Impact Investing & Scaling Social Ventures in South Asia

To round out our spring series on “Entrepreneurship in Asian High-Tech Industries”, we feature Ms. Asha Jadeja Motwani (photo), Trustee of the Motwani Jadeja Foundation, and Ms. Radhika Shah, Co-Founder and Chapter Leader of the Ashoka Silicon Valley Chapter.  Topics will include how impact investors evaluate social entrepreneurial startups in Asia, how  social ventures are deployed and scaled, and how sustainable impact can be measured and achieved.  Our panelists will also give their perspectives into general trends in impact investing and social entrepreneurship in India and across Asia.

Ms. Asha Jadeja Motwani is an active philanthropist, tech investor, and social impact investor who is focused on sustainability initiatives which yield social results in her investments.  She was one of the first women venture capitalists in Silicon Valley and was the Founder and Managing Director of Dot Edu Ventures along with her late husband Stanford Computer Science Professor, Rajeev Motwani. Ms. Motwani founded the Motwani Jadeja Family Foundation and is continuing her work in India by fostering innovation in the social sector and leveraging technology to build a more global community – connecting innovators across the world via the RajeevCircle Young Entrepreneurs Fellowship.   RajeevCircle is a Silicon Valley mentoring group / community of 300-400 people including several valley tech leaders – created in memory of Professor, Rajeev Motwani.  Ms. Motwani pursued a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University and has received a Masters in Civil Engineering from UC Berkeley.

Ms. Radhika Shah is a high tech executive and entrepreneur in the information retrieval and social networking space.  She architected some of the first personalization and online community solutions at Broadvision in the early days of the internet.  Ms. Shah is passionate about leveraging technology for scalable social impact.  She mentors  social and tech entrepreneurs in the US and India and is deeply engaging  silicon valley with Ashoka Fellows from around the world. She is one of the founding volunteers of  the mentoring group RajeevCircle and a part of the SV Leadership Circle for Action For India - helping social entrepreneurs scale. Ms. Shah was on the Steering Committee for StartX Mentor Labs, and is currently a mentor, venture advisor & judge at SkyDeck Labs – a U.C. Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley Labs collaboration for fostering innovation and entrepreneurship. She holds a Masters in Computer Science from Stanford University and an MBA from U.C. Berkeley, Haas School of Business.

Immediately following is a short-networking reception from 5:30 – 6:15PM.  This is the final session in the US-Asia Technology Management Center’s series of public talks on “Entrepreneurship in Asian High-Tech Industries.”