Rishi Jaitly

Rishi Jaitly is a distinguished entrepreneur, executive and educator with extensive global experience leading missions that unlock the potential of people, and places.

As Professor of Practice and Distinguished Humanities Fellow at Virginia Tech, he founded the Institute for Leadership in Technology, which offers the nation’s first Executive Leadership Credential in the Humanities to rising leaders from around the world, and indeed all those who crave “Full Stack Human” skills and sensibilities in this AI-ascendant era. Until recently, Jaitly served as a Senior Advisor to OpenAI.

Previously, Jaitly served as Founding CEO of Times Bridge, a leading venture capital firm facilitating international expansion for world-leading companies, including Airbnb, Coursera and Uber. Before Times Bridge, he was Twitter’s Vice President for Asia Pacific, Middle East, and North Africa, and the company’s first employee in mainland Asia. Prior to that, Jaitly held leadership roles at Google & YouTube in South Asia and in Washington, D.C., and served as a speechwriter for Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Jaitly has also devoted a range of his career to social entrepreneurship, co-founding initiatives such as Michigan Corps, Kiva Detroit and the BMe Community, and having served as a Director at both College Summit and Knight Foundation. He presently serves as Chairman of the National Humanities Center and was a longtime Board Director of Virginia Humanities. Jaitly, who is a former Trustee of Princeton University and Commissioner of Higher Education in New Jersey, was in 2022 recognized as one of Rest of World Magazine’s “Top 100 Global Tech Changemakers.”

A public speaker who has been featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Forbes Magazine, and on CNN, MSNBC and the BBC, Jaitly earned his A.B. in History and Certificate in American Studies from Princeton University.