Debbie Wosskow – Keynote Speaker

Debbie Wosskow OBE is a trailblazer for female empowerment and digital disruption. She is the founder and former CEO of Love Home Swap, a home exchange website business which she sold in 2017 for $53 million. She is also the co-founder of AllBright, the largest global network for women which has recently focused on pioneering female inclusion in Web3. Through Allbright, Debbie has launched an NFT collection and opened a members’ club in the metaverse.

Debbie holds a range of advisory roles including Senior Advisor at McKinsey, and Member of the Mayor of London’s Business Advisory Board. She has guided the UK government on a series of business-related matters; in 2015 she led the government’s independent review ‘Unlocking the Sharing Economy’, also known as the Wosskow Report, and she has sat on both the government’s Industrial Strategy Board and Productivity Council. She is widely regarded as a poster figure for the sharing economy.

She is the co-author of ‘Believe, Build, Become – how to supercharge your career’ (Virgin Books 2019 and reissued 2022 post pandemic) and sits on the Board of the Women’s Prize for Fiction. She is a former ‘Evening Standard’ Entrepreneur of the Year and one of the original ‘Management Today’ 35 Under 35. She graduated with an MA in Philosophy and Theology from New College, Oxford. She founded her first company Mantra PR at the age of 25 with just £3,000.

Debbie is passionate about empowering women through increased access to capital. She has spoken widely on how true power and equality will arrive only when women have an equal share of wealth and opportunity. After discovering in 2016, that only 2 per cent of capital went to women, only 12 per cent of senior investors were women, and that only one in six people in leadership positions in the UK are women, Debbie co-founded AllBright in 2018 to help female entrepreneurs expand their networks and secure funding. As well as running digital and physical masterclasses and meetups, Allbright partners with Goldman Sachs to host pitch days that provide its members with access to potential investors.

Having built successful, women-friendly spaces both online and in real life, Debbie shares insights into how we can design inclusive spaces. She also speaks to companies about how they can appeal to female consumers, meaningfully enact feminism within their brand, and ensure the diversity of their teams.

AllBright’s metaverse clubhouse and NFT collection are encouraging female representation and entrepreneurship in the traditionally male-dominated tech space. 5% of the revenue from their NFT sales is reinvested in an incubator for female talent in web3, and Debbie speaks on how we can ensure that the burgeoning blockchain and decentralised technologies are not monopolised by men.

Debbie is rapidly becoming a leading authority on the challenges and business potential of web3, NFTs and the metaverse. She routinely guides audiences on how these technologies operate and the promise they hold, both for revolutionising the way that content and capital are created and owned, and for building robust global communities. Her insights, however, span far beyond web3 and also incorporate more traditional iterations of the internet. She draws from her personal experience running Love Home Swap and AllBright to shed light on how companies can integrate more traditional digital technologies into their offering. At McKinsey, she has specialised in online platforms, networks, and marketing.

Debbie was awarded her OBE for services to British Businesses, and at the heart of her ethos is the power of community and female inclusion in furthering innovation.