Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran, CEO of Digital Brain and Silk Road Biking

UnConventional

Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran is the CEO and Co-Founder of Digital Brain, an enterprise SaaS company based out of Palo Alto. He was part of the youngest group to ever cycle from Europe to Asia and ran a social impact organization that reached over 7 million people; he was awarded by Amartya Sen, Nobel Laureate for Economics, for revamping an Indian malnutrition policy. He's survived off hackathon prize money in Silicon Valley and also holds two world records solving Rubik's cubes.

While growing up in southern India, Kesava noticed that many of his community members held negative stereotypes about citizens from surrounding countries. At age 16, when Kesava attended United World College, he met students from many other countries and immediately realized that the negative perceptions he grew up hearing, were not only unfair but also untrue. A couple of years later, Kesava was asked by a friend to join a cycling trip from the United World College campus in Bosnia to China. Kesava saw this trip as an opportunity to promote intercultural understanding, and the idea for Silk Road Biking was born. Silk Road Biking is an organization that encourages and supports travel enthusiasts to connect with the communities they visit and to share their stories as a way to help break stereotypes. The Silk Road Biking project, which started as a one-time trip, now reaches over 7 million people across various media platforms. Kesava and his friends were the youngest people in the world to cycle across the Silk Road to China, passing over 4,000 kilometers, traversing 9 countries and sharing their stories to build a more peaceful future. Kesava is currently working to unite all travel enthusiasts on one digital platform to share their stories and resources on traveling with purpose, connecting with others and contributing towards an understanding world.