A graduate of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and President of the Stanford Australia Association, Surtees was Yahoo!’s first US Vice President and General Manager of Commerce, at a time when the global business had a market capitalisation of $US125bn and sat inside running 20% of the pageviews of Yahoo! when it was one of the top 20 most valuable companies in the US.
Locally, Surtees co-founded Zeetings, which was acquired by Canva and laid the groundwork for Canva for Presentations, a world’s-first cloud-based presentation platform now used in more than 1.5 billion Canva presentations since 2021. He has also had a long-standing role as Chairman of Entrepreneurs’ Programme Committee and the Catalysing AI Opportunity Fund Committee at the Australian Department of Industry, Science, Energy, and Resources.
In addition to his new role at Food Ladder, Surtees chairs the board of Better Breathing Foundation, a not-for-profit contributing to vital research on chronic lung diseases, and sits on the board of the Menzies Leadership Foundation.
Supporting a period of growth and innovation
Surtees’ appointment comes as Food Ladder readies itself for huge scale following a partnership with IBM to integrate its watsonx artificial intelligence (AI) portfolio into Food Ladder’s educational program with ambitions to expand to more than 1,000 schools by 2030 and supplement the meals of more than 25 million young Australians.
“Food Ladder seeks to mitigate one of the world’s most pressing issues by addressing food security as well as concepts like circular economy, health, and human welfare – and is pioneering a new pedagogy by integrating AI to achieve its goal of putting nutritious food on the tables of young people across the nation,” said Tony Surtees, incoming Chair of Food Ladder.
“The Food Ladder program helps to enhance both teaching and learning across communities from remote through to urban areas, bringing together the transformative power of hands-on real-world experiences – planting, growing, and harvesting food – with the power of AI-reinforced learning,” he said.
“Using technology in this way has the potential to change lives by endowing upon students from all backgrounds the positive experience of growing food and producing a tangible result flowing from their own efforts. This is changing the lived experience of students in a unique and most impactful way and demonstrates how their own efforts can result in things of value.”
“We are delighted to attract someone of Tony’s calibre to Chair the Food Ladder Board,” said Kelly McJannett, CEO and co-founder of Food Ladder.
“Tony brings a wealth of experience across government, not-for-profit, and commercialisation, which will be an asset to Food Ladder as it moves into the next phase of tackling Australia’s food insecurity crisis,” she said.
“Tony has worn many hats, as an entrepreneur and builder of new digital technology, a mentor, a leader in governance and a strategist. Importantly, he has been a leader in the use of artificial intelligence to help organisations grow. We look forward to learning from him.”