Nilesh Ashra

Nilesh Ashra

Founder/CEO in Portland, OR, he/him/his

About

Nilesh is the founder of OK Tomorrow, a specialized content company that delivers inspiration and innovation to creative companies. His entire career has been focussed on creating the right environment for the creative leaps and bravery behind important innovation.

Contact

LinkedIn

Work Experience

2022 — Now

OK Tomorrow exists to provide inspiration and innovation to creative organizations.

We produce fast-paced entertainment to help your team stay ahead of emerging technology, science, innovation, and the future of brand.

Think of it like "HBO for business."

2020 — Now
Founder/CEO at Pragmatic Futurism

My whole career, I've been helping make future technologies easier to understand and work with. So that great companies and teams can find and maintain their sweet spot.

The three problems I think every brand and creative organization has today with emerging technology:

- How do we up-level our knowledge?
- How do we work better across internal silos?
- How do we get faster at moving from concept to pilot?

We're here to help you address these head-on.

Clients say it's more fun than it sounds. Just ask them!

2019 — 2020
Independent Consultant / Creative Director at Freelance

Helping product, design and marketing teams out.
Bringing some know-how to the innovation, technology and services projects.
Always trying to make the hard stuff fun for teams.
Ex-leader of big teams/initiatives.
Hands on coder.
Full of ideas.
Sometimes they're good!

2013 — 2018
Portland, OR

I founded W+K Lodge in 2014, and served as the head of creative and technology.

Created and managed new digital team of ~30, with expertise in digital product and brand experiences. We utilized emerging technology to help brands be more useful and joyful to their customers.

Very proud to have been given the chance to grow a new creative team inside the world's best independent creative agency.

2011 — 2013
Creative Technology Lead at Wieden & Kennedy
Portland, OR

I worked on: Nike, American Express, Coca-Cola Global, P+G, Dodge.

2006 — 2011
Lead Developer at POKE
London, England

Through the 4.5 years that I was at Poke I was part of a technology team that produced the widest variety of work that I've known.

As Lead Developer, my role was to work with the creative and production teams respectively to make sure we'd deliver really, really good work -- on time and high quality software.

There is barely a corner of modern, open-source-stack web development that I didn't have the opportunity to work on.

In the last 2.5 years, I championed and led the migration of primary day-to-day development from PHP to Python. It was challenging (from a management, production and practical standpoint) at the start, but a deliberate and phased rollout of Python in appropriate projects turned into a full Python dev team. By the end of my tenure we had half a dozen well-drilled Python developers who had delivered dozens of projects.

Speaking

2024
Innovation, Creativity, Inspiration at Various Global Brand Offsites
2023
Cannes, France

Participated in Future Gazers panel

2017
Austin, TX

Even the smartest computers are still pretty dumb. We want to beat up the theory that we’re all going to die from robots. Experts and skeptics in the space of AI, experience design, and innovation will talk about the "useless" things that are being made with AI as well as the genuine advancements in a conversation that will examine where the AI apocalypse is really at, and if it’s even ever going to happen.

Awards

2018
Innovation & Design from FastCompany
2016
40 under 40 from AdAge

Education

2002 — 2005
BSc, Artificial Intelligence at University of Manchester
Manchester