CLOSING KEYNOTE
Shaun White is regarded as one of the greatest action sports athletes of all time. A three-time gold medalist and one of the most decorated athletes in X Games history, White established himself as a dual-sport athlete (skateboarding & snowboarding) as a teenager before focusing primarily on snowboarding for the better part of his career that spanned more than two decades.
The action sports pioneer has been recognized for his entrepreneurial endeavors including corporate partnerships, signature products and fashion lines, and a global sports and music festival. He recently launched WHITESPACE and The Snow League and has been named among Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s 100 Most Powerful and Marketable Athletes, Forbes’ Most Valuable Sports Brands and 30 Under Thirty among others. Born with a congenital heart defect, Tetralogy of Fallot, he is an advocate for children battling illness and is an active supporter of St. Jude’s Children’s Research Center, Boys and Girls Clubs of America, and Make-A-Wish Foundation.
As the Co-Founder and Co-Director of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy and a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Andrew studies how digital technologies are changing the world. Published in 2023, “The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset Transforming the Future of Business” reveals what Geek companies are doing differently and why it works so well. They are much more freewheeling, fast-moving, evidence-driven, egalitarian, argumentative, and autonomous than their Industrial Era predecessors. As a result, they are standout performers and fierce rivals, disrupting industry after industry – and they’re just getting started.
Other books include More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources - and What Happens Next, as well as The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, coauthored with Erik Brynjolfsson and has been both a New York Times and Wall Street Journal top ten bestseller. Also with Brynjolfsson, Machine | Platform | Crowd: Harnessing our Digital Future, offers an executive’s guide to succeeding during this turbulent era. These books have been translated into more than 15 languages, and McAfee and Brynjolfsson are the only people named to both the Thinkers50 list of the world’s top management thinkers and the POLITICO 50 group of people transforming American politics.
McAfee was educated at MIT and Harvard. He lives in Massachusetts, watches too much Red Sox baseball, doesn’t ride his motorcycle enough, and starts his weekends with the New York Times Saturday crossword.
As Chief Research Officer, Evan is responsible for Omdia’s research across Enterprise, Consumer, Telecom, and Integrated Tech (semiconductors, displays, automotive, manufacturing, and smart infrastructure). In this role, he leads the teams developing cutting-edge research, ranging from cybersecurity, AI, workspace technologies, channel, cloud and data center, consumer devices, media and entertainment services, games and games tech, and media distribution. Through his work, Evan focuses on helping service providers identify new opportunities and navigate the tech ecosystem. He offers insights that enable vendors to counter competitive risk, develop ecosystem strategies, and offer innovative services to consumers and business. B2B services remain his core area of expertise.
Prior to Omdia (formerly Ovum), Evan worked at Datamonitor and Nortel Networks. He holds a degree in English and European studies from Amherst College and a Master of Philosophy in European Politics from the University of Oxford.
