PROFILE

Rika Nakazawa is a senior leader, investor, best-selling author, and frequent public speaker on technology-powered business transformation. She is co-founder and Chairwoman of Strides AI, a social impact venture, focusing on diversifying the board room and c-Suite by empowering women and underrepresented groups to build and leverage social capital with modern technology, ultimately delivering high-performance organizations. She is also Group Vice President within the New Ventures & Innovation team at NTT where she is building NTT's Industry 4.x business consulting practice, focusing on our most strategic and innovative accounts.

Trilingual in Japanese, German and English, Rika grew up in Japan and moved to the US to attend Princeton. Rika has since worked internationally for over two decades in senior executive roles in strategy, business development, consulting, and marketing with Fortune 500 companies - Accenture, NVIDIA, Capgemini Sony, American Express - and Silicon Valley startups. She is a Digital Transformation veteran and has served on multiple start-up boards in Next-Generation Computing, Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence ecosystems.

Throughout her career, Rika has been an avid advocate for ESG and especially advancing women's leadership in governance, technology, and business across industry verticals and global dimensions. She resides in Austin, TX with her partner and huskies, where she is strategizing when to start her second book, and exploring new and steep jagged edges to apply her passion for rock-climbing.