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Latest - Decades: 2020s

Sarah Bond

Sarah Bond leads Microsoft’s gaming business development team. She and her team are responsible for cultivating and managing Microsoft’s gaming partnerships, crafting and executing deals and negotiations and shaping strategy and M&A. Sarah’s organization is global with presence in Redmond, Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai and London.

Prior to Microsoft Sarah held a variety of senior roles at T-Mobile, including leading the Corporate Strategy and Development team, responsible for cross-functional strategic initiatives, major investments, partnerships, mergers and acquisitions. She was a member of the team that led T-Mobile’s turnaround.
Sarah started her career at McKinsey & Company, where she was an Associate Partner in the West Coast office focused on the consumer technology sector. Sarah holds a BA in Economics from Yale University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Lisa Goodchild

Lisa Goodchild’s experience in – and passion for – all things digital is unrivalled. For more than 20 years she has lived, loved and been a major player in the industry making waves in far-reaching arenas, from fashion, finance & tech to online advertising and non-profit.

Throughout her career, Lisa has brought excitement to her projects, making ‘it’ happen, with her agency social media consultancy Digiwoo, for the likes of Hewlett Packard, British Airways, Goldman Sachs, Panasonic & Ted Baker, & also in her capacity as an advisor to notable names such as PR guru Lynne Franks, June Sarpong MBE, Shaa Wasmund MBE & MOBO Awards founder Kanya King MBE. Lisa also mentors for Google & Virgin as well as being a Marketing Academy Alumni and a Marketing Academy Apprenticeship Charity Trustee.

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David Barker

David Barker was one of the UK’s first internet entrepreneurs in 1994 and spent ten years working with global corporations including Intel, Cisco and Microsoft. In 2004 he became a social entrepreneur to tackle some of the issues facing society such as social mobility, unemployment and poverty.

Since 2005 David has been innovating new social enterprise start-ups using Tech for Good. In 2015 he founded Techcentre, The Social Innovation Agency, to work in partnership with clients to innovate new tech-enabled social enterprise start-ups.

Andy Ayim

Andy Ayim moves in the world of venture capital, tech start-ups, and product development. In 2010 Andy, along with his brother, Kwabz and a few friends set up Mixtape Madness, a passion project to create a central location online for people to listen to UK hip-hop and grime music.

He is currently Managing Director of the London Accelerator at Backstage Capital, that looks for investment opportunities with companies founded by those from under-represented groups, including women, people of colour, and the LGBT community.

In 2018 Andy was named in the Financial Times as one of the top ten most influential black and minority ethnic tech leaders in the UK.

Professor Liz Bacon

Professor of Software Engineering, champion of women in STEM, Vice-Principal and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at Abertay University in Dundee, BSC President: Liz has many accolades to her name including completing an industrial placement at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Geneva, during her sandwich degree in the 1984/85 academic year.

With others she helped change the school curriculum in computing and set-up more than 200 computers at school hubs across the country to train the teachers to deliver it. In 2016 Liz became a Trustee and Director of Bletchley Park Trust, the home of British code breaking.

Dr Louise Bennett

Dr Louise Bennett is an IT Security Expert with more than 30 years’ experience in the industry. Her first experience of computing was modelling weather using London University’s Atlas computer.

She worked at the Ministry of Defence as an operations analyst and one of her first roles involved programming in BASIC and Fortran to develop a flying training programme for the RAF.

In the late 1980s she became R&D Director as well as IT Director and moved to Thorn Security where she led early work in biometrics with fingerprint, hand, iris and voice recognition and also worked at AEA Technology (the privatised Atomic Energy Establishment).

As the chair of the security forum at the British Computer Society, she has an excellent bird’s eye view of what’s going right, and wrong, with the nation’s security

Paul Barry-Walsh

Paul Barry-Walsh is an IT entrepreneur and investor. After leaving IBM in 1986 Paul founded Safetynet; then in 1996 Netstore; and in 2001 he founded the Fredericks Foundation, which has become one of the UK’s leading micro finance organisations.

In 2005 alongside Paul & Peter Sedgwick, he founded Frank Investments. This business was established to provide long-term investment management services to a partnership of investors. Paul has made over private 30 investments since 2000 and typically invests between £250-£ 500k each year. 

Sir Nigel Shadbolt

Sir Nigel Shadbolt is Professor of Computing Science at the University of Oxford and Principal of Jesus College. He is Chairman of the Open Data Institute which he co-founded with Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 2012.
He is also a Visiting Professor in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. During the course of his career he has made significant contributions to the fields of Psychology, Cognitive Science, Computational Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Semantic Web and Web Science.