Sponsored by the Alumni Association of Princeton University

Moderator:

Steven A. Kelts

Panelists:     

Dina Nayeri ’01
Faculty Member, University of St. Andrews, Scotland

Blake Parsons ’11 
Lead Product Manager, DoorDash AI Support

Eno Reyes ’21 
Chief Technology Officer, Factory

Robert Gordon III *89 
Senior Strategic Leader, AI and Digital Innovation, DSS, Inc.

PANELISTS

Dina Nayeri ’01
Dina Nayeri’s acclaimed books, essays and stories are published in more than 20 countries and taught in schools across Europe and the U.S. “Who Gets Believed?” was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award. “The Ungrateful Refugee” was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and won Germany’s Geschwister-Scholl-Preis. The Observer called it “a work of astonishing, insistent importance.” A former fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris and winner of a National Endowment for the Arts literature grant and the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature Paul Engle Prize, Nayeri has written essays and stories that have been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, “Best American Short Stories” and many other publications. A graduate of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Harvard Business School and Princeton, Nayeri is a reader at the University of St. Andrews. 

Blake Parsons ’11
Blake Parsons is a product leader building AI-powered customer support across chat and voice at DoorDash. His current focus is improving AI agent performance with the goal of replacing Tier 1 support while maintaining strong customer outcomes. Previously, he was director of product management at BirchAI (acquired), leading generative AI products for enterprise healthcare, and earlier helped build Uber Eats ads and led driver growth and operations products at Uber. He began his career in strategy and operations consulting at Bain & Company. Parsons earned a B.S.E. in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton and a Master of Engineering from the University of Cambridge. He represented both universities as a varsity heavyweight rower. Outside of work, he is an AI tinkerer, aspiring mechanic and occasional chef, and the father of a 2-year-old.

Eno Reyes ’21
Eno Reyes is co-founder and CTO of Factory, a Sequoia Capital-backed startup building an enterprise platform to enable, deploy and measure the impact of frontier software development agents called Droids. His interests span cognitive science, computer science and artificial intelligence. Previously, he was a research engineer at Hugging Face and a software engineer at Microsoft. Reyes was named to the 2025 Forbes 30 Under 30 North America list in artificial intelligence.

Robert Gordon III *89
Robert Gordon is the senior AI strategist of Document Storage Systems, Inc., an information technology and software development company focused on veterans health. A graduate of Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), Gordon serves as a board member, secretary and governance chair of Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID). He is a former deputy under secretary of defense for military community and family policy in the Pentagon, and former president of Be the Change Inc. His 26-year military career included overseeing the American Politics program as an academy professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He is the recipient of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service, SPIA’s Edward P. Bullard Distinguished Alumnus Award and the National Conference on Citizenship’s Franklin Award.