Rana Sarkar
Canada’s Consul General
Rana Sarkar was appointed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as Canada’s Consul General in San Francisco | Silicon Valley in 2017 to focus on Canada’s tech diplomacy and growth agenda. He also sits on Canada’s NAFTA Advisory Council. Previously, Rana was a co-founder, investor and advisor in Asia, Europe and North America, most recently as the National Director of High Growth Markets for KPMG. He was the founding co-chairman of the Advisory Board of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto where he remains a Senior Fellow.
Pavan Dhillon
Founder and Principal Attorney at Dhillon Immigration Law
Pavan Dhillon is the Founder and Principal Attorney at Dhillon Immigration Law, a boutique law firm specializing in Canadian business immigration. She provides expert advice in securing a variety of Canadian temporary and permanent resident visas for her international clientele. Based in the United States, Pavan has cultivated a unique expertise in cross border business immigration.
For over ten years, Pavan has served as trusted Canadian Immigration counsel to global corporations, regional companies and startups seeking to expand into the Canadian market. Pavan tailors customized immigration strategies taking into account each client’s unique long-term and immediate immigration goals. Pavan brings her personalized approach to clients from a wide range of industries including biotech, digital media, information technology, gaming and entertainment, engineering, financial services, consulting, manufacturing and construction, aerospace, insurance and higher education. Keeping in mind the nuances of each industry, she devises compliance-driven immigration strategies.
Pavan has an exceptional track record with a variety of visa and work permit categories, including: labour market impact assessments (LMIAs), NAFTA or Free-trade agreement work permits, intra-company transfers, provincial nominee programs, express entry, Global Skills Strategy, Global Talent Stream, reciprocal employment and family-based sponsorship applications.
Pavan regularly advises individuals seeking to live, work, study or launch a business in Canada. Pavan has successfully advocated for her clients by negotiating directly with Port of Entry Immigration officers in difficult and complex cases. She also works extensively on Canadian inadmissibility issues from overcoming a criminal record (alcohol and drug related offences to white collar crimes), medical inadmissibility or non-compliance with Canadian immigration laws. She is also well-versed in the complex area of residency obligations.
Prior to launching her boutique immigration law firm, for over five years, Pavan successfully led and developed the largest Canadian immigration practice in the United States on behalf of an international law firm. Pavan is a regular speaker at legal conferences and events across the United States, Canada and Mexico. She has been quoted in news and media publications such as Bloomberg BNA.
Pavan brings her passion for immigration law to each and every case that she takes on. As she has gone through the immigration process herself as an immigrant to the United States and she understands what it is like to be in your shoes. Pavan consistently demonstrates her dedication to her clients by remaining at the forefront of the dynamic area of Canadian immigration law while relying on an innovative and efficient client service delivery model. Although Dhillon Immigration Law is based in San Francisco, California, we service corporations and individuals across the world–from Shanghai to Silicon Valley and from New Delhi to New York.
Shuman Ghosemajumder
Global Head of Artificial Intelligence at F5
Shuman Ghosemajumder is the Global Head of Artificial Intelligence at F5.
Prior to F5’s acquisition of Shape Security in January 2020, Shuman was the CTO at Shape, where he led product, research, and engineering. Shape’s AI platform protects the web and mobile applications of the world’s largest banks, airlines, and retailers, against advanced fraud and cybercrime. It was ranked #1 in patents amongst all AI startups worldwide on the AI100 list in 2019.
Shuman previously led global product for click fraud protection at Google, where his teams built AI technology to defend and enable their advertising businesses (then $23B in pay-per-click annual revenue). He joined Google in 2003 as one of the early product managers for AdSense, which he helped grow into a $2B ARR business. In 2004, he was part of the team that launched Gmail.
Shuman is co-author of CGI Programming Unleashed (Macmillan Publishing) and a contributing author to Crimeware (Symantec Publishing). He has also written for Harvard Business Review, Recode, VentureBeat, and other publications, and is a regular guest lecturer at Stanford University.
Shuman earned his BSc in Computer Science from Western University in Canada, where he was a President's Scholar, and his MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. On MIT’s 150th anniversary, The Boston Globenamed him to their MIT150 list, as one of the top innovators of all time from MIT.
B.J. Arun
President, TiE Silicon Valley
B.J. Arun is a successful serial entrepreneur who brings over 25 years of leadership experience in the Information Technology industry. He was most recently CEO of July Systems (acquired by Cisco in 2018), a cloud-based mobile internet platform company powering consumer facing mobile services of some of the largest brands in the world. July's customers include Intel, Cisco, ESPN,
B.J. Arun is a successful serial entrepreneur who brings over 25 years of leadership experience in the Information Technology industry. He was most recently CEO of July Systems (acquired by Cisco in 2018), a cloud-based mobile internet platform company powering consumer facing mobile services of some of the largest brands in the world. July's customers include Intel, Cisco, ESPN, CNN, LVMH, Toys R Us, NBA, NFL, NBC Universal, Viacom, PGA Tour, Turner Broadcasting, Wall Street Journal, News Corp, AT&T, Verizon, and CBS with a service footprint in over 100 countries, reaching over 150 million users and driving billions of transactions annually. Prior to July Systems Arun co-founded and was formerly CEO of Librato, a San Francisco based SaaS company offering a platform for Real-time Operations Analytics that accepts metrics from any source for real-time aggregation and transformation, anomaly detection, alerting, visual analysis and storage. Librato was acquired by Solarwinds (NYSE: SWI) in January 2015. Prior to Librato, Arun founded California Digital in San Jose, CA in 1994 and ran the company profitably since its inception. Arun orchestrated the acquisition of the assets of VA Linux Systems (Nasdaq: LNUX) in 2001 which catapulted California Digital into a market leadership position in the space of Linux based High Performance Computing and related software services. Under his leadership, California Digital deployed North America and Europe's fastest Supercomputer Thunder' at the Lawrence Livermore National Labs in 2004. Arun is an active Charter Member of TiE, The Indus Entrepreneurs, a not-for-profit global network of entrepreneurs and professionals dedicated to the advancement of entrepreneurship since 1994. In addition to various awards and recognitions, Arun was awarded the prestigious Karnataka Rajyotsava Day Award' by the Chief Minister of Karnataka (India) on November 1st, 2004.