Dhaya Lakshminarayanan

Dhaya Lakshminarayanan is a sought-after innovation and strategy consultant as well as a storytelling expert and speaker. A sample list of her clients includes Twitter, Reebok, Adidas, Peet’s Coffee, Intuit, Yelp, Agni Energy, Seven Figures Management, Columbia University, Stanford University, StubHub, 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.

At Omidyar Network, $400M a mission-based, return-focused investment fund headed by eBay founder, Pierre Omidyar, Dhaya was an Investment Manager, responsible for sourcing, executing, closing, and managing both venture capital and non-profit investments. Her for-profit investments included: Innocentive, CircleLending (acquired by Virgin), Prosper, Meetup, Voxiva, Eventful, PatientsLikeMe, and Collaborative Drug Discovery on whose Board of Directors she served. Her non-profit investments include Myelin Repair Foundation, KaBoom!, Sunlight Foundation, and Guidestar. Dhaya has also been a management consultant with Booz Allen Hamilton and also worked in asset management for Parnassus Investments, a $1 billion socially responsible mutual fund where she focused on the health services sector. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she received a Bachelor of Science and a Master of City Planning.

She hosted the Emmy Award winning series “High School Quiz Show” during the premiere year on WGBH. She was a featured Storyteller on the PBS station, KQED, and is a regular contributor to NPR’s “Snap Judgment” a storytelling program, which Ira Glass called, “Amazing. Like a cousin of ‘This American Life’ that grew up in a wildly different neighborhood…” She hosts The Moth, a monthly storytelling event, broadcast on NPR affiliates nationwide. Dhaya Lakshminarayanan is the winner of the Liz Carpenter Political Humor Award (previously awarded to Samantha Bee, Wanda Sykes and satirist/humorist Mark Russell) presented by the National Women’s Political Caucus. KQED named her one of the twenty “Women to Watch” a series celebrating women artists, creatives and makers in the San Francisco Bay Area who are pushing boundaries. Comedy Central Asia crowned her Grand Prize Winner of “The Ultimate Comedy Challenge” filmed in Singapore. She has worked with the following: Janeane Garofalo, Norm Macdondald, Marc Maron, Jello Biafra, Dick Gregory, Maz Jobrani, and Greg Proops. She had the pleasure of introducing former Vice President Al Gore and making him laugh (there is photographic evidence). The Boston Globe, The Bay Guardian, and The San Jose Mercury News have all run profiles about her.