For 17 years, Usher Raymond IV & Usher’s New Look (UNL) have led the charge to spark young minds. On September 14th at the Stave Room in Atlanta, we will host our annual signature event. This year’s event will be an extraordinary experience as we introduce our new initiative – the “UNL Spark Lab”. We invite you to join us and take a peek at the world through the lens of a New Look youth to see how they identify their “Spark”, and discover pathways to success through education and leadership.
TechSquare Labs, Atlanta, GA. Paul Judge is a serial entrepreneur and active investor. Most recently, he co-founded the home WiFi company Luma. In addition, he serves as Executive Chairman of Pindrop, a pioneer in voice fraud prevention and authentication, which he co-founded in 2011. Paul is also the Co-Founder of TechSquare Labs, an incubator, seed fund, and corporate innovation space in Atlanta, and the Co-Founding Chairman of Monsieur and Curateurs. Formerly, Paul co-founded Purewire, a leading web security company, serving as CTO until its acquisition by Barracuda Networks in 2009 where he then served as Chief Research Officer through its IPO in 2013. Prior to this, Paul served as CTO on the founding team of CipherTrust, a leader in email security that was acquired by Secure Computing in 2006. He also worked briefly with IBM and NASA. Paul is an inventor of approximately 30 patented and patent-pending computer security technologies and has spearheaded multiple research initiatives including founding the Internet Research Task Force’s Anti-Spam Research Group. He is a recognized authority on information security issues, having authored numerous papers that have been published in leading academic journals and presented at multiple industry and academic conferences. Paul has received many awards including recognition by MIT's Technology Review Magazine in 2003 as one of the “top 100 innovators under 35”, Black Enterprise’s list of “50 Most Powerful Players Under 40” in 2005, and InfoWorld's “Top 25 CTOs” in 2007. Paul holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Morehouse College and received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Network Security from Georgia Tech. He is a member of the 2016 Class of Henry Crown Fellows and the Aspen Global Leadership Network at the Aspen Institute.
Described as “a visionary thinker with a rare intellect,” Sinek teaches leaders and organizations how to inspire people. With a bold goal to help build a world in which the vast majority of people go home everyday feeling fulfilled by their work, Sinek is leading a movement to inspire people to do the things that inspire them. Sinek is the author of the global best seller, Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action and the New York Times and Wall Street Journal best seller, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t. Simon's next two books are Together is Better, coming out September 2016, and Find Your Why: A Practical Guide to Discovering Purpose for You and Your Team, coming out early 2017.
Simon is also best known for popularizing the concept of Why in his first Ted Talk in 2009. It has since risen to the third most watched talk of all time on TED.com, gathering 27+million views and is subtitled in 43 languages.
Sinek’s unconventional and innovative views on business and leadership have earned him invitations to meet with an array of leaders and organizations, all branches of the military, government agencies and entrepreneurs.
Sinek is an adjunct staff member of the RAND Corporation and he actively supports the not-for-profit organization, charity: water. He serves on the board of the Tami Stronach Dance Company and lives in New York.
What I hope to do with the UNL SPARK LAB is to produce innovative, active young men & women, who become disruptive innovators and find ways to communicate an idea; youth who articulate what's happening in their community and how they'd like to change it.