Biren Gandhi (http://lnkd.in/biren) is a Distinguished Strategist in Cisco’s Corporate Strategy Office, focused on identifying key technology trends and accelerating their adoption through acquisitions, development or partnering. He has built a successful track record of bringing innovation to life through strategic collaborations with startups, venture capital firms, universities and partner ecosystems.Currently, Biren spearheads strategy for highly disruptive technologies, such as the Internet of Things, fog computing, Drones/UAVs, Blockchain, Deep Learning, Robotics and Artificial Intelligence.Biren has nearly 20 years of leadership, strategic and tactical technology experience in diverse verticals like social networking, cloud, big data, mobile, telecom, social gaming and enterprise collaboration. Prior to joining Cisco in 2011, Biren was divisional CTO of a few gaming studios at Zynga and before that a Sr. Architect at Facebook. He also co-founded AdMunity, a startup providing a collaborative social platform for the advertising community.Biren actively participates as a keynote speaker, panel judge, mentor or advisor in internal and external events in the venture capital, startup, innovation, accelerator and incubator domains, focusing on disruptive new frontier technologies. He also participates in fund-raising efforts for a number of non-profits and enjoys sharing his various interests at http://thoughts.birengandhi.com.