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Sarah Prevette      

Co-Host of "Quit Your Day Job," Pioneering Web Entrepreneur & Founder of Future Design School

Sarah Prevette has developed transformational strategy for some of the country’s biggest business leaders and renowned brands. Globally recognized for her work in human-centered design and entrepreneurship, she is proud to work alongside an incredible team of educators to drive innovation inside schools. Prevette’s organization, Future Design School, provides world-class strategy development, professional training programs and resources that empower effective leadership and personalized learning.

Schools across North America leverage Future Design School in order to build capacity with their existing teams and to drive critical skill development with their students. The organization works with school leaders to establish holistic, long term strategic plans that have immediate, measurable impact. Through a wide range of services that include world-class professional development and comprehensive curriculum; the Future Design School team actively supports educators in designing exceptional, experiential learning for students. The company proudly supports over 20,000 educators and more than 350,000 students.

Prevette has an illustrious history of innovation. After starting her career at an early stage startup in 1997, she gained invaluable experience in all aspects of business as she worked with an entrepreneurial team to scale the company into a global behemoth. She was recruited to run product development and marketing for a large software company, which she helped grow and sell to Thomson Reuters in 2008. Prevette then founded Sprouter; the world’s first online community providing real-time advice to startups. The platform was acquired in 2011 and she went on to build BetaKit – a popular technology news site that was acquired in 2013. In 2014, she joined forces with talented business leaders from some of the world’s top companies like LEGO, Virgin and Starbucks to create a venture capital fund that actively invested millions of dollars in early-stage startups across a wide variety of industries and created nearly a billion dollars in net worth.

Sarah has been named by Inc Magazine as one of the top entrepreneurs in North America and one of the “Top 20 Power Elite” by Canadian Business. She is frequently in the media and has been profiled by numerous prestigious publications including The Globe and Mail, Entrepreneur Magazine and The Wall Street Journal. She is an in-demand speaker who has delivered keynote speeches at prestigious events including South by Southwest, Big Omaha, GrowCo, Summit Series and Google Forward and has lectured at many academic institutions including Harvard, Columbia and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is an active advisor and investor in several companies, as well as an esteemed board member for Communitech and VentureLAB. Sarah proudly serves as an Innovation Advisor to the Governor General and continues to advocate for startups in her ongoing advisory work with various levels of government.

Speech Topics


Future Design School: Teaching Creativity and Fostering Entrepreneurship in Youth

“Entrepreneurs possess common traits: they see opportunities in challenges, are unfailingly resourceful, and can creatively problem-solve on the fly. They are also confident in their personal capacity to affect change and are passionate about their individual pursuits,” says Sarah Prevette. “With Future Design School, we want to inspire this kind of entrepreneurial philosophy at an early age. We want to teach a repeatable process of ideation, validation, and rapid execution so that all kids are confident in their ability to innovate.”

In this inspiring, future-forward talk, Prevette shares the tactics she and the team behind Future Design School use to teach kids ages 11-18 crucial skills like innovation, creativity, problem-solving, and product design. Why is it important to share “design thinking” and a entrepreneurial mindset with kids? How can you bring this message into your school or classroom? And what does this all say about the future of education—and the future of our planet? Prevette tackles these challenging questions with aplomb, leaving audiences with the energy and know-how to get out there and start making change.

Design Thinking at Work: How to Cultivate Creativity and Entrepreneurship

How do you distill a problem into a creative solution? Embrace design thinking? Empower your team? Pinpoint where your skill set and passion converge? Enter Sarah Prevette, serial entrepreneur, investor, and founder of Future Design School. In this talk, Prevette shares her ultimate credo and how it can change your business: Creativity as a skill set; entrepreneurship as a philosophy. Innovation can be taught, she says, as long as you embrace the mentality and deftness of the entrepreneur. Her keynotes and workshops are a hands-on exercise in identifying your organization’s problems and finding effective, out-of-the-box solutions that you can implement tomorrow. Prevette—a delightful, no-holds-barred speaker—draws on her years of experience and work with some of the most successful business leaders on the planet to share stories, lessons, and activities that will build your game plan. She’s a joy to both watch on stage and work with behind the scenes; the human version of an “aha!” moment.

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