. His teams delivered an entirely new user experience for Google products in Material You, multiple cutting edge Generative AI experiences, and transformed foundational technology depended on by billions of people. Prior to Google, Cory led the mobile transition at Meta as VP Mobile, was the co-creator and founding-CTO of Second Life, and shipped multiple video games. Cory Ondrejka is a Senior Fellow at the Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University and a graduate of the United States Naval Academy and former Naval Officer.