Mitra Ardron Email & Phone Number

Us

I mentor and support innovators, entrepreneurs and investors working on important sustainability and impact problems where the solution is at least partly technical. Natural Innovation.org is my non-profit vehicle for that work, and my time has involved extensive travel across developing countries to work with, and understand the innovation process. I'm always open to hearing from incubators, accelerators, and investors, who may have a need for someone who bridges impact, and technology of all types.

Folia Water has developed an affordable paper water filter that is sold via FMCG channels at the kiosks on street corners across the developing world. Seeking to bring access to clean water to all and create a $1b grocery staple. I've been an advisor, investor, and board member, helping them spin out of Folia Materials, and raise grants and impact investment.

Boston, Ma, Us

Folia has developed an affordable way to add nano-metal to paper using existing paper machinery. The anti-microbial paper has uses in water and air filtration; PPE (e.g. face masks); and as alternatives to plastic in food packaging. I'm an advisor to the company, working with the CEO to help them commercialize, raise money, and go from startup to scale.

Bedford, Massachusetts, Us

Folia Water has developed an affordable paper water filter that is sold via FMCG channels at the kiosks on street corners across the developing world. Seeking to bring access to clean water to all.I've been an advisor, investor, and board member, helping them spin out of Folia Materials, and raise grants and impact investment.

San Francisco, California, Us

I'm led the effort at the Internet Archive to integrate with decentralized peer-to-peer technologies. (IPFS, WebTorrent, YJS, Gun etc) and their broader involvement in the movement towards a decentralized internet where your data belongs to you, and where data lives in the "cloud" rather than a data center. I then built a offline version of the Archive's server that could run where the internet was poor or intermittent.

Santa Barbara, Ca, Us

We developed a platform for "Pay As You Go" to support bringing electricity to low income users in developing countries. This included hardware that was integrated by solar system manufacturers; a back-end SaaS service to manage customers, and integrations with mobile money services. Lumeter was acquired by Mobisol in June 2017.

Washington, District Of Columbia, Us

As a previous judge, and also an applicant to the business plan competition run by Mentor Capital Network (formerly "WIlliam James Foundation" or WJF) , I've been consistently impressed at its value to entrepreneurs. The leverage from the mentoring is a huge return for even the losers, making it one of the few competitions that are always worth entering. I'm honored to be invited to join its board.

Between major contacts I provided commercialisation and business development consulting to green companies, especially cleantech companies with a particular interest in how to incorporate sustainability in ways that build the bottom line and company image.Clients included:Urban Ecological Systems: a developer of the world's first commercially viable aquaponics system, I helped commercialise a brilliant invention and introduced the investor who put over $5m into the first farm. Zelfo (now called Zeo): developing innovative materials from waste cellulose. I helped them raise their first round of finance.

Au

We pioneered an innovative crowd purchasing scheme that brought solar photovoltaics to residential customers, building a 18 person team that generated over $10m in sales in its first year. This involved re-engineering the entire supply chain to drop overall costs by 30% compared to our competitors.

Worked with a leader in the natural baby product industry to create a product range, get it manufactured in India and build a wholesale business in organic products.

Au

I was brought in to commercialise a process to make paper from banana trees, using no chemicals, no water and minimal power. We developed business models and plans, and explored market opporunities. Papyrus listed on the ASX (Australia's stock exchange), about six months after I left. www.papyrusaustralia.com.au

A career detour to pursue a long-term interest in how communities learn in a rapidly changing environment. I took a contract with a local community college that had a grant to investigate and apply Knowledge Management principles to Community based Sustainable Regional Economic Development while exploring how vocational learning had to change in a world where people's needs for rapidly learning skills don't mesh with traditional educational challenges.

Brought in to implement the founder's ideas for a professional social network with a fine control over privacy. I architected a system and worked with a team in India to develop it. While the company itself failed to raise another round, the IP was acquired by LinkedIn where many of its ideas are implemented.

In between major projects I consulted to clients on the interfaces between technology and business, including:SGI - managing the team transferred to them from Paragraph in its acquisition. Alexa - consultant on some sever side projects, including a one week crunch to build a crawler for Yahoo.iCulture - Acting CTO to a startup portal for Cultural Creatives and Sustainability, developed the architect and helped them recruit a CTO.NetDeva - Acting CTO architecture of a contact management system

Flycode was the first peer to peer video sharing service, I developed the spec, which led to a key patent on swarming, built and managed a team of 20 programmers in India, negotiated with key partners and customers.

My colleague and I joined the Russian-American company Paragraph to help "clean it up, and sell it". I managed the cross-cultural interface between the management team and the engineers, and led a brilliant distributed team between Moscow and San Francisco to create shared 3D products. Our efforts led to Paragraph's sale to SGI.

Led a team to work on the challenge of bringing shared 3D environments to the net. Included architecting the client-server interaction for Worlds Chat the internet's first 3D Chat System.

Created one of San Francisco's first ISP (Internet Service Providers), working with many of the early internet companies. I was responsible for Pandora's technical direction and most of its major contracts including AOL's first gateway to the Internet and Sovam - Russia's first ISP.

Johannesburg, Za

We partnered with organizations across the world to replicated the experience of GreenNet and PeaceNet into new countries. Creating an international NGO focused on ICT4D (Information and Communications Technology for Development), still working on policy and service provision in about 40 countries. www.apc.org

London, Gb

Seeing the need for email in the Environment, Peace and Human Rights communities, I created an Internet Service Provider (in the days before there was an "@" in email) for this sector. Its still going .. www.gn.apc.org

Ma, Computing

Education record