Biography:

Richard Boly is a career U.S. diplomat and currently the Director of the Office of eDiplomacy, an applied technology think tank for the U.S. Department of State. Previously, he was a National Security Affairs Fellow the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he launched the Global Entrepreneurship Program. He recently served in U.S. Embassy, Rome, where he developed and ran a program to promote entrepreneurship in Italy. Continuing with his close ties to Italy, Richard serves on the board of the Mind the Bride Foundation, which connects the innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystems in Italy and Silicon Valley. Other embassy assignments include the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Paraguay. Richard is the most junior diplomat to win the Cobb Award for commercial diplomacy. Richard and the Office of eDiplomacy are finalists for the 2012 Service to America Medal to be awarded in September.

In a prior life, he was the first Presidential Management Fellow with the Inter-American Foundation, was a consultant with the Inter-American Development Bank, and founded and ran a shrimp hatchery in coastal Ecuador. In a stint with the Silicon Valley iconic PR firm, Regis McKenna, he helped launch the first Apple Macintosh. Richard is a graduate of Stanford University and the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at UCSD .