Team

Parag Gupta, Founder

Parag Gupta has been active with social ventures for the past 12 years as an entrepreneur and advisor to Fortune 500 CEOs, public officials, and nonprofits alike.  

He created both Waste Ventures Charities and Waste Capital Partners to incubate waste picker cooperatives and provide them with the access to finance so they may scale and generate a margin at a commercial rate of return. 

Prior to founding Waste Ventures, Parag served as Associate Director of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship where he directed the South Asia and Eastern Europe portfolios involving luminaries such as Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the Honorable Sonia Gandhi, and Vaclav Klaus in the coveted 'Social Entrepreneur of the Year' selection.  He also designed Base of Pyramid programming at the World Economic Forum for Fortune 500 CEOs in India, China, the Middle East, and at the Annual Meeting at Davos.    

Parag also founded IDEAS which applied venture philanthropy principles to advocacy outcomes in developing countries.  Previously, he was a management consultant at the Bridgespan Group advising foundation and nonprofits. He also was involved in creating a specialty coffee sector for Technoserve.  He started his career working in government at the US federal, state, and local levels.  

Parag received his Masters from the Harvard Kennedy School, his Bachelors from the University of Chicago where he also served as President of the Student Association.  He was a World Economic Forum Global Leadership Fellow and has been recognized twice for having a 'Top 2%' concept by the Echoing Green Foundation for two different social ventures.  He has been featured on CNBC and in the San Francisco Chronicle, and Times of India.  Parag has also been published in multiple anthologies and the editorial columns of the Business Standard, Economic Times, and the HT Mint.  He is a featured blogger on the premier social entrepreneur site, Social Edge with his blog, 'Talking Trash'.

Tiffany Talsma

Tiffany joined Waste Ventures in February 2011 as an internal management consultant to support the team in development of Waste Ventures' rapid growth strategy. Tiffany brings with her experience in M&A and strategy consulting for deal due diligence and business improvement projects in the US and Germany. She holds a BBA from the Michigan Ross School, where she led development projects such as advising a community coalition in East Detroit on their growth strategy and developing an ESL program for under-served communities in Panama. Tiffany has a passion for the informal waste management sector which developed from her childhood in Nigeria and work with the waste pickers of the Guatemala City landfill.

Linus Kendall

Joining Waste Ventures in August 2010 as Social Business Fellow through Artemisia and AIESEC. Linus brings experience ranging from non-profit management, technology consultancy as well as incubation and promotion of clean technologies. Before joining Waste Ventures, Linus worked as the CEO for the Swedish chapter of the global non-profit organization AIESEC. 

Board of Directors

Geoff Davis, Chair

From 2001 - 2008 Geoff was CEO of the microfinance accelerator Unitus, which he guided from start-up to a global leader in microfinance. He is also the co-founder of the Unitus Equity Fund, the first commercial microfinance venture capital fund and a founding investor in SKS Microfinance, the world's largest microfinance institution. Earlier in his career, he founded a microfinance program in Mexico, was part of the start-up team at Grameen Foundation and launched Grameen Investment, a microfinance investment fund. Before his conversion to a social entrepreneur, he founded and sold a translation agency, founded a commodities trading company, co-founded a dot.com and was part of a start-up biomedical engineering company. He has spoken world-wide on microfinance, entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship. Geoff has been named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young. Geoff is a triathelete and father of 3 wonderful girls and an amazing wife.

Harish Hande, Founder of SELCO

Dr. Hande is an engineer and a renewable energy entrepreneur with extensive experience meeting the energy requirements of the health, education and water sectors. He is the co-founder of SELCO-India, the first solar energy service company in India. He is also a founder and director of S3IDF-South Asia. Since 1995, SELCO-India has installed over 65,000 PV systems. His experience includes a large number of health, education and water related projects: over 100 small rural and urban health clinics, over 200 rural and semi-urban schools and dormitories, and over 250 irrigation and drinking water systems. He has also worked on hybrids, such as PV-grid hybrids. Dr. Hande brings both technical, practical field and commercial expertise for fostering sustainable projects.

Pamela Hartigan, Executive Director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Said Business School at the University of Oxford

Dr. Hartigan leads social entrepreneurship programming at the University of Oxford. Prior, Dr. Hartigan spent eight years as the first Managing Director of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, a sister organization of the World Economic Forum where she was also on the Forum Managing Board. She has been responsible for conceptualizing and creating new organizations, departments or programs across a variety institutional arrangements and multi-stakeholder platforms. A graduate of Georgetown, she also holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology. Dr. Hartigan is a frequent lecturer on social entrepreneurship and innovation at graduate schools of business in the USA, Europe and Asia, and is an Adjunct Professor at the Columbia Business School. She is co-author of The Power of Unreasonable People: How Entrepreneurs Create Markets to Change the World.

Advisors

Vikram Akula, Founder and Chairperson, SKS Microfinance

Vikram Akula founded SKS Microfinance, the largest microfinance institution in India. Vikram is credited with one of the fastest growth rates in the microfinance sector and one of the most commercially successful. Previously a management consultant with McKinsey & Company, Vikram has over a decade of work and research experience in microfinance. He was a Fulbright Scholar in India, during which he coordinated an action-research project on providing micro-credit for food security. He has also worked as a community organizer with the Deccan Development Society in India. He holds a B.A. from Tufts, an M.A. from Yale, and has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. His Ph.D. dissertation focused on the impact of microfinance. He has received several awards for his work with SKS, including the Schwab Social Entrepreneur of the Year and Time 100 Most Influential People.

Iftekhar Enayetullah and A. H. Md. Maqsood Sinha, Founders of Waste Concern

Waste Concern is the first company to operate a CDM-registered compost project in in the world. It was established in 1995 and has major successes in reducing emissions in several cities around Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Vietnam by composting solid waste instead of burning or flaring, and selling it to fertilizer companies. So far, Waste Concern’s model of managing waste has reduced more than 18,000 tons of CO2 emissions each year in Bangladesh and generated 414 new jobs for the urban poor. It is helping to reduce the 52% of generated solid waste that remains uncollected in Dhaka.Waste Concern also regularly consults to UN bodies and governments on CDM processes and solid waste composting.