David Roberts

David Roberts is a globally recognized thought leader, keynote speaker, and entrepreneur educated at MIT and Harvard Business School, best known for coining the term "exponential leadership" in 2010 and founding New Disruptive Theory. A recipient of the prestigious Clay Christensen Disruptor Award, Roberts led the development of the 17 Global Inspirational Goals, proposed at the United Nations to inspire the best of humanity. He served as Vice President of Singularity University and Director of its Graduate Studies Program, and his pioneering work in leadership, management, and decision-making has been the subject of case studies taught at Harvard, Stanford, and Berkeley business schools. A former military officer and Special Agent, Roberts went on to serve as an M&A investment banker at Goldman Sachs headquarters before returning to public service across five elite federal agencies, where he led the development of multi-billion-dollar revolutionary spacecraft and spy planes and co-founded and served as Mission Operations Commander of the world's largest fleet of robots. He has secured over $150 million in funding from top Silicon Valley investors, with his startups earning recognition among the "Top 50 Private Companies in the World." Roberts has served as Chairman of 1QBit, the world's first and leading quantum computing software company, as a board director at MetricStream, a global leader in governance, risk, and compliance, and as a board director of Southeast Asia's leading corporate venture capital firm, which has invested nearly one billion US dollars in deep tech and AI startups. A formal advisor on manufacturing the first object in space, Roberts is also the founder of GEDI, an organization transforming education by training leaders for extraordinary, lifetime human performance through character-driven, week-long global experiences.