About

Not quite a professional bio…

Payal Arora was born in India but was shipped off to San Francisco in her teens after causing much trouble with her Marxist artistic experiments in Kerala. Instead of starting her own Hare Krishna club in California, she waitressed and did street art, a perfect combination to remind her that poverty wasn’t that sexy after all. She sold her soul soon after and became an art dealer, selling expensive art with the right mix of cheap wine and cheese, but thankfully this was interrupted by her love affair with New York where she stumbled into research. In came her passion for global culture, technology and communication which she pursued by accumulating some good old ivy league degrees from Harvard and Columbia University so she could say stuff like ‘I went to school in Boston.’ Since then, she has been studying digital usage among the global poor and consulting for numerous private and public sector institutions like GE, KPMG, UNESCO, and Dutch Brewers. To prove she isn’t just traveling all the time and eating great food, she has to publish articles and books including her latest ‘The Next Billion Users” book with Harvard Press. She is currently a Professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam and calls Amsterdam her home.