Puneet Kaur Ahira served at the pleasure of President Barack H. Obama and was the Special Advisor to the United States Chief Technology Officer. The scope of Puneet's role at the White House included leveraging open technology platforms and communities to debug connectivity deserts across America and abroad, counter violent extremism, expand opportunity for refugees + other marginalized communities, and scale the work of heroic women and men driving forward ingenious solutions to some of our world's most pressing challenges. In her previous life in the private sector, Puneet was the Program Director for Solve for X and a Rapid Evaluator at Google[x] - Google's stealth moonshot laboratory focused on technology-led projects that could positively impact billions of people, especially across developing markets. Prior to her time at Google, she worked as a Portfolio Analyst at Goldman Sachs, where she was part of the founding team that introduced a framework to identify structurally-advantaged companies poised to disrupt their industries over the next 15-20 years. She served on the Board of Directors for Colin Powell's non-profit - America's Promise, co-founded an NGO called Freedom's Answer, and co-authored a book on civic engagement and activism under the same title. Puneet received her BSc and MSc from Oxford University. She is currently in start-up mode and collecting good humans as part of her roles as Co-Founder & Chief Architect of a newly-formed company called shift7, and as Founder & Principal of Omission Studio - a critical design practice.