On October 4th, students and alumni heard from Evan Gordon Greenfield, Rajesh Swaminathan, and Rebekah Emanuel on Impact Investing and Deep Tech Start-Ups.

Evan Gordon Greenfield oversees British Columbia Investment Management’s ESG program for its Private Equity asset class. Formerly, Evan was Senior Managing Director, Global Head of ESG at S&P Global where he oversaw ESG strategy, M&A, and operations. Evan helped establish S&P Global as pre-eminent provider of ESG and climate solutions to corporates and capital market participants. Prior to joining S&P Global, Evan helped build and oversee the ESG and Impact Investing Platform for Deutsche Bank’s Asset and Wealth Management vertical in the America’s. Previously Evan was a private equity investor in the States, Europe and Asia. Evan is a passionate member of the ESG Movement and believe the capital markets can play a critical role in advancing sustainability. Evan graduated from Duke University with a Bachelor of Arts in Economics & Markets and completed his MBA at Harvard Business School.

Rajesh Swaminathan is Partner at Khosla Ventures. Rajesh has two decades of experience assisting and investing in deep tech startups. He manages many of the firm’s investments across renewables generation, storage, hydrogen, industrial decarbonization, plastics, foodtech, healthcare and advanced manufacturing.

Previously, Rajesh was the head of Applied Ventures LLC, the venture capital arm of Applied Materials, where he managed a portfolio of 85 deep tech startups globally, as well as two deep-tech funds in Korea and Taiwan. He led investments and helped build companies, many of which had strong exits, including Enphase Energy, Solid Energy, Rockley, Infinite Power Solutions, Adaptive3D, Tango, Inpria, PlayNitride and Norsk Ti. Rajesh was recognized amongst the top 100 global CVCs on the Global Corporate Venture (GCV) Powerlist. Earlier, Rajesh worked at Third Point Ventures and at Lucent’s Bell Labs, where he drove technical assessments and partnerships for several optical, MEMS, and RF device startups, and also led DFR programs for the successful deployment of Lucent’s 10Gb/s and 40Gb/s systems.While pursuing his MBA at Harvard Business School, Rajesh worked on Deutsche Bank’s clean tech banking team, and also worked with KV on companies in solar and water. Previously, he earned a master of science degree from the University of Maryland and a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, where he was awarded the Shankar Dayal Sharma (President of India) Medal for overall excellence.

Rebekah Emanuel is the senior advisor for social impact at the Harvard Innovation Labs. A McKinsey alum and HBS grad, Rebekah has started flagship organizations across the private, public, and social sectors. While a student at HBS, she incubated a startup at the i-lab, took her startup to a residency at MassChallenge, and was invited to the second class of the Harvard Launch Lab. Alongside startups, Rebekah has also spent significant time guiding mature organizations. As a director at the City of Boston, Rebekah wrote the long-term growth plan for the city, including exciting plans for the Allston area where the i-lab is situated. The first long-term plan completed in 50 years, she helped solicit and integrate over 14k constituent voices and align the city’s budget against the strategic priorities. The metrics she designed to track progress attracted media attention for their cutting-edge public accountability. Rebekah holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, an LLM in Law from the National University of Ireland Galway as a Mitchell Scholar, and a BA from Yale University. She also serves as a chaplain.