HUB Directory

Nili Gilbert, CFA, CAIA

Independent Director

New York, New York

Nili Gilbert, CFA, CAIA, is a board director, founder, and investor with over two decades of experience in global capital markets. She brings an operator's perspective to business, policy, technology, and sustainable value creation. As an Independent Board Director of Brookfield Asset Management (NYSE: BAM), a leading global alternative asset manager with over $1 trillion in assets under management, she oversees strategic planning, capital allocation, and significant investments in digital infrastructure supporting the growth of AI. As a Senior Advisor at McKinsey, she applies a global investor’s lens to the intersection of emerging technology and industrial systems transformation. She also chairs the David Rockefeller Fund Investment Committee. Previously, she co-founded Matarin Capital, growing it into one of the larger women-owned asset managers in the U.S., and managed over $25 billion as a Senior Director at Invesco Quantitative Strategies. Most recently, she was Vice Chairwoman of Relae (formerly Carbon Direct), a science-based investment and advisory firm. Nili is deeply engaged in global economic and policy dialogue. She serves on both the World Economic Forum Global Future Council and the Bretton Woods Committee. She is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the Economic Club of New York. Named to Barron's 100 Most Influential Women in U.S. Finance and TIME100 Climate, she is also a Forbes contributor and has been a frequent commentator on international markets and economic strategy on CNBC and Bloomberg Television. Her TED Talk has nearly 2 million views. She has delivered hundreds of speaking engagements across six continents, from Davos to the G20, World Bank to the Vatican, Swiss Re to First Abu Dhabi Bank, Fortune to Bloomberg. Her unique perspective is built from a career identifying the holes in conventional wisdom and translating it into strategy. She has developed this worldview across two decades in investing and deepened it through sustained engagement with the policymakers, investors, and institutional leaders. These insights and perspectives are expressed across the full range of topics she brings to the stage. She has also been recognized as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, LinkedIn “TopVoice” in Finance, Entrepreneur of the Year by the National Association of Securities Professionals, Bloomberg BusinessWeek “One to Watch”, and awarded a Bellagio Center Residency by the Rockefeller Foundation. She holds a BA magna cum laude from Harvard and an MBA from Columbia Business School, where she was a Toigo Fellow, and has completed executive programs at Oxford and Stanford. Based in New York, she is a native English speaker with professional proficiency in German and French.

Giovanni Brees

N/A

New York, New York

Giovanni Brees is a founder, product strategist, author, and speaker. He builds companies that run on AI systems instead of big teams. 25 years of product launches and half a billion dollars raised For more than 25 years, his work has revolved around product launches and driving revenue growth - for small and medium-sized businesses, groundbreaking startups, and multinationals alike. He ran a boutique agency that marketed some of the best-known brands in the world, and a product validation and launch operation that took more than 4,500 products to market and helped founders raise over 500 million USD through crowdfunding alone, reaching audiences of hundreds of millions. Along the way, he became a trusted partner to Fortune 500 companies and an advisor on product launches, new market entries, and strategic growth for leading companies including Bain, P&G, and WordPress. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Bloomberg, Forbes, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, and Mashable. Then he rebuilt everything Twenty-five years of launches, validations, and agency work gave him one clear insight: the bottleneck is always the same. People. Time. Overhead. So when he exited the agency business, he refused to do the obvious thing - build another one, bigger. He rebuilt everything instead. Today, he runs Meet Oscar and CiteEngine with no full-time employees - only AI agents that handle outreach, content, pipelines, and operations autonomously. Every day. Whether he is in the room or not. And now he is building KentoHQ - the infrastructure that lets other businesses do the same: a roster of AI teammates with verification built in and a human decision at every boundary that matters. The books He wrote the operating manual for this way of working. The Zero-Employee Company is the book on replacing headcount with AI agents: how to turn roles into systems, wire them together, trust but verify their output, and keep human judgment exactly where it belongs. No hype, no dream-selling - the real model, including the parts that break. He is also the author of The Crowdfunding Quick Guide (2024 and 2026 Editions), drawn from the campaigns behind more than half a billion dollars raised. Speaking and advisory He speaks and advises on AI-first operations, zero-employee businesses, product launches, go-to-market strategy, and crowdfunding - for founders who want leverage without headcount, and for companies that want to understand what work looks like when systems do the doing and humans do the judging.

Chris Lourens

Director

South Africa

As a Director and Partner at Solve Business Consulting, I have over 24 years of experience in helping financial services companies solve challenges, manage change, become future-fit, and thrive. One of my core competencies and passions is the Global Investment Performance Standards (GIPS), which are the ethical principles for calculating and presenting investment performance. I have helped most of the large asset managers in South Africa to implement and maintain GIPS compliance, and I have served on the GIPS Committee. I have also been a speaker and lecturer on GIPS and risk management at local and international conferences and universities.