Women With Impact #53 - Yip Thy-Diep Ta
Welcome to Women With Impact, a newsletter all about the journeys of mission-driven women and how they have a positive impact in our world.
I’m Clara Richter and this is the 53rd edition of Women With Impact. If you enjoy this issue, please share it with a friend and like it above.
For this edition, I had the pleasure of interviewing Yip Thy-Diep Ta, the CEO and Founder of J3d.AI, also known as Jedi, an AI-powered platform designed to drive human-centric collaboration. Her bold vision is to make peace more profitable than war, redefining how technology can unite people across industries and borders. Earlier this year, Yip hosted the House of Collaboration at Davos, a unique event series that brings together global thought leaders to foster partnerships and drive solutions to some of the world’s toughest challenges. Yip started her career in strategy consulting, before embarking on her entrepreneurship journey. She is a TEDx speaker at MIT and MBA graduate from INSEAD.
Wishing you a pleasant read!
Best,
Clara
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The Journey
Who are you and how do you most like to spend your time?
My name is Yip, and one of the key questions I'm thinking about is how we can make peace more profitable than war. This is tightly linked to my background: my parents had to flee from the Vietnam war as boat refugees, arriving in Germany and starting from zero. War and displacement being a large part of my family’s biography made me think about how we can create situations where these conflicts do not need to happen, and people do not have to relocate.
Peace and conflicts of course do not happen only between nations, but also in smaller entities, such as organisational entities, families, and relationships. I made it my goal to find solutions how can we live in non-violent situations with each other, especially through our communication. Non-violent language is a big contributor in my opinion, as words shape our environment. As widely known, words come after our thoughts, and our thoughts arise after our reactions. The latter in turn may be conscious or unconscious. I am a strong proponent in knowing in which state one is, the conscious or unconscious, as they are the fundament for all that follows. We can train ourselves to be conscious with the words that we use and the narratives that we generate in our lives.
What is the story behind J3D.AI (Jedi)?
I have always been very inspired by the integrity and the moral codes of the Jedi in Star Wars, where in a world in which we might have to position ourselves according to our values and simultaneously agree that there are common values that we want to uphold, the question remains how we train ourselves not to be corrupted by things that go against our self-declared values.
When we look at society today, I think one of the key skills that we are lacking nowadays is a way to lift the nonviolence within ourselves and shape our activities in a way where we can use our intelligence as a force for good.
My strong belief is that we need to reshape our organisational structures and thinking in companies into fields that we consider of non-violence. Here’s where Jedi comes in: we optimise market intelligence with the use of AI for expert conferences and organisations, mainly DAX40 companies in Germany. Jedi increases stakeholder engagement and collaboration pre-, post and during and post conferences, as well as automates report documentation, and insights generation.
What are your key priorities for your company for 2025?
Jedi is currently in its third year of its inception, where we are on track for our growth and speaking with several ventures. Our goal for this year is to continue what we have done the previous years: transforming complex conference content into accessible, manageable formats using advanced AI. We are committed to making expert insights universally accessible.
What is a recent success you are proud of?
For sure our J3D.AI House of Collaboration in Davos, where we facilitated signature events centered around peace. Especially in times of war and conflict, our focus is to lead discussions on how we can build nations and economies centered around the key value all of us are striving for. For us, there was no place better than enabling this in Davos, where all key leaders come together once a year. We investigated how the future will look like in 100 years - and we are excited to publish the results in a short amount of time.
You mentioned to me earlier that you are planning a bigger conference, a so-called “castle event”, later this year in Germany. What is your vision?
At Jedi, we believe that breakthrough innovation only comes through interdisciplinary collaboration when experts break away from silos, they are currently working in. For instance, if you're an expert in quantum or an expert in AI cybersecurity, and you bring your knowledge together with an expert in other sector, say health, you can move the needle of innovation in a completely different level.
We at Jedi provide this platform for experts to connect at the SystAIn3r Community. Beyond that, we train these experts also in the most foundational ways of thinking and acting in a nonviolent way. This particularly needed in times were abundant companies break because of tensions and conflicts. What we do is the design of experiences, bringing people together to work with each other in the most productive way.
The castle events we organise is one such human experiment lab so to say, where we connect 100 of the top experts from entire globe to Germany, at the heart of Europe. The theme of this year’s retreat is all around sustainability and health - whereas health in its widest form including planetary, individual and societal health. We incubate “Zebracorns”, the companies that combine sustainable and future-proof business models – so called “Zebras”, with technology, to make the scalable – so called “unicorns”.
The Lessons
What is your superpower?
Getting things done, and getting them done in extremely difficult environments. I think this largely goes back to how I was brought up, coming into a country where for instance, I didn't speak the language until I went to kindergarten. Learning the skill of accomplishing certain tasks and taking over responsibility, no matter in how hard a situation might have been, is what makes me, me. I had to learn repeatedly, how to connect between adjacent fields and translate between different disciplines, between different cultures and manage to deliver outcomes simultaneously.
The Inspiration
What’s the most surprising thing on your entrepreneurial journey?
I think in the beginning I really thought that you need to have a big vision, and you need to be unique, that you need to inspire the entire world when you are a founder. Now, after a few ventures later and as I moved through this entrepreneurial journey, I noticed the most the important thing is relentless execution.
The most important thing I learned for myself is to just keep going, even when you go in small steps, even when you go in circles. With every step you go, you are in a different environment, and you might then suddenly identify opportunities that you could not have seen when you were one step back. I noticed how much more this perspective and the progress you take this way is important to me now, compared to my beginnings as an entrepreneur.
What’s a recommendation you have for someone who would like to go more into execution mode?
Sometimes when I get really stuck, I take an empty piece of paper and a pen, and just start writing “I'm stuck, I'm stuck, I'm stuck” until something else comes to mind and I do not feel stuck anymore. And following from that, I will be in a flow mode. I then structure a bit my notes and thinking, and from that I am back on track. It’s an easy thing to do and I highly recommend it to try it out if you ever feel like this too.
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