About Lisa

Lisa Gansky has always worked where systems are shifting—where technology meets culture and new forms of trust and value emerge. Since the early days of the commercial internet, she has played the roles of founder, investor, board member, advisor, and instigator, helping build ventures and networks that challenge inherited models of business, ownership, trust and governance.

In the 1990s, Lisa co-founded and led Global Network Navigator (GNN), the first commercial website. After its acquisition by AOL, she ​​became that company's Senior Vice President of Internet Properties and Services. She later co-founded and served as Chairman & CEO of Ofoto, a trailblazing digital photography company acquired by Kodak, where she became General Manager of Digital Imaging.

Since then, she’s launched and invested in dozens of ventures spanning data infrastructure, energy, mobility, fintech, marketplaces, and circular economy platforms. As the author of The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing, she helped bring access-based platforms and business models into the mainstream, and has advised governments, startups, and institutions on the design of distributed systems. She is a founding partner of Mesh Ventures, co-founder of Próximo Lab and an early co-founder and advisor of Boundaryless, home to the influential Platform Design Toolkit. She is also an advisor to Boson Protocol and a board member of Latin America–based Guil Mobility Ventures, UK-based, Bango Plc and Forest Bikes, and SF-based Oway.

Her early work in infrastructure and marketplaces has evolved into a deeper inquiry: how do we design for resilience in a time of unraveling? Whether advising crypto experiments or serving on public innovation boards in the US, UK, Europe and Latin America, she focuses less on hype than on the quiet redesign of ontologies and the systems and biases that infuse them.

Lisa is also a writer and speaker, though not on a circuit. Her talks and essays often emerge from collaboration, research, or frustration—and tend to spark the next project or conversation. She is especially drawn to accomplice-driven work: constellations of people with shared questions and complementary tools, often crossing disciplines and geographies.

Her current curiosities include: the role of AI in community trust, frameworks for platform governance, the politics of access, and regeneration. She believes the best work is rarely done alone, and the most interesting futures aren't built from scratch—they thrive in the compost of all we’ve learned before.