This Committee of 100 Masterclass for Individuals event will focus on strategies for effective personal marketing, building strong professional networks, and cultivating meaningful mentorship.

The Master Classes for Individuals series is designed to provide practical guidance from accomplished professionals to help individuals advance in their careers. Over the years, our events have consistently highlighted the importance of engaging in effective personal marketing, having a strong network inside and outside of the organizations that you are part of, and developing mentors to achieve professional success.

Our accomplished panelists included Raj Gupta, Co-Chair of the Board of Advisors at Johns Hopkins Gupta-Klinsky India Institute and former CEO of Rohm and Haas; Bob Lee, Chairman of the Board at Blue Shield of California and Committee of 100 Member; and Deb Liu, former President and CEO of Ancestry and Committee of 100 Board Member.

Audience will have the opportunity to ask questions during the Q&A session at the end of the webinar.

Peter Young, Chair of the Asian American Career Ceilings Initiative, Committee of 100 New York Regional Chair, and Committee of 100 Member, will moderate the discussion.

Raj Gupta
Co-Chair of the Board of Advisors at Johns Hopkins Gupta-Klinsky India Institute;
Former CEO of Rohm and Haas

Raj Gupta was born in a small village in Uttar Pradesh, India. As a 22-year-old in Spring 1968, he came to the United States with only $8 in his pocket to do graduate studies in Operations Research/Computer Science at Cornell. He built a 39-year career at the global Fortune 500 specialty materials company Rohm and Haas, where he retired as Chairman and CEO in April 2009.

Over his career, he has served as a director at 15 public companies across a wide range of industries, including Hewlett Packard, DuPont, Arconic/Howmet, Delphi/Aptiv, Airgas, Tyco and Avantor. He also held long-term Board Chair positions at Delphi/Aptiv (7 years) and Avantor (12 years), both Fortune 500 companies. In addition, he has served on the boards of six private companies, including Vanguard Group, IRI, StrozFriedberg, and Aceto. Gupta received a BTech(Hons) in Mechanical Engineering from IITBombay in 1967, followed by an MS in Operations Research/Computer Science from Cornell in 1969 and an MBA in Finance in 1971 from Drexel University.

After retiring from Rohm and Haas Company, Gupta and his wife Kamla established their family’s Ujala Foundation (which means “light” in Hindi), focusing on education and healthcare, equally directed to India and the U.S. Since its inception, the Ujala Foundation has contributed towards an endowed professor at Hopkins, initial funding for the Drexel University Gupta Governance Institute, fellowships at Drexel’s Business School and Cornell University’s School of Biomedical Engineering, and other causes, including Gupta’s alma mater IITBombay, and several civic and cultural organizations in India, such as Pratham and AIF, and the United States, such as the Philadelphia Zoo, Philadelphia Art Museum, and the Franklin Institute. To date, the Johns Hopkins Gupta-Klinsky India Institute represents the Ujala Foundation’s single largest commitment.

Gupta and Kamla split their time between suburban Philadelphia, PA and Bonita Springs, FL. They are parents to two daughters and grandparents to three boys. Gupta documented his personal and professional journey in a book titled Eight Dollars and a Dream: My American Journey, written in collaboration with Syd Havely and published in 2016.

Bob Lee
Chairman of the Board at Blue Shield of California;
Committee of 100 Member

At the time of his retirement from Pacific Bell (now a part of AT&T) in May 1998, Bob Lee was a corporate Executive Vice President and President of Business Communications Services, a business unit which included responsibility for $3B in revenue, $1B in direct expense, 15,000 employees and the establishment of two new subsidiaries: Pacific Bell Internet Services and Pacific Bell Network Integration.

During his twenty-six year career, he managed work groups in operations, sales, and marketing. Among his specific jobs at Pacific Bell, he was the Executive Vice President of Marketing and Sales for five years from 1987-1992. In this capacity, he was responsible for all brand management, product management, market strategy and sales for the consumer and business markets. Several major accomplishments in this role were the expansion of distribution channels to sales agents (a first among the regional Bell operating companies) and extensive market segmentation which had major implications to products and channels. Both measures resulted in revenue growth rates greater than the overall national telecommunications market. In 1997, he negotiated the deal with the San Francisco Giants that resulted in naming their ballpark, “Pacific Bell Park.”

Lee is currently a director for two companies. Blue Shield of California is a not-for-profit company with revenues of approximately $14B. He has been on the board since November of 2004. He has been the Chairman of the Board since 2012. Lee has been on the board of Broadvision (NASDAQ: BVSN), an e-commerce software company with revenues in the $60M range, since September 2004. He chairs the compensation committee and serves on the audit committee.

Lee is also active in several nonprofit groups. He is the former Chairman of the Board of Youth Tennis Advantage, a nonprofit group serving Bay Area inner city kids with tennis and tutoring. He is also the former Chairman of Committee of 100. He is also a past board member of the Asian Pacific Fund, serving the Asian American nonprofit community in the Bay Area. Additionally, he is a member of the Board of Councilors for U.S.C.’s School of Engineering. Currently, he is serving as a Big Brother in the Big Brother/Big Sister Program of the Bay Area.

Lee received his Bachelor’s of Science degree from the University of Southern California in 1970. He received his MBA from U.C. Berkeley in 1972. In his spare time, Lee enjoys tennis, golf and traveling. He and his wife, Carolyn, live in Moraga, California. They have two grown daughters who have families of their own.

Deb Liu
Former President and CEO of Ancestry;
Committee of 100 Board Member

Prior to joining Ancestry, Deb Liu was a senior executive at Facebook where she created and led Facebook’s Marketplace, where millions of people buy and sell from one another. She also led the development of Facebook’s first mobile ad product for apps and its mobile ad network, in addition to building the company’s games business and its payments platform, including Facebook Pay. Named by PaymentsSource as one of the most influential women in payments and one of Business Insider’s most powerful female engineers, Liu has worked in the tech industry for over 18 years. Prior to Facebook, she spent several years in product roles at PayPal and eBay, including leading the integration between the two products.

Actively involved with promoting diversity and women in tech, she is the founder of Women In Product, a nonprofit to connect and support women in the product management field. Liu serves on the board of Intuit, and she’s a seed investor and advisor to several startups. She also holds several payments and commerce-related patents.

Liu received a BS in Civil Engineering from Duke University and an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. She lives in California with her husband and three children, and she enjoys chronicling their family adventures in her Mommy School comic.

Peter Young
CEO and President of Young & Partners;
Committee of 100 New York Regional Chair and Board Member

Peter Young is CEO of Young & Partners, a boutique investment banking firm focused on the life science and chemical industries. He manages the firm and is actively involved in client transactions and financings. Under his leadership, Young & Partners has established and maintained its position as a highly regarded firm serving the corporate strategy, M&A, restructuring and financing needs of clients worldwide. He was previously head of industry groups at Salomon Brothers, Schroders and Lehman Brothers, a senior private equity executive with J.H. Whitney & Co. and a senior member of Bain & Co., the corporate strategy firm.

Young received a BA in Economics from Yale, an MS in Accounting from NYU, and MBA from Harvard Business School where he graduated with Distinction as a Baker Scholar. He is a CPA and a Chartered Global Management Accountant. He serves on a number of boards of directors, both corporate and non-profit and is a board member of Société de Chimie Industrielle, a leading life science and chemical industry non-profit organization and on the Editorial Advisory Board of Pharmaceutical Executive.