Poonacha Machaiah has over 20 years of global experience as a successful entrepreneur and business leader in Fortune 100 companies. Poonacha is among the new breed of emerging social entrepreneurs who are using approaches from the commercial world and employing technology to tackle social and environmental problems. Today he is leveraging his vast global experience and technology domain expertise to bring to communities transformative wellbeing and educational solutions.

Poonacha has co-founded “JIYO” along with internationally renowned physician and author Deepak Chopra M.D., to build a social wellbeing platform. He is the founder and CEO of ‘ABOVE – A Bunch of Versatile Entrepreneurs’, a company he had founded in 2008. Poonacha is also the co-founder of the social enterprise ‘WeightLess Project’, a global movement to address the challenges of obesity and malnutrition that plague our communities. Poonacha was instrumental in founding of India’s leading social media startup along with internationally acclaimed film director Shekhar Kapur and Oscar award winning music composer AR Rahman. During his tenure as CEO, Qyuki was been voted as one of India’s coolest startups (Business Today) and also featured in Fortune (India) and Fast Company.

Through the majority of his career, he has held senior leadership positions in Global Sales & Business Development with leading MNC’s like Sasken, Motorola, Visionael, Iridium, and Dimension Enterprises – a leading Internet Data Center services startup in the Washington DC area, which was then acquired by Nortel Networks in 2000.

Poonacha is very active in the community and currently on the advisory board of Chopra Foundation and Transmedia mentor at XMedia Lab, an internationally acclaimed digital media think tank. Poonacha holds an MBA from the College of William and Mary in Virginia and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Engineering from the B.M.S. College of Engineering in Bangalore, India.

Talk Description:

How we do leverage technology to improve our wellbeing? The talk will explore technologies and solutions that can be leveraged to transform our personal and societal wellbeing. How do we move from a reductionist approach of tracking our activities (data), to a more integrated/system approach to wellbeing (insights/behavior). The talk will also discuss the ten facets of wellbeing to highlight the linkage between personal, societal and environmental wellbeing.