Dhaya Lakshminarayanan
Nerd Nation
Dhaya Lakshminarayanan is a consultiant and entrepreneur. A very nerdy job title. A sample list of her clients include: Wells Fargo, Seven Figures Management, Yelp, Columbia University, individual entrepreneurs, and political candidates. She has been an invited speaker at over a hundred panels and conferences. She was hired by the Entrepreneurs Organization to speak about Entrepreneurship, Leadership & Innovation in Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Calcutta, and Kathmandu.
Dhaya is also a comedian, storyteller, and television host. Professions, nerds dare not to pursue. She has sold-out shows in Atlanta, Boston, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley at such venues as at the San Jose Improv, the San Francisco Punchline, the historic Purple Onion, the Los Angeles Comedy Store, and New York’s Gotham Comedy Club. She was the host of Emmy Award winning television series “High School Quiz Show” which premiered on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) station WGBH in 2010. She was a featured Storyteller on the PBS station, KQED, for the Black History Month series, and is a regular contributor to NPR’s “Snap Judgment” a modern storytelling program, which Ira Glass called, "Amazing. Like a cousin of ‘This American Life’ that grew up in a wildly different neighborhood . . . " Dhaya is the co-founder of “The Smartest Girl” Project, a television show & global talent hunt platform focused on discovering and maximizing the potential of smart, talented girls worldwide. “India’s Smartest Girl” will be the inaugural launch of this project in Summer 2012.
Previously she has been a management consultant, a buy-side analyst, a non-profit executive and an investor at Omidyar Network, $400M a mission-based, return-focused investment fund headed by eBay founder, Pierre Omidyar. There, Dhaya was responsible for sourcing, executing, closing, and managing both venture capital and non-profit investments. She graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (twice).
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