Frederic Kerrest is the executive vice chairman, COO, and cofounder of Okta, an enterprise software company that IPO’d in 2017 at a $2 billion valuation and now has a market cap worth nearly $40 billion. Frederic is responsible for establishing and driving Okta’s corporate priorities; accelerating innovation across the company; working closely with customers, partners, and prospects; and serving as a key liaison with the investor community.
A software entrepreneur at heart, Frederic cohosted the Zero to IPO podcast, featuring founders, entrepreneurs, and investors who shared insights from their experiences building innovative technology companies. He serves on the Executive Advisory Board of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship
Mike Maloney is host of the smash hit video series, Hidden Secrets of Money; former Rich Dad/Poor Dad advisor; author of the best-selling precious metals book, Guide to Investing in Gold and Silver, and founder of GoldSilver.com. For more than a decade, Mike’s travelled the world sharing his economic insights with audiences from Hong Kong to Rome and from Silicon Valley to Wall Street.
David Weir received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University. He is the author of Decadence and the Making of Modernism (University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), James Joyce and the Art of Mediation (University of Michigan Press, 1996), Anarchy and Culture: The Aesthetic Politics of Modernism (University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), Brahma in the West: William Blake and the Oriental Renaissance (State University of New York Press, 2003), Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature against the American Grain, 1890-1926, and American Orient: Imagining the East from the Colonial Era through the Twentieth Century (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011).
An anti-communist, he emigrated to Britain with his wife and four children following the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet-led armies of the Warsaw pact. A polymath and polyglot, he worked as a Clinical Psychologist until his early retirement in 1982, when he turned to full-time prose and poetry writing, under his main pseudonym of Jan Kresadlo. His first novel Mrchopevci (GraveLarks) was published by Zdena Salivarová and Josef Škvorecký's emigre '68 Publishers, and obtained the 1984 Egon Hostovský prize.
Born in 1954 in New York City, where his parents lived while graduate students at Yale University, Kuran spent his early childhood in Ankara, where his father taught at the Middle East Technical University. When he was a teenager, his family moved to Istanbul. For a decade, he lived just off the campus of Boğaziçi University, where his father was president and professor of Islamic architectural history.
Kuran obtained his secondary education in Turkey, graduating from Robert College in Istanbul in 1973. He then studied economics at Princeton University, graduating magna cum laude in 1977. He went on to Stanford University to obtain a doctorate in economics. His doctoral supervisor was Kenneth Arrow, a Nobel laureate.
