Bruce Cahan

Co-founder & president, Urban Logic, Inc.; Ashoka Fellow social entrepreneur; Fellow, CodeX

Bruce Cahan is co-founder and president of Urban Logic, Inc., a New York nonprofit qualified in California, an Ashoka Fellow social entrepreneur and a Stanford CodeX Fellow.

After a decade of practicing corporate and municipal finance law at Weil Gotshal & Manges in New York City, and two years as managing director of a Hong Kong merchant bank, Bruce became an early pioneer in urban information systems that leveraged geospatial technologies, and prepared cities to cope with their everyday and extreme disasters. An emergency responder at the Mayor’s Command Center after 9/11, Bruce realized that cities and the businesses, NGOs and others operating in them lack a common incentive, pre-disaster, to improve regional quality of life so as to earn credit ratings through improve through comprehensive disaster mitigation strategies as part of daily operating and capital investments. This required a unique knowledge of finance, law, technology and urban operations.

Instead of creating another credit rating agency, Bruce moved to Silicon Valley where he is creating GoodBank™(IO), as a high-transparency bank that uses sustainable resiliency® underwriting and new social financial literacy and transparency tools for showing the bank’s and its customers’ impacts, and how conscious banking can make the bank and the banking system safer.

Bruce was a a nonresidential fellow of Stanford’s Center for Internet & Society (2006-2010), where he remains an active blogger and community member.

Bruce has a private law practice, and is a member of the California, New York and Pennsylvania bars. Bruce’s advice on geospatial technologies, sustainable resiliency and disaster preparedness is sought domestically and internationally.