Tara Lemmey is CEO of LENS Ventures, an innovation investment and development company working with leading institutions, including American Express, Nokia, and the Lumina Foundation, in creating next markets. She is an expert in making both vast and disruptive innovation happen.
Ms. Lemmey is the technology co-chair of the Markle Task Force on National Security in the Information Age since 2001. The innovation work in the Markle reports has influenced fundamental restructuring of how the government views intelligence and homeland security in the post 9/11 world. She is the Ambassador from Silicon Valley on the Embassy of the Future Commission, where she serves with 26 former Ambassadors to bring innovation to the State Department. Ms. Lemmey is is a Commissioner on the Embassy of the Future Task Force and on the Faculty of the Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, and a member of several private boards.
Ms. Lemmey has been published in Wired, Business 2.0, Business Week, and the Harvard Business Review. She is an active participant at Fortune Brainstorm and Fortune Most Powerful Women Summits. Ms. Lemmey is also the inaugural Department Chair of Policy, Law & Ethics at Singularity University in 2009, has been a visiting lecturer at Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Columbia, and UC Berkeley, and is a commentator on public radio.
A serial entrepreneur herself, Ms. Lemmey has founded multiple start-ups in both the private and public sectors. Earlier in her career, she was president of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where she worked on global initiatives in the areas of intellectual property, encryption, and privacy. She also founded three technology companies that were trailblazers in new markets, and was on the founding board of TRUSTe, a leader in online privacy.