Finding pathways and revealing opportunities.

In the early two-thousands, Dana Smirin was one of a small cohort at the table at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco where a group of investors, entrepreneurs, and policy makers decided the environmental technology sector needed to unite to attract real capital behind it, the beginning of what became the global clean technology industry. She was the one on the ground scouting deals across North America and Europe for the Clean Tech Venture Forum, later awarded a fellowship by the American Council on Germany to explore how policy and finance can accelerate climate technology to market, a fellowship that opened doors to remarkable people and experiences across the world and was an early sign that her self-directed path could stand alongside any formal one. She helped found what became the Cleantech Open, now a global accelerator spanning more than 40 countries.

It wasn't her first movement. She'd been building environmental and green businesses since the late 1980s in London, then brought that experience to Capitol Hill's earliest legislative groundwork for green building and green chemistry incentives. Later, as part of the U.S.-South Africa Binational Commission, she helped shape how American companies returned to South Africa after apartheid, responsibly, with value for workers and communities: early groundwork for what would become the socially responsible investing movement.

Then, at the peak of her career, a lymphoma diagnosis stopped her and left her beloved role at UC Berkeley. She responded the way she'd respond to any hard problem: she pulled apart the system, found the gaps, and built something new, co-founding a clinic in South Africa that became central to her own survival, and to hundreds of others since.

That instinct, seeing the structure underneath a crisis and building the fix, is what she now brings to entrepreneurs, executives, and family offices navigating their own inflection points.