The Ivy Podcast

Mike Hayes is the Chief Digital Transformation Officer at VMware. He joined VMware in October 2020, and leads the company’s worldwide business operations and the acceleration of the company’s SaaS transition. Prior to joining VMware, Mike served as Senior Vice President and Head of Strategic Operations for Cognizant Technologies, where he ran a $2B P&L for Cognizant’s largest financial services clients. Mike previously spent four years at Bridgewater Associates, an investment management firm, where he served in Chief of Staff to CEO and COO roles. Prior to Bridgewater, he spent 20 years in the U.S. Navy SEALs where his career began as one of 19 graduates from a class of 120. Mike served throughout South America, Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia, including the conflicts in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan. His last job in the Navy was the Commanding Officer of SEAL Team TWO, which included ten months as the Commander of a 2,000 person Special Operations Task Force in southeastern Afghanistan. Before that, Mike was selected as a White House Fellow (’08/’09) and served two years as Director, Defense Policy and Strategy at the National Security Council.

Yasemin Akcakaya is the VP of Consumer Marketing, leading integrated marketing, brand and product teams at Norwegian Cruise Line. She has a track record of combining strategic vision, strong analytical thinking and keen grasp of market trends to drive aggressive profitable growth in highly competitive B2B, B2C, Online and Retail landscapes. Since joining NCL in 2020, Yasemin has focused on developing innovative and impactful strategies that elevate brand, drive loyalty and increase consumer engagement. She has deep experience in the areas of brand strategy, customer retention, customer experience, loyalty marketing, CRM, personalization, integrated marketing, marketing analytics, and customer research. Prior to joining NCL, Yasemin led marketing teams at CVS, Liberty Mutual and FedEx.

Jon Younger PhD is the founder of the Agile Talent Collaborative. He is a thought-leader in the freelance space, sits on several advisory boards, and is the author of Agile Talent (Harvard, 2016) and writes regularly on the freelance revolution for Forbes.

IT executive with a proven track record of success in both private and public companies including 3 IPOs – Excite@Home, Salesforce,com, and MobileIron. Expertise in building high performing, collaborative teams (90+), delivering on business strategy, and generating new revenue while decreasing operating costs. Extensive experience managing local and remote teams across time zones and continents. First IT leader hired at Salesforce.com. Lead the security function at companies and successfully completed SOC 2 Type 2 compliance for 2 pre-IPO companies.

David is the Chief Digital Health Officer of Boston Scientific and a VP within IT responsible for Digital Health and Data Solutions, Chair of the Brigham and Women’s Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice Executive Council, a thought leader in information-enabled healthcare safety, and a Governance Committee member of NESTcc, an organization driving leverage of Real World Evidence. He has spent the last two decades envisioning and developing digital health solutions and organizations, influencing industry policy and leading large MedTechs through transformation.

At Boston Scientific, David is responsible for establishing and leading Digital Health Development Studios, Remote Engagement, Internet of Things and Advanced Data Intelligence teams, and partnering to establish the evolving capabilities that will ensure enterprise success in Digital. Through the pandemic, David has focused on driving Tele-First digital care solutions that enable Boston Scientific, physicians and health systems to safely deliver care.

Prior to joining Boston Scientific, David served as Vice President of Health IT Integration and Strategic Innovation at Becton Dickinson (BD), where he led enterprise-wide health information technology capability development efforts to ensure commercial success and developed actionable strategies to improve patient outcomes, drive health system efficiency and enable BD’s growth through the application of information technology. As Vice President of Corporate Strategic Innovation at BD, David was responsible for integrating company-wide activities focused on the identification of new market opportunities outside of existing core areas, the development of high-impact growth concepts that fall outside of, or cut across, existing business units and incubation of non-core offerings.

David received a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from U.C. and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.