Rishi Jaitly

Rooted in place and guided by service, Professor Rishi Jaitly is a leading advocate of the humanities with uncommon entrepreneurial and executive experience at the intersection of technology and society.

Presently, Jaitly is a Distinguished Humanities Fellow at Virginia Tech, where he also serves as a Professor of Practice in the Academy for Transdisciplinary Studies. At Virginia Tech, he founded and now leads the Institute for Leadership in Technology, which offers the nation's first executive humanities degree to rising leaders in the technology landscape. 

Jaitly is the Co-Founder, and was the Founding CEO, of Times Bridge, the U.S.’s leading venture capital firm enabling international expansion for the world’s best ideas, including Airbnb, Coursera, Headspace, Malaria No More, Stack Overflow and Uber. Prior to founding Times Bridge, he was Twitter’s Vice President, Asia Pacific, Middle East, North Africa, and the company’s first employee in mainland Asia. Earlier in his career, he was the Founding Managing Director of Twitter India, the Head of Public Policy for Google & YouTube South Asia, a speechwriter and aide to Google CEO Eric Schmidt and a Director of the Knight Foundation in Detroit and College Summit in Washington.  

Jaitly is also the co-founder of Michigan Corps (an online service and storytelling platform for Michiganders everywhere), Kiva Detroit and Flint (America's first peer-to-peer microlending initiative) and the BMe Community (America's largest digital network for black males leading in their hometowns).

Jaitly is a former Trustee of Princeton University and former Commissioner of Higher Education in New Jersey; he is a current Trustee of the National Humanities Center, where he serves as Vice Chair, and Board Director of Virginia Humanities, PRX and Village Capital. In 2022, he was named one of Rest of World Magazine’s “Top 100 Global Tech Changemakers.” 

An accomplished public speaker who has spoken at the UN, appeared on CNN and the BBC, and been featured in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, Jaitly earned an A.B. in History and a Certificate in American Studies from Princeton University.