DisrupTV Episode 445

Alejandro Laplana is the Founder and CEO of Shokworks, Inc., an ROI-focused product development, design firm, and venture builder. Headquartered in Miami with strategic hubs in Austin, Texas, and Medellín, Colombia, the company specializes in digital transformation, software engineering, and AI-powered automation.

Claire Díaz-Ortiz is a celebrated author and leadership thinker who was an early employee at Twitter. Wired magazine called her "The Woman Who Got the Pope on Twitter" and Claire was named one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company. In 2023, she was named to the Thinkers 50 Radar List of emerging management thinkers.

Claire is the author of 10 books that have been translated into 12 languages, including One Minute Mentoring (with her mentor, legendary management guru Ken Blanchard), Social Media Success for Every Brand, and Twitter for Good. Her next book, written with Marshall Goldsmith, explores executive coaching.

In Claire’s work, she has been called everything from “The Woman Who Got the Pope on Twitter”(Wired) & “Twitter’s Pontiff Recruitment Chief” (The Washington Post) to a “Force for Good” (Forbes) & one of the “Ten Most Generous in Social Media” (Fast Company). In a quote not soon to be forgotten (LOL), TechCrunch recently called Claire "a globe-trotting, multi-hyphenate polymath." Claire was one of the first users of Twitter in Kenya (a claim verified by no one), and is also known for the dubious honor of being the first person to live-tweet her own child’s birth, which was admittedly a bad idea.

As a venture capitalist, Claire was a scout at Kleiner Perkins, a partner at a seed fund - where she started the first initiative to invest in women founders across Latin America - an advisor to Antler, a global accelerator with $1.2BAUM across 23 global locations, and startup chair at a decentralized web3 fund of 150 professional venture capitalists from the Kauffman Fellows program, where she was a fellow.

Claire holds an MBA from Oxford University, where she was a Skoll Foundation Scholar for Social Entrepreneurship, and has a BA in History and an MA in Anthropology from Stanford University. She was the co-founder of Hope Runs, a non-profit organization operating in Kenya from 2006 to 2019.

She has appeared in print and TV media like CNN, BBC, Bloomberg, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, Good Morning America, The Today Show, The Washington Post, TechCrunch, Fortune, Forbes, Wired, etc. To be clear, whenever she goes on TV to talk about Elon it is a bad idea.

Claire lives with her family of small children in (mostly) Argentina, where things could be more streamlined.