Bio
Fascinated by how leaders and individuals alike must reinvent their approaches to excel in an entrepreneurial age, Amy is author of The Creator’s Code: The Six Essential Skills of Extraordinary Entrepreneurs forthcoming from Simon and Schuster. The book distills the six essential skills shared by 200 leading entrepreneurs who shape our future—skills that can be learned, practiced, and passed on. The book showcases counterintuitive insights from the founders of LinkedIn, SpaceX, Tesla Motors, PayPal, eBay, Spanx, Chipotle, Under Armour, JetBlue, Zipcar, Airbnb, Dropbox, and Theranos, among others. The Creator’s Code is designed to offer a fast-track guide to outsmart, outpace, and create enduring companies in the rapidly changing global economy.
A strategic advisor, entrepreneur, and lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Wilkinson has spoken on innovation and entrepreneurship at the Wall Street Journal Women in the Economy conference, The Economist Innovation Summit, Federal Reserve Board of Governors, National Governor’s Association, and International Council of Small Business Summit, as well as national media outlets such as FoxNews and CNN.
Amy’s background is in international business and trade including serving in the White House as a Senior Policy Advisor and White House Fellow. Working with the cabinet-ranked U.S. Trade Representative, Amy outlined U.S.-China trade policy, coordinated congressional passage of the Central America Free Trade Agreement, and helped negotiate the Panama, Peru, and Colombia trade agreements. As an international business executive, she led strategy teams for McKinsey & Company in the firm’s London and San Francisco offices and cross-border mergers and acquisitions teams for JP Morgan in New York and Latin America. Amy spent five years living in Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil and is founder of Alegre, an international art-export company that provided indigenous artisans with access to the U.S. market. She began her career as the youngest ever Chief of Protocol for the United States Embassy in Mexico.
Amy was born in Hong Kong and has lived and traveled extensively overseas. She has studied at Oxford University and The University of Salamanca and received a Rotary International Scholarship to live in Spain and a 2015 Eisenhower Fellowship to travel in China and Singapore. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and an Ewing Marian Kauffman Foundation grantee for her research on high scale entrepreneurship. Amy holds a BA, MA, and MBA from Stanford University. Her writing has been featured in The Economist, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Washington Post, USA Today, and Stanford Social Innovation Review, among other publications.