Bridging Worlds and Building Trust Through Responsible Tech and Empathy
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Lyel Resner
This story is part of the Architects of Impact series, highlighting stories of innovation that demonstrate how our Community is mobilizing to ensure a world that works for all people and the planet.
Education is everything for Lyel Resner. From a classroom in New York City’s Spanish Harlem neighborhood to a lecture hall at Cornell University or MIT, you’ll find him investing in youth. Lyel has dedicated his career—a mixture of tech and education—to the potential of future generations.
That early drive to create access and opportunity would eventually shape a career at the intersection of education, technology, and systems change.
From Harlem Classrooms to Global Ed Tech
Lyel has more than a decade of experience in educational technology in Silicon Valley, the Middle East, and his New York City home. He was an early executive of the Flatiron School, ran the Public Interest Technology Studio at Cornell Tech, is a co-founder of Swayable, and is currently Visiting Faculty at MIT, bringing a new level of innovation in equity and opportunity to our Community. He is a trusted voice for top purpose-driven founders and investors, aligning capital strategy, business models, and mission outcomes.
Lyel’s purpose and passion were sparked while working as a teacher in Spanish Harlem, a neighborhood that has some of the highest unemployment and poverty rates in the city despite being adjacent to one of the wealthiest zip codes in the United States. Young people from this neighborhood, who Lyel says “are an extraordinary wellspring of creativity and talent,” are not afforded the same privileges and opportunities as those just a few blocks south of them.
As he grappled with this inequity in New York and the world at large, Lyel knew that there was so much untapped potential. Those talented students could be future problem-solvers, leaders, and peacemakers. “It felt existentially important to broaden the scope of solutions and problems by broadening the set of people with access to those tools and power,” he says.
This feeling has been a throughline in his tech career. Lyel saw how tech was blooming in all directions, but it wasn’t built with everyone in mind, nor was it being built by a representative group. He saw the deep need and moral imperative to widen the aperture on who gets to build the future. A mentor recently pointed out that, all along, Lyel’s life’s work has been about “bringing dignity into spaces where it hasn’t been prioritized.”
It’s this same philosophy that guided his work at Cornell Tech, where he launched and led the Public Interest Tech Studio’s programming for 400+ graduate students on responsible innovation. The Studio equips graduate students with the skills to design, launch, and scale technology that serves public needs and advances social impact while blending technical expertise with real‑world problem-solving focused on equity.
Building Peace Through Code and Community
Lyel’s deep personal commitment to serving all youth led to his role on the board of MEET, or Middle East Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow. The program, based at MIT, offers a three-year fellowship to Palestinian and Israeli youth that uses computer science, entrepreneurship, and leadership training as a foundation for building shared futures. Founded by MIT students and faculty, MEET is designed not as a direct reconciliation program, but as a high-trust, high-rigor space where young people from both communities build long-term relationships while solving real-world problems together.
For Lyel, MEET represents the convergence of two life-long commitments: youth development and building across deep divides. On October 7, 2023, when the Israeli-Hamas war began, he went all in for MEET. The stakes became even more personal, the work more urgent. In a time of profound polarization, he stood with the students and staff working across conflict lines to create a better future.
“They’re doing this with all the skin in the game that they can,” he says of the MEET fellows. “They have all the real grief that they can possibly hold, and yet they still find the space for nuance and grace to see that they share a connection. I can’t think of a more profound expression of people who realize their fates are intertwined than our kids.”
These experiences made Forward Global a natural next step. As a member of our Community, he brings a critical perspective on socially responsible tech. Forward Global, he says, is the right hub for long-term thinking and has the right people who want to go that length with him.
Lyel believes in a responsible technology ecosystem that absorbs and nurtures people’s best instincts, rather than compromises them. “We need the capital and structure, and models of companies that contribute to the public interest,” he says. By giving youth the permission, motivation, and empowerment to be part of the technology ecosystem, there can be a more equitable future.
