Speakers

A portfolio director, investor and PE adviser, Stevie chairs both the British Council and Mind, is the Non-Executive Director and Chairman of Remuneration for The Co-op Group and is an investor/advisor to two tech scale ups.
She graduated in law and after roles in marketing, television and international advertising agency management, she was named Chief Executive of Clear Channel and later Future plc – an international consumer publishing company – where she led digital transformation.
Previously, she chaired BBC Children in Need for a decade, served three terms as Chairman of The Groundwork Federation, and was Audit Chair for Arts and Business.
She is a Fellow of both the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising and the Marketing Society, and holds an honorary doctorate for services to business.
She was named one of the UK’s 100 most connected women in GQ magazine and is on the Telegraph/Debretts list of Britain’s 500 most influential people. She was appointed CBE in the 2017 Queen’s Birthday Honours.

Krzysztof Krawczyk is the Head of the Warsaw Office and a Partner at CVC Capital Partners, one of the world’s leading private equity and investment advisory firms. Since joining CVC he has been a board member
of such CVC’s portfolio companies as Zabka, Stock Spirits Group, PKP Energetyka, D-Marin
and AR Packaging.

Krzysztof has a successful track record of 25 years in European private equity and he served on the boards of numerous private and publicly-listed companies in TMT, industrial, logistics and healthcare sectors throughout CEE region.

Prior to joining CVC, Krzysztof was Managing Partner at Innova Capital, a leading mid market private equity firm in Central Europe. Krzysztof also worked at Pioneer Investment, a Poland-based private equity fund, and Daiwa Institute of Research, an advisory arm of Japanese investment bank Daiwa.

He is a member of The Polish Business Roundtable, an association of founders and CEOs of the largest companies operating in Poland and a Board Member of Valores, a first venture philanthropy fund in the CEE region.

Krzysztof holds a degree (with Honors) in Finance & Banking from the Warsaw School of Economics.
He is also an alumnus of the Executive Program at Harvard Business School. Krzysztof has been awarded
a Private Equity Person of the Year for 2015 and 2017 by the members of Polish Private Equity Association.

Manas Chawla is a political risk expert and the Founder and CEO of London Politica, the world’s largest political risk advisory for social impact. He has specialist expertise in consulting on soft power, corporate diplomacy, and crisis management, and has advised the United Nations, World Economic Forum, and a range of C-suite executives at Fortune 500 companies. An accomplished public speaker, Manas has delivered lectures and keynotes on geopolitical risk and open-source intelligence at universities and conferences across Europe, including the most widely-watched TED talk on political risk. He serves as Chairperson of LSE’s Political Risk and Investment Society and trustee of the London Speakers Union. He gained an undergraduate degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science and is currently a Master’s candidate for the Global Governance and Diplomacy programme at the University of Oxford.

He is responsible for the strategy and development of Grupa WP’s key brands and services. For the Wirtualna Polska acquisition transaction, together with Jacek Swiderski and Krzysztof Sierota, in 2014 he was awarded the Leader of Business title in the 48th Forbes Ranking and the Forbes 2015 Player of the Year in the New Technology category. In 2014, he was awarded the Person of the Year title in the MIXX Awards competition. He studied management and marketing at the Warsaw School of Economics. Active participant in debates on the development of technologies in Poland and their impact on the environment. In his private life, he is a keen basketball player.

Alison Edgar MBE has worked tirelessly throughout the last decade as “The Entrepreneur’s Godmother” to flip the crushing statistic “90% of start-up businesses fail”. She has helped thousands of entrepreneurs to harness their inner potential to understand the fundamentals of business success. She now works with some of the world’s leading organisations including Sky, Amazon, Adobe, and MetLife, teaching employees to think like entrepreneurs, harnessing the agility of small business. Alison is a twice best-selling author and in 2020, she received an MBE for recognition of her long-term services to entrepreneurship and business. She is a contributor to ITV, BBC TV, and Radio and has recently become a business mentor on a new Amazon Prime UK & US TV show airing in 2023.