Portrait No. 001
Navroop Sahdev
Founder and CEO
The Digital Economist
The pull was an intellectual and moral urgency: the realization that economics, as practiced, was fundamentally unprepared for emerging technologies—and deeply misaligned with human reality. The push was personal. Throughout my career, I was consistently an outlier: a young woman in male-dominated institutions, an immigrant, a woman of color, often the first to do what I was doing. I was fortunate to be in the world’s leading institutions, yet naïve enough to believe that excellence implied safety or integrity. It did not. Sexual harassment and structural exclusion were not exceptions; they were features. In spring 2019, something shifted. It felt like a spiritual rupture—a moment of clarity where I understood that I already had everything I needed. I began trusting my intuition, seeing power structures clearly, and stepping fully into my agency. Why me? Because I’ve lived the system’s failures and built the capacity to redesign it. Why now? Every moment before gender equality is achieved is the right moment. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
In her words
“The defining challenge of this century is not technological innovation but institutional reimagination. My mission is to help build the economic and governance systems that allow humanity to thrive in the age of intelligent machines.”
Chapter I
The toughest challenges you've faced as a founder.
The hardest challenge has been building institutional credibility while refusing to contort myself to fit legacy power structures. As a woman, immigrant, and woman of color—often the youngest person in the room—I was routinely underestimated, questioned, or treated as provisional. I learned quickly that vision alone is not enough; stamina, precision, and an unshakeable sense of self are required to survive systems that were not designed for you to lead. There were moments of deep isolation—building at scale without inherited networks, institutional backing, or financial safety nets. I bootstrapped for years, reinvesting everything, carrying both the intellectual burden of redefining economics for emerging technologies and the operational weight of execution. I became fluent in fundraising, policy, media, convening, and governance—not by choice, but by necessity. And yet, traction followed. The Digital Economist has convened leaders at Davos, UNGA, and Climate Week; published over 100 research papers annually; built a global community of thousands of senior executives; launched an Institutional Research Network; and partnered with governments, multinationals, and multilaterals. We did this without compromising our values—or waiting for permission. The climb taught me this: grit is not loud. Power is cumulative. And systems only change when someone is willing to outlast them.
Chapter II
Your vision.
I am obsessed with one problem: power without accountability. We are living through a moment where technology, capital, and policy are reshaping the world faster than our institutions—or our ethics—can keep up. The real crisis is not AI, climate, or markets in isolation. It’s that the systems governing them were designed for a different century, by a narrow set of voices, and they keep reproducing harm at scale. My vision is to help redesign the rules of the game—economic, technological, and governance systems—so they reflect how the world actually works today, and who actually lives in it. Through The Digital Economist, we enable leaders to move from extractive models to human-centered ones, from performative commitments to real institutional change. If we do this right, the world becomes less brittle. Technology serves people, not the other way around. And decisions that shape millions of lives are made with foresight, dignity, and shared responsibility—not unchecked power.
Chapter III
The impact you want to leave behind — for your industry, your community, and the women who come next.
My legacy is rewriting the economic and governance rules for a world of eight billion people. I want to be proud that I helped move economics away from extraction and extreme concentration of wealth—now at pre–World War I levels—and toward systems that redistribute power and resources to women and communities that have been systematically stripped of both. That includes embedding human-centered design into markets and institutions, and reviving indigenous knowledge not as symbolism, but as scalable governance wisdom alongside modern science. If someone looks back and says that The Digital Economist helped shift economics from something extractive and exclusionary into something relational, accountable, and human—then that is enough. Not monuments. Not titles. Just proof that the rules can be rewritten, and that women who see clearly can change the architecture of the world.