Lyel is currently Visiting Faculty at the MIT Morningside Academy of Design where he lectures on Impact Entrepreneurship and Responsible Innovation.

He is building the connective layer between purpose-driven capital and exceptional founders whose companies create value without extracting it — helping asset owners access early-stage founders with the ambition to reshape industries in the public interest. He writes Salt, a newsletter on capital, technology, and building things worthy of our best ambition.

Previously, he was Visiting Faculty at Cornell Tech, where he was Head of the Public Interest Technology Studio and led programming for all graduate students on responsible innovation. He also co-founded the Startups & Society Initiative (SSI) — a non profit research project backed by the Ford Foundation and Omidyar to support founders and investors with responsible innovation practices. As part of SSI, Lyel co-founded the Responsible Innovation Founders Summit — an annual event that has attracted 700+ global tech leaders including founders backed by Y-Combinator, General Catalyst, and Sequoia, and published the Responsible Innovation Primer for Founders — a distillation of 100+ interviews of influential tech and civil society leaders about building tech companies responsibly.

Lyel was a Co-founder of Swayable (YC W18), which uses AI + data science to create more persuasive media for many of the worlds leading advocacy organizations, social + political campaigns, and brands, including the ACLU, Airbnb, and Anthropic. He has also worked with Signal, Google, Girls Who Code, New America, The Rockefeller Foundation, among others.

Following nearly a decade of building technology education and economic mobility programs in under-invested neighborhoods across the country, Lyel became an early executive at The Flatiron School — the country's leading school for web and mobile development that has worked with the White House and The City of New York on groundbreaking economic mobility initiatives. Under Lyel's leadership, Flatiron Precollege built a diverse, mission-driven, 60-person team, expanded to 13 cities, achieved 10x year-over-year revenue growth, and built teacher-training programs with 100 NPS.

His writing has appeared in the Stanford Social Innovation Review Techonomy, Ford Foundation, and ImpactAlpha; his work has been featured in The New York Times, Wired, TechCrunch, Fast Company, Bloomberg; and he has been quoted in the Financial Times on impact investing and business models. He has spoken at the U.S. State Department, Harvard, Yale, MIT, Google, Spotify, Merck, SXSW, Techonomy, 500 Global, ReFrame Venture, Sorenson Impact, MozFest, VentureCrush, 2050.do, the US State Department, the Mexico Foundation for Science, among others.

Lyel previously served on the boards of the Centre for Social Innovation, The Bronx Academy for Software Engineering, and Sourcemap and currently is a Board member of MEET.org which brings Israeli and Palestinian teenagers together for joint technology and leadership education.

A helpless thalassophile, Lyel continues to paddle into heavy surf and complex systems, perhaps irrationally believing that technology can still serve the public good — and that one day he'll be spat out of a proper five-second barrel. In the meantime, he's prepared to take the tumbles.