
Zia Yusuf
Senior Partner & MD at Boston Consulting Groups
TED Attendee
Palo Alto, California, United StatesAbout Zia
I am a…
Athlete, Business leader, Business mentor, Change Agent, Entrepreneur, Idea generator, Muslim, Parent, Technologist, World traveler
Bio
Currently Zia is a Senior Partner & MD at the Boston Consulting Group
Zia was CEO of Streetline Inc. the leading global provider of senor enabled smart city solutions (http://www.streetline.com/). Streetline uses sensor enabled applications to help cities manage parking assets and allow drivers to find open parking spots using their mobile device. Drivers looking for parking cause 30%+ of the traffic in a city - Streetline solves this problem. Just prior to his role leading Streetline, Zia was Entreprenuer-in-Residence at Sutter Hill Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners. He spent the last ten years at SAP AG where he was executive vice president and a member of SAP’s Executive Leadership Team. At SAP, he led the company’s efforts in key areas, including co-founding SAPMarkets, a B2B marketplace company; founding and leading the SAP global corporate strategy team and its Design Services Team; and, most recently, as head of the global ecosystem and partner group, where he managed a network of 7,500 partners, award winning SAP online communities of innovation and the $125 mm SAP Netweaver Fund. Prior to SAP, Zia was part of the Investment Banking Division at Goldman, Sachs & Co., where he worked on corporate finance and M&A transactions. Previously, he worked on health sector issues in Southern Africa, as well as project and structured finance in South Asia and Indochina, at the World Bank Group.
Zia has a MS in International Affairs from Georgetown University, an MBA from Harvard Business School, and a BA from Macalester College. He is also an associate consulting professor at Stanford University, where he taught “Experiences in Software Design” with Terry Winnograd and Hasso Plattner, co-founder of SAP and is currently co-teaching "Designing Liberation Technologies" with Profs. Terry Winnograd & Joshua Cohen. Zia is also an advisor to several start-ups and is an actively involved board member of non-profit institutions focused on education in South Asia and social entrepreneurship in East Africa. You can follow Zia on Twitter or read his blog, “The Right Question.” He has also been profiled extensively in leading business and technology publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, FastCompany, CNNMoney, TechCrunch, VentureBeat etc. and featured in national television and radio stations such as CNN, MSNBC, KLIV Radio, and CNBC.
I'm passionate about
making sure that where you are born does not determine what you can achieve.
Areas of expertise
Design Thinking in Corporates, Economic Development, Ecosystems, enterprise software, Girls' & Women's Education, Smart City Technologies, South Asia, World Travel
Things you might not know
playing the conga drums.