Meet the Speakers

Jen Yang Weedn, Vice President, Business Development, is an experienced business development leader who has created growth through partnerships while at start-ups in the advertising, media and search spaces, as well as larger media and tech companies including MTV, AOL and Myspace. Jen joined LinkedIn in 2011, and now leads business development for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions and Sales Solutions, which includes creating the partnership strategy, executing both product and go-to-market partnerships, and managing partner programs for these fast-growing businesses. At LinkedIn, Jen is also on the advisory council for the Women In Product organization.

Svetlana Vaz is a Technical Lead/Product Manager at Adobe. Her main focus at Adobe has been guiding a cross-functional team through the entire strategic and tactical product lifecycle, from ideation and roadmap to development, refinement, ongoing optimization, and growth of tools that optimize the Sales and Marketing CRM Platform Engineering Operations. She enjoys working on the vision and strategy of the internal products used by the sales & marketing teams.

Svetlana is also passionate about mentoring, volunteering and coaching college students on IT career development. Outside of work, she enjoys hiking, traveling, spending time with her 4 year old and exploring the different cuisines of the world.

Parvati Ashok is a Director of Engineering leading all UI/UX development for a large engineering organization delivering Oracle’s Identity Cloud Service, a key offering supporting all Oracle cloud customers. Parvati has over 20 years of experience in building and leading UI teams for Identity Management, enterprise security and telecom billing and has worked in several companies including Portal Software, and HP ArcSight.

Parvati is passionate about building User Interfaces that are intuitive and easy to use and provide a competitive advantage. Parvati is experienced in driving company wide UI and UX initiatives to ensure the UI efforts across the organization is consistent and scalable. She is skilled at leading large global teams, instituting development processes, architecture and guidelines to ensure a premier UI/UX.

In addition, Parvati has been mentoring and guiding women engineers and is a member of Oracle’s Women’s Leadership group.

Parvati has a M.S in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts and Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from the University of Madras, India.

Gopal Krishnan is the Engineering Director, Creative Production & Promotion. His team enables effective production and distribution of creatives to support the launch and promotion of our content via Netflix product and marketing. Our products are used to ensure successful launch of all titles on Netflix, whether it's by creating the metadata and assets (artwork/trailers) for these titles or through localization of the service into the different languages that Netflix supports globally. We also build products to promote our titles via marketing across paid, owned, and earned media (e.g. marketing planning, programmatic ad optimization, interfaces for press, etc). Previously, he has led teams that built the personalized Netflix homepage, global Yahoo homepage, crawl and information retrieval for Yahoo search, etc.

Tina is a Sr UX Design Lead at PayPal, and spearheads MarTech enterprise software tooling design. She has been in the design industry for over 3 decades. Before PayPal, she was a Sr UX Designer in FInTech enterprise tooling at Google, and enjoyed a 20 year tenure at IBM in UI/UX enterprise software design and was a Design Team Lead. Tina was an early Diversity speaker within IBM, an IBM patent brainstorming mentor, served on the Billy DeFrank Board of Directors for a short time, and is a professional UX/UI Mentor. Her passion has always been about how people and things work, and more importantly, why they work. Her drive in life is to help people think differently to facilitate ethical innovation for our world. Tina is an artist, craftsman, outdoorswoman, and perpetual creator.

12+ years of full-time experience in Product Management and Engineering, building global teams and software for enterprise and consumer products.

Passionate about designing minimalist and customer centric experiences. Strengths are data driven customer focused product management, complex large scale software releases with multiple partners, and innovating to simplify.

Anjali has over 20+ years' experience in designing, developing and leading teams to build software solutions for security services; enterprise applications for telecom and management solutions for the wireless industry along with sound management background. In her current capacity at Cisco, she is the Partner Security Architect and Security Officer at Cisco Customer Experience’s Platform Security Group. She is currently leading the Security Center of Excellence initiative and her main focus is developing strategies and solutions for improving the security and privacy posture of Cisco Products. Her specialty is navigating complex landscapes in the areas of container security, data governance, and cyberspace privacy issues. Anjali has been an avid speaker, an influencer in Networking With A Purpose Silicon Valley series in areas of data privacy and cybersecurity. Her expertise is at the intersection of Machine Learning, Networking, and Cybersecurity. She holds a Patent in the field of workload scheduling based on a credit-based mechanism. She is also an Executive Producer of "Diva Motherhood" music video celebrating "mainstream women". Anjali holds a Masters in Computer Science from Dalhousie University, Canada, and a Bachelors in Electronics Engineering from the University of Pune, India.

Deepika Gupta is a Security Architect/ Technical Leader in the InfoSec team at Cisco. Currently, she is the product owner and technical lead for Continuous Security Buddy (CSB) product for OpenStack and OpenShift which provides automated security posture validation of private cloud tenants. Before joining InfoSec team, Deepika was a Security Advocate and Manager/ Technical Leader in Cisco’s Cloud Business unit working on security and quality assurance of OpenStack based NFVi solution.

Deepika has also hosted and presented at Cisco’s internal security conference for several years. She is also a pillar lead for Cisco’s Women in Cyber Security.

Nazanin Delam is a Senior Software Engineer at Netflix. Nazanin is passionate about UI development, she loves JavaScript. At Netflix, she works on UI features on the WEB to enhance user experience across devices. Prior to Netflix, she worked in the Finance industry as a Software Architect for four years.

Nazanin is dedicated to advancing the role of women in engineering. She volunteers with Hour of Code teaching high school girls how to code and serves as a member of Women Who Code and Women Tech Makers to mentor engineers.

When she’s not working, you’re most likely to find Nazanin building AI applications and robots with JS, exploring the world, playing games, or curled up with a good book.

Karuna is Senior Software Engineer at IBM's Silicon Valley Lab. She came to USA to pursue her Master's in Software Engineering from San Jose State University and started her career as a Cloud Engineer at IBM.

Currently she works as a DevOps Engineer on ensuring Enterprise applications to run reliably using latest cloud-native technologies. Her expertise is around creating scalable and robust infrastructure to run Hybrid SAAS applications on Kubernetes running on different cloud providers. Automation and seamless CI/CD is the goal with the big aim of one click deploy for every new product..

She is an avid reader, blogger, enthusiastic learner, socially and physically active and a cheerful person. Follow her @goyalkaruna

Callie is a Data Scientist in the Search Ranking team of the Search cloud at Salesforce. Her team's goal is surfacing the most relevant search results for every user at scale, by ranking potential results based on various abstracted features. The ranking team trains and AB tests models for thousands of organizations, and is constantly building a better system at larger scale. Prior to her data science career, Callie was a particle physicist doing research at CERN on the top quark, and with her ATLAS group held the record for the most precise measurement of the top quark in the world for two years. Outside of work, she enjoys yoga, travel, and building projects.

Rama is a Principal Software Engineer in the Search cloud at Salesforce. Her team focuses on building a complete platform that allows customers to gather data, train Machine Learning models, do Experimentation and operationalize the models. She loves building platforms that solve customer problems. Prior to Salesforce, she was at Microsoft for 16 years where she gained extensive experience working with Cloud technologies in the areas of Data, Analytics and Machine Learning. Outside of work, she enjoys Yoga, gardening, travel and spending time with her active family.

Jutta Williams is a Sr. data protection Technical Program Manager at Facebook. Formerly a Security Engineer and Product Manager for DoD working on crypto systems, she later served as the Chief Privacy, Security and Compliance Officer for two large integrated healthcare companies. She was recruited to Silicon Valley in 2015 by Google where she eventually led data protection for their Medical AI research team. She is the former Head of the US delegation to ISO for AI Standards. Ms. Williams graduated with highest distinction from Carnegie Mellon University, earning a Masters of Science in Information Security, Policy and Management.

Daria Naidenov is a Senior Digital Designer at T-Mobile where she helps push the creative envelope through social, web, and digital branded experiences. Previously, she worked with a variety of start-ups and SaaS companies to create and execute design strategies to move each individual company’s brand identity forward. Daria received her Bachelor of Arts in Digital Technology and Culture from Washington State University. She enjoys exploring the intersection of art and technology, where creative conceptual ideas develop into compelling digital solutions.

Rebecca is a product manager and senior software engineer at New Relic. Her tech cred is from a full time coding bootcamp; before she was in tech she studied History and French. She enjoys solving problems, learning from customers, and learning new languages from Netflix’s array of international reality tv programs.

Caroline has worked with enterprise blockchain technologies for over two and half years. Presently, she is the lead engineer for the IBM Blockchain extension for Visual Studio Code, an open source IDE which provides developers with the tools they need to quickly and easily develop smart contracts and blockchain applications. She also plays a role in the community as a Hyperledger Technical Ambassador. Prior to her role in blockchain, she worked on IBM's Watson and enterprise integration products. Outside of work, Caroline enjoys spending time with her two children.

A technology professional with 15 years’ experience and B.S. Computer Engineering degree from San Jose State University, Seema has marketed cybersecurity solutions at Juniper Networks, Check Point Software, Imperva and Webroot. Currently, she drives a cross-Microsoft vision around security, compliance and identity by supporting sales teams and delivering compelling content for awareness and adoption of their enterprise security solutions. Born and raised in Silicon Valley, she enjoys time with her two daughters, speaks English and Hindi fluently and is an avid Bollywood singer. Furthermore, Seema has visited 15 countries and studied in the exotic island country of Singapore.

Aruna is a global marketing leader who is passionate about digital transformation, workplace transformation, and DevOps. Her leadership vision is to elevate marketing into an engine that drives thought leadership and demand generation, with a direct impact to a company’s growth. She specializes in SaaS and digital marketing leading with data driven omni-channel marketing that contributes to the company’s revenue and profitability.

As the VP/CMO of Cisco’s market leading Webex Collaboration business, she is responsible for all aspects of marketing. Before coming to Cisco, she has held other leadership roles at CA Technologies, Juniper Networks and Hewlett Packard.

Nina Harding is the Chief of Global Partner Strategy & Programs for Google Cloud, leading a team that creates and develops partner strategy and programs across all partners that sell, service and build with Google Cloud technology.

In July, Nina launched Google Cloud Partner Advantage to the global market. From getting 100% partner attach commitments across all teams, creating dynamic incentives, to launching a deal registration and referral programs, all her efforts are directed toward enabling partners and strengthening their Google Cloud business for their future.

A 25+ year veteran in the IT sector, prior to joining Google Cloud she spent 13 years at SAP as Vice President of Global Business Development and Sales Program building SAP PartnerEdge for their expanding partner ecosystem. Previously she held various partner impacting roles at Microsoft, Cacheon and Oracle.

Born and raised in NYC, Karyn began her professional life as a journalist, working at Fox News and CNN. She bridged over to marketing, obsessed with understanding and explaining how technology drives innovation and improvement in all walks of life. Over the last 20+ years, Karyn has led marketing teams for companies including Cisco, Salesforce and LogicMonitor, and advised several start-ups on marketing strategy and revenue growth. She lives in the Bay Area where she raised two sons and a golden retriever. Karyn serves on the board of Directors for the Overground Railroad Project, an organization that supports asylum seekers on their journey to citizenship and is active with the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America. She drove for every school field trip.

Audrey Blackmon is a 28 year payments industry leader. As the SVP of Business Development – Americas for Verrency, she leads sales for North & South America.  Prior, she has held leadership roles at First Data, Worldpay and Vantiv as well has several other organizations.

Audrey brings many years of both professional and non-profit experiences. Audrey is the co-Founder and was Member of the Board of Directors for the Southeast Acquirers’ Association; she serves as an Advisors to the Board of Directors for Women in Electronic Transactions; and serves as a mentor at Plug and Play Tech Center in Silicon Valley.

Her passion for Foster Care youth started with her own experience as a former Foster Care child. After aging out of the system on her 18^th birthday, she went on to attend college, open her own business at 20 years old and continued on to run many successful businesses. Audrey has volunteered as a child advocate with CASA in her county.

Audrey has been married for 37 years and has 2 adult children. She is an avid basketball, soccer, track & field and football fan.  She has been known to catch a game whenever she travels.

Robin Leidenthal leads the Global Payment Partner team at eBay responsible for developing and managing eBay relationships with the card brands, other forms of payment, processors and sponsor banks. In addition, Robin represents eBay through industry groups such as ETA and others. Prior to joining eBay, Robin led the Visa US Acquiring Sales team and the Acquirer Processor Sales team.

Robin has over 30 years of banking and financial technology experience. Robin deeply understands emerging acquiring models such Payment Facilitators and Marketplaces, as well as traditional SMB and large merchant card not present acceptance. Robin brings traditional banking disciplines, including AML and KYC, as well as higher risk / frictionless onboarding experience to enable growth while balancing risk and brand exposure.

Robin has extensive global expansion experience, having built and managed large international teams and establishing global partner relationships. Robin's diverse experience from large banks to early, disruptive fin tech start-ups such as PayPal provide for a unique approach to enabling new and traditional acceptance models.

Uzma Makhdumi is currently Head of Payments Partnerships at Google where she helped launched Google Pay internationally in multiple markets. She now leads new business development initiatives for consumer payments globally working with banks, payment networks, regulators and financial technology companies to incubate new use cases to support consumers and merchants.

Prior to Google, Uzma was leading commercialization for Visa Digital and was also one of the early Product Managers for Mobile at Yahoo! where she managed their first revenue generating mobile products. She has also been a consultant at McKinsey advising high tech companies in the areas of strategy, growth and acquisition, and was an engineer at Bose Corporation working directly for the founder/CEO, Dr. Amar Bose.

Uzma double-majored in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, and Management Science from MIT and holds an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. She is also a certified leadership and executive coach, an Advisory Board member for RISE UP for Money2020 US to empower women leaders in Payments, and a startup advisor.

Prashanthi Ravanavarapu leads PayPal's Consumer Financial Services and Emerging Markets product teams. In her current role, she leads the teams focused on building products to improve customers financial health across the globe and building products for consumers in emerging markets. Prior to this, she was PayPal's Product Architect leading product innovation to solve the needs of the financially underserved. Prashanthi’s mission is to put a dent on global poverty through democratizing financial services for all. She believes in the intersection of profit and purpose and is enabling that at PayPal by bringing human centered design, lean and behavioral science to product innovation. She has had various roles in Data, Architecture, Strategy and Product Management. In addition to leading cross-functional teams focused on product innovation, she is a change agent and an intrapreneur. Prashanthi was also recently named as one of the most influential women in Payments in 2019.

Morgan leads Strategy and Programs for Google Cloud’s CTO Office, the mission of which is to foster collaborative innovation between Google and its most strategic customers around the world. Her technical focus area is AI, and she has a passion for Responsible AI. By keeping her finger on the pulse of the Office’s engagements, and leveraging the deep technical and industry expertise across the team, she identifies themes that are relevant and important for today’s technical leaders.

Morgan holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of British Columbia, and an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Nanneh is an Economist and Data Scientist at Amazon. She grew up in Los Angeles where she completed her BA at UCLA in Economics with a Minor in Mathematics, followed by a PhD in Economics at UC Irvine. Nanneh then joined Amazon’s global delivery speed team where she has developed causal and predictive models, designed and evaluated large-scale experiments, and led the science vision for new products affecting millions of customers. Her published papers study the timeline of STEM gender gaps and hiring discrimination by gender or age. Nanneh is a Chapter Lead in the Amazon Women Engineers program and mentors for Built by Girls.

Swati Jhawar is amongst the founding members of Microsoft Teams. She is a Product leader with more than a decade of experiences and proven impact across a wide range of global and industry-leading enterprise and consumer products. She specializes in crafting cohesive user experiences, incubation of new products, customer focused product strategy and has shipped user delight experiences in 181+ markets with cross-platform apps (Mobile and Desktop) and Web clients. Off work, she is a certified Scuba diver who aims to explore the remotest wrecks and reefs across the world.

Imani is a grateful wife, sister, daughter, parent of 2 dogs, athlete, and leader. She is most passionate about listening, learning, having diverse life experiences, and helping others. Her approach to triumphing over adversity and helping teams excel are based on what she has learned in life and refined in school and at work.

Most impressed by human resilience and unimpressed by titles and roles; she has leveraged life’s lessons to build and lead global teams at LinkedIn, Facebook, and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

She holds a B.S. from University of Notre Dame, a M.S. from St. Mary’s College of California, and two certifications because she loves to learn.

Janelle Hitz is Senior Designer at Disney Streaming Services, currently working on the Disney+ platform. Previously, she designed for gaming companies that include Electronic Arts and Blizzard Entertainment. She received her Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in Digital Media with a specialization in Interactive Media from the University of Central Florida. She enjoys executing the entire breadth of a design process and believes that building relationships across teams and disciplines is key to successful products. When she's not designing you can find her surfing, snowboarding, or playing video games. Janelle currently resides in the San Francisco Bay area with her husband and two corgis.

>Debarati is a product leader with a focus on product strategy & innovation. She thrives in challenging entrepreneurial environments and has a proven track record of driving teams towards goals through intense customer focus and out of the box thinking. She has the innate ability to operate in fast-paced environment with limited information. She comes with 12+ years of broad domestic and international experience in shaping and developing Platform and Products.

In her current role, she manages eBay’s Selling Platform. She started her career as a software engineer, has been a startup co-founder and has a keen eye for photography.

Krystal is a Software Engineer at Simple Habit, a mental health wellness app with a female CEO. She is committed to increasing the number of female and Latinx computer programmers. Krystal does this by giving technical talks and volunteering. In her talks, she seeks to give a face to those who are not usually represented amongst conference speakers. She believes the more you see, the more there will be.

Krystal is also a huge advocate of equal opportunities in the workforce, especially equal pay. In 2019 she was featured in the #NothingLess Micro Documentary by Hired. In 2018, she gave the talk “Applying Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In principles in technology” as part of the Visionary Voices program. You can reach Krystal through her website at www.krystal-flores.com.

Rashmi Gopinath is Managing Director at M12 (formerly known as Microsoft Ventures) and leads enterprise software, cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, devops, and AI/ML investments in US and Canada. She also leads the fund’s investments in India. Previously, Rashmi was an Investment Director at Intel Capital focused on investing in cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, and big data companies. She also led global business development for high-growth startups. Prior to that, she held product development and product marketing positions at GE and Oracle. Rashmi has an MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University and a Bachelor of Electronics Engineering from the University of Mumbai in India.

Ms. Adams is the leader of Cloud Innovation Services in IBM Services, North America. She is responsible for the business that performs sales, development, enhancement maintenance, and testing services for on premise and cloud applications. Ms. Adams has more than 25 years of consulting and leadership experience in IT strategy, systems and technology and complex program delivery. She has held several senior leadership roles within IBM, including leading Global Technology Services for the North America Industrial Market. She also led the Chemical, Oil & Gas Industry business supporting North America clients. Prior to her current role, Ms. Adams led the Digital Technology Services organization for Fujitsu Americas. Throughout her career, Ms. Adams has worked closely with clients to create technology strategies that align to their business objectives and key imperatives. Ms. Adams holds a Bachelor of Science degree from California State University, Chico, as well as an MBA from Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management. Ms. Adams currently lives in the Chicago area with her husband Rick and their four children. She is active in the community and sits on the Board of Directors for the Chicago Youth Centers, the Board of Trustees for the Hinsdale Community House, and the Board of Directors for the International Women’s Forum, Chicago.

As Head of the Innovation Network, Beth oversees Citi Ventures’ emerging technology practice. In collaboration with internal and external partners, Beth’s team stays abreast of frontier technologies and dives deep to understand and experiment with tech that intersects with Citi’s business. By pairing a deep understanding of a technology’s potential and limitations with insight into business priorities and client needs, Citi Ventures can advocate for and support the adoption of next gen technologies that have the potential to deliver net-new value for Citi clients.

Prior to joining Citi Ventures, Beth was a Managing Director at Alvarez & Marsal and provided technology advisory and management consulting services to financial services, healthcare and technology companies. Throughout her career, Beth has held Chief Technology Officer, CIO and tech leadership positions at Silicon Valley Bank, Charles Schwab, Blackhawk Network, Art.com, and Turner Broadcasting. She was also a part of the founding team at Manilla.com, where she set up and managed the San Francisco office, and led the startup’s product, design, engineering, and customer service teams.

Beth started her career as a software developer, systems analyst and DBA. She received her BS in Computer Science from San Francisco State University and was an International Women’s Forum (IWF) Leadership fellow. She is passionate about increasing the number of women in STEM careers and regularly mentors women taking charge of their career journey. She is an active member of the IWF and serves on their non-profit Legacy Foundation board. When not working, Beth loves to travel, be outdoors, practice yoga, and spend time with her family.

Corinne Walters Opdyke started her career as a front-end software engineer at APT with a focus on usability. She’s transitioned into the first technical program manager role in Data & Services at Mastercard, building enterprise software for financial institutions, merchant, and beyond. Corinne is passionate about company culture, specifically diversity, inclusion, and engagement. She enjoys personal finance, checks out actual books from the public library, and volunteers with kids. She lives in the DC area with her husband and dog.

Alana Karen is an award-winning tech leader, author, and speaker whose work is a part of our everyday lives. From Google Search to Adwords, Fiber to Google Grants and beyond, Alana has been leading the charge to develop, scale, build and drive team and product development that has rippling industry impact. Alana has been featured in Forbes, Women 2.0, Stanford, MTV, LinkedIn Influencers and more. She’s a Board Member Emeritus with BUILD and has spoken at conferences and summits around the globe on technology, leadership, DEI, talent and innovation.

A progressive type, Ash focuses her efforts within technology on bringing awareness to inclusion of women and people of color, especially in the Context Driven Testing and Agile communities. Though technology and inclusion have her heart today, engineering was not her first love. A former chef, Ash crafted her software approach through the learnings of hospitality. After 16 years, she put recipes aside when she began her career in software development, falling back on her skills in engineering she acquired as a kid building computers with her brother. An avid fan of matching business needs with technological solutions, you can find her doing her best work on whichever coast is the sunniest. Having helped teams build out testing practices, formulate Agile processes and redefine culture, Ash, formally Engineering Manager in Quality, now serves as Head of Diversity & Inclusion for Credit Karma. She continues testing and consulting based out of San Francisco.

Michelle King is a leading global expert in gender and organizations, and the Director of Inclusion at Netflix.Michelle has spent her career advancing women in innovation and technology, leading global diversity and inclusion programs and advocating for women at work. She is the former head of the UN Women’s Global Innovation Coalition for Change, and is an Advisory Board member for Girl Up, the United Nations Foundation’s adolescent girl campaign, and host of The Fix, a podcast that shares the stories, challenges and triumphs of women across innovation, technology and entrepreneurship. She speaks frequently on the topic of gender equality, and contributes regularly to Forbes on the topic of women’s advancement at work. Her work has been published in Harvard Business Review, Huffington Post, Scoop and TIME magazine. Michelle is a published, award winning academic with a PhD, a Masters in Psychology, and an MBA.

Liz is a purpose driven global technology marketing leader with demonstrated innovation experience. She leads integrated digital marketing and social media programs, brand and influencer awareness initiatives, market segment and product portfolio messaging, ground-breaking global partner programs and demand generation campaigns that impacts revenue growth.

For the past three years, she has been awarded CRN Magazine Women in the Channel recognition, and, in 2013, Liz received industry recognition with the Sirius Decision Channel Program of the Year. A Silicon Valley native, she is an outdoor enthusiast, who disconnects from all devices as much as possible to go adventuring.

Olivia Rose is the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Mailchimp, an all-in-one marketing platform for small businesses. Olivia leads Mailchimp’s Security and Abuse Prevention teams to effectively align security initiatives to organizational goals and strategies, while enhancing Mailchimp’s security program maturity and posture.

Olivia has more than 16 years experience advising and consulting executives and C-Level clients on effective measures to reduce and manage risk on their digital transformation journeys. She has held multiple leadership positions, including at IBM Internet Security Systems (ISS) and Solutionary (NTT). She also founded QloudSecure, which helped companies like Costco and Google improve their security maturity programs.

Olivia holds numerous IT and security certifications, including CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional), CISM (Certified Information Security Manager), CCSK (Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge), and CPHIT (Certified Professional in Healthcare Information Technology), among others, and is an active participating member of several industry groups. She is an accomplished and experienced speaker, having spoken at many local and national events, and is widely regarded as a mentor for new talent entering the field.

Sonali is currently an Advisory Managing Director based in New York office for KPMG LLP, where she is a member of the Forensic Service Line. Sonali focuses on AI, Machine learning, applying advanced data and analytics solutions specific to forensics, Risk consulting, Regulatory Compliance, Surveillance and Due Diligence.

Sonali has more than 18 years of experience in leading data and cognitive analytic solutions using augmented intelligence in financial crimes, information governance, data archiving, and risk and compliance. She is a trusted advisor for AI solutions for global Financial Services Clients.

She has had a diverse career with a core engineering background to leading advanced cutting edge technology solutions with firms such as IBM, HP, Honeywell across the globe.

Born in a low-mid class family in India, it was a struggle for Praveena’s parents to provide education. But they always instilled that education is key to success and they put all their earnings into her education and fortunately she was able to live up to their expectations. With limited resources in India, Praveena managed to get into Texas A&M University, College Station for a Masters’ program. After graduating, she joined Array Networks in San Jose. After a few months, she joined Ixia, worked for 6 years, then joined Nuova (Cisco), worked for 6 years. Later, Praveena joined Nimble Storage (now HPE) as a software engineer, later moved to management and is now a Director of QA.

Creating the equality and inclusion that empowers women in technology is a key part of my leadership philosophy, from rethinking traditional hiring practices to mentoring emerging developers, engineers and architects.

To be a cutting-edge company, growth is essential—from the functionality of your software and the talent of your engineers, right down to your mindset. In my 20+ years leading global software development teams across e-commerce and SaaS domains, I’ve developed a reputation for leveraging strategic business acumen and in-depth technology skills to promote rapid growth.

As a leader, I attract top talent and support my teams in their personal and professional development while creating processes that increase productivity and quality.

Samantha Cowan is the Head of Security Compliance at HackerOne. Samantha has extensive experience with complex security projects involving security monitoring, organizational compliance, threat detection, and incident response. Prior to HackerOne, Samantha was the Director of Compliance at OneLogin, as well as a security engineer at CoverHound / CyberPolicy, and Zenefits. Samantha holds an MS in Cybersecurity and MBA from the University of Maryland.

As the CIO of Nutanix, Wendy's focus on enterprise adoption of modern technologies fuels the company's global mission. Wendy also serves on the boards of Qualys, Inc. and Girls In Tech. A consumer tech enthusiast, Wendy has led technology and operational functions for Robert Half, GoPro, Yahoo! and Cisco. Wendy's recent accolades include being named ORBiE's Bay Area Enterprise CIO of the Year, the Fisher Center for Data Analytics' CIO of the Year, and one of HMG's Top Technology Executives. She was also ranked first on Enterprise Management 360's list of Top 10 Tech CIO's, named one of Silicon Valley Business Journal's Women of Influence and listed as one of the National Diversity Council's Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Technology.

Katelyn has nearly 20 years of experience in consumer marketing for agencies, large brands, and early stage companies. Her sweet spot is products and services that are building a new market, and typically at a pivotal point of change within companies. From reinventing a 50 year old hotel chain brand at La Quinta to making “photo books” a household word at Shutterfly, Katelyn’s focus from the beginning has been performance marketing at scale while balancing brand building along the way. Katelyn graduated with a marketing degree in business at University of North Texas and participates in the Peer 150 and Enrich leadership programs, to name a few. Katelyn was named 40 under 40 by DMN News in 2017, one of “50 Growth Marketers You Should Know” in 2016, and 40 under 40 via Brand Innovators in 2013.

Radhika Rangarajan is Director of Customer Solutions Engineering for Data Analytics Technologies at Intel. She is responsible for the Open source solutions team that delivers new applications and usage models in Big Data Analytics, Machine learning and Deep learning. She also leads technology partnerships with Enterprise and Cloud partners, key learnings from which have been influential in software product innovations, and in furthering the convergence of Big Data and AI with end-to-end technology solutions.

A recognized community leader, Radhika’s passion is in strengthening the Diversity and Inclusion in Tech. In 2015, Radhika co-founded Women in Big Data (WIBD), a grass roots community focused on inspiring, connecting and championing the success of women in Data Analytics and AI. Today, the WIBD community is Global, 14000 members strong and has 23 chapters worldwide.

Radhika holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from University of Madras and a master’s degree in Computer Science from Texas Tech University, Lubbock. Radhika also holds a Certificate of Business Excellence from U.C Berkeley Haas School of Business. She serves as the West Coast Regional lead and is on Executive committee for the Global Women in Big Data community.

Arushi is one of the founding engineers at WhatsApp Business and helped build the first monetization product for WhatsApp post acquisition. Over the last 3 years at WhatsApp, she has led different spaces of WhatsApp Business; from building the backend infrastructure for business platforms, to designing and building products for small-medium businesses. Today, she works closely with large enterprises across the world to engineer products and help define product strategy for communicating with users via WhatsApp Business.

Cassandra Rommel specialized in distributed systems at Northwestern before pursuing a career with early stage hardware startups. After her tenure as a founding engineer at Brilliant, working on IOT in the consumer smart home space, Cassandra took on a new challenge helping bring IOT to the industrial world with Samsara, one of the fast growing startups in Silicon Valley. She is passionate about hardware, startups, women in STEM, and her dog Archie.

Pavi Ramamurthy is the Head of Security at Anaplan, a connected planning company. Anaplan's connected planning platform enables organizations to accelerate decision making by connecting data, people, and plans across the business. At Anaplan, Pavi is responsible for driving and managing security initiatives across the Corporate and Product platforms as well as Governance, Risk and Compliance. Pavi has over 24 years of experience working in the software industry with close to 15 years in the security sector. Her previous stints include LinkedIn, VMware, Determina, Vitria and 3Com.

Amanda is the principal software engineer at Ripple - a leader in blockchain and cryptocurrency-based technology company. Before Ripple, Amanda was the chief architect of Huawei Pay at Huawei Device USA, and principal architect roles at Apple, PayPal etc. Amanda has been working in the tech industry in the bay area since 2000 and she has always been  passionate about building world-class software products for mobile payments, mobile advertising, e-commerce using cloud, big data, AI/ML, microservice technologies. Amanda is the co-chair of AnitaB.org Software Engineering Committee, and was a member of leadership committee of “Women@Apple” and “eBay Women in technologies”. Amanda is an avid ballet dancer.

Nisha is a software engineer at Appian Corporation. She started her career with client-side mobile development and is working towards becoming a full-stack developer. At Appian, she led the Hackathon guild that worked on developing and delivering technical talks and workshops at various university Hackathons. Nisha is also a member of the Hiring Committee at Appian. The committee equips developers to ensure a fair and consistent engineering interview process.

Nisha earned her Masters in Computer Science from Dartmouth College. Outside of work, she loves to explore new places, share insights on personal growth, read non-fiction books, and mentor students about STEM field.

Gabby is a UX software engineer who spends her time translating meaningful human needs into great user interfaces and product experiences. She currently works at Playground Global, a Silicon Valley VC firm backing early stage startups. Leveraging her technical and design skills, she supports companies in Playground Global’s portfolio through work on application development, interaction design and product discovery. As a student at UC Santa Cruz, her academic work at the intersection of linguistics and computer science included research on natural language generation and dialogue systems. At Amazon Lab126, she did early prototyping and software development for the Echo, Echo Look, and other unreleased projects. Since joining Playground Global in 2016, Gabby has worked with several startups across diverse applications including robotics, city mobility, home awareness, and augmented reality. While all of the startup companies she works with are building innovative new technologies, Gabby is particularly excited to share her work with Artificial, a company building robotics software tools to close the loop between humans and automation.

Ilana Golan is an entrepreneur turned tech investor and Forbes Business contributor who loves to help individuals and companies grow.

Selected top 40 women to watch in 2016 and Business Insider Silicon Valley Women of influence in 2017.

Ilana is a Board Director and General Partner at Homrun, the first of its kind network-based venture, accelerating the growth of Israeli companies in North America.

Board and Advisor to startups, bringing fast problem solving, out of the box thinking and vast experience in product, go to market strategies, innovation, and leadership.

Ilana is also an award-winning international keynote speaker on Leadership, Reinventing Your Career, and Breaking Barriers and the inventor of M.A.S.T.E.R - #careerLeap in 60 days - the program that has been transforming thousands of lives and careers.

Speaking events include Tech Crunch Disrupt, Western Digital Leadership Conference, Wix, Cleveland Leadership Summit, Inman Connect, Skolkovo Executive MBA Program, Haifa Economic Corporation, Technion World Tour, Rambam Women who Inspire and countless others.

Ilana started her own company (acquired), grew another startup to $15M yearly revenue and was part of an exit of $300M.

Ilana started her career as an F-16 flight simulator instructor and became the first woman to become a commander and in-charge of training of all F-16 pilots in Israel in the simulator.

Ilana studied Hardware and Software Engineering in the Technion.

Ironman-finisher, World Traveler and Mountain Climber.

Always pushing the limits and Breaking Barriers.

Adrienne is on the Technology Leadership Team at Cornerstone, a leading Talent Management and Talent Experience software company. As Sr. Director of Business Systems, she develops technology strategy and leads the engineering teams who are creating software and tools to help internal departments get their jobs done efficiently and easily. With her passion for narrowing the gender gap in technology, she also leads the Diversity & Inclusion efforts for the Cornerstone Engineering department, mentors women in technology, and has been a volunteer for Girls Who Code since 2013, hosting weekly coding clubs for middle and high school girls.

Adrienne holds a B.S. in Environmental Systems Engineering from Penn State. She lives in Westchester County, NY with her husband and 3 children.

As the Business Head (APAC Region), She is leading the global business relationship in USA, China, Japan, Hongkong & other Asia Pacific Regions. She has focused on Go-To-Market Strategy to expand the adoption of Click2Cloud products.

Her true passion is to work on strategies. Currently She is working with Alibaba, Huawei, SoftBank, OTC, Telefonica other cloud providers for customer advisory platform (CAP) and Hybrid/ Multi-cloud Migration strategies.

She is promotor of open-source ecosystem includes; Openstack foundation, OpenSDS, CNCF, Linux Foundation. Apart from her professional career, she is pushing the boundaries, to make a difference in youth empowerment and women in tech– the upcoming Leaders in India. She is excited and looking forward to challenges and more learning experiences!

Lizzie Matusov is a full-stack software engineer at Invitae. Her primary focus is building high-end customer experiences to empower a broader range of physicians to order genetic testing. Prior to her role, she worked as a software consultant for Red Hat, where she focused on consulting delivery for application development, migration, and deployments. She has written and supported production code for front-end, back-end, and DevOps in a variety of industries - including finance, biotech, and insurance. Beyond her role, she works to support diversity in engineering through organizational initiatives, mentorships, and speaking at conferences.

Patricia Lenkov is a Senior Managing Director with Teneo’s Talent Advisory team. She is widely regarded as a thought leader on board recruiting, corporate governance, composition, and succession.

Prior to joining Teneo, Patricia led Agility Executive Search, a boutique firm she founded in 2008. Agility Executive Search specializes in corporate board and senior level executive search. To date, Patricia has conducted over 300 board searches for corporate clients, as well as, having worked with some of the world’s leading activist investors to recruit board directors. In 2018, Agility Executive Search was named as one of “America’s Best Executive Recruiting Firms” by Forbes and was included in the Hunt Scanlon “New York Power 60” List.

Previously, Patricia was a member of the board of director’s practice at Spencer Stuart for four years, and prior to that, she spent six and a half years with Heidrick & Struggles where she conducted board and senior-level search assignments for Fortune 500 companies.

Earlier in her career, she held the role of Assistant Director of the MBA Program at Concordia University where she was also an Adjunct Professor. During her time at Concordia University, the MBA Program was ranked 4th in Canada by Canadian Business Magazine.

Patricia is an active member of the Women and Leadership Advisory Council at Concordia University and is on the Advisory Board of BoardProspects.com, the world’s largest online boardroom community.

Previously, she was a member of the Family Advisory Council of the Komansky Center for Children’s Health at New York- Presbyterian Hospital Weil Cornell Medical Center and the New York Steering Committee of 2020 Women on Boards.

She holds a BA, with distinction, in psychology from McGill University and an MBA from Concordia University.

She recently founded the ½ Percent Project, an animal welfare charity.

Patricia is an active contributor to Forbes.com.

Shweta is a technical leader and a software architect at Teradata with over 14 years of experience in Software Engineering.

She is currently focused on improving the Identity/Access Management experience for developers and customers and is building infrastructural services and API Management for Teradata's Data Analytics platform.

Shweta also co-founded inPHYnity.com to teach physics to high-achieving students and train them to represent the United States in international physics competitions with multiple students qualifying at the national levels including one who qualified to be a member of the 20 person USA Physics Team. She has a Masters in Computer Engineering from Vanderbilt University.

Joanna Sienko has recently joined Faire as an Operations Lead, an online wholesale marketplace for local retailers. Faire leverages prediction algorithms and artificial intelligence to forecast which products will sell faster in order to manage inventory efficiently and streamline the network effects within the international wholesale space.

Prior to joining Faire, Joanna spent 3.5 years at Flexport, a modern Freight Forwarder as a Sr. Global Operations Manager for the Enterprise segment. Joanna managed an Operations Team both in San Francisco and Hong Kong.

Prior to Flexport, Joanna worked in Investment Management at Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, graduated with a dual degree in Economics from McGill University and is presently very involved in the First Round Network community.

Sreeja is a Staff Product Manager at Qualcomm. In her role, she interacts with Wireless Enterprise Providers to align their connectivity needs with Qualcomm’s prolific wireless portfolio. She is excited to play her part in defining the roadmap, features and use cases for the next generation of connectivity solutions which are laying the foundations for IOT and Smart Homes. Prior to Product Management, she scaled up the Engineering Ladder at Qualcomm to become an Engineering Manager.

She has a Masters’ Degree in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech. She has 2 patents in the fields of Wireless and Display technologies.

She has been a speaker and emcee at the IEEE WIE International Leadership Conference, 2019., Women in Silicon Valley Conference 2019 among many others prestigious events.

Sreeja is extremely passionate about promoting and encouraging women in the STEM field and actively works for the cause through the Qwomen organization at Qualcomm as the President of the Bay Area chapter. She acts as the Qualcomm Liaison for IEEE WIE Santa Clara Valley, is a Techwomen Mentor and works with the NCWIT Bay Area chapter on their events. She also Emcees and volunteers for Vibha, a non-profit organization for under-privileged kids and Reading Partners. In her spare time, she loves reading, mentoring and volunteering.

Katy has been working in mobile development for more than 5 years. After graduating from Boise State, she landed a job at TSheets, a time tracking company, and furiously learned how native mobile apps were made from design to development to testing. Along the way, she has learned valuable lessons about creating a customer experience that drives engagement through fast and responsive applications. Outside of work, she is often found giving her time at various STEM events such as Hour of Code and SheTech encouraging the next generations of engineers or exploring the outdoors with a camera in hand.

Alexa Smith has been actively engaged in the blockchain space since early 2016, leading partnership and ecosystem development efforts from both the startup and enterprise side. In her current role with DFINITY, she helps to catalyze development on the DFINITY platform through impactful partner programs. Prior to joining DFINITY, Alexa founded and led BASF’s Blockchain Lab and supported the company's digital innovation initiatives in the Bay Area. She was a founding team member and the Director of Market Development at Xpansiv, a startup focused on the use of data science and cryptography to differentiate commodities based on their environmental and social impact. She holds a BS in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and was a Fulbright Fellow to Argentina in 2015.

Shweta Saraf is the Director of Cloud Networking Engineering team at DigitalOcean, a public cloud provider that developers love. Shweta enjoys working in high growth, bleeding edge technologies and startups and has previously scaled teams from 0-100 multiple times. Shweta loves bringing open, diverse and inclusive culture to her teams and supporting STEM and was founder of Women in Science and Engineering at Cisco. She was recognized by YMCA, Silicon Valley in 2015 as Emerging Leader and also currently sits on Forbes Technology Council.

Siobhán is an engineering leader with a passion for scalable infrastructure, machine learning, and collective intelligence. She began her career studying how humans learn at Harvard University & Harvard Medical School, and now leads an engineering team at Landed, where she helps essential professionals build financial wellness near the communities they serve. Before joining Landed she worked as a software engineer for two San Francisco-based startups, Avisell and Uncountable, and was a 2018 Insight Data Engineering Fellow.

Allison Metcalfe is the General Manager of the TV division at LiveRamp, the leading provider of omnichannel identity resolution. Allison is responsible for driving the strategy around bringing people-based marketing capabilities to television. Prior to LiveRamp, she served as the Senior Director of Customer Success at Demandbase. She also brings experience from earlier customer success roles at Jigsaw (now Data.com, acquired by SalesForce) and Equilar. Allison holds a BA from the University of St. Thomas.

She is one of the country ambassadors for Africa Code Week, an initiative supported by Google, SAP, UNESCO and YouthMobile in 37 African countries and a Technovation International Challenge mentor. Through all these co-ordinated efforts, Victoria hopes to conscientise as many young female Africans on the benefits of learning Digital and Coding Skills in relation to STEM and broaden the scope of the uptake of STEM Business Entrepreneurship as a whole towards the development of her country and the African continent. Her work cuts across all spheres of the community and enables corporate stakeholders to have a fuller share in imparting business entrepreneurship skills, digital skills training and empowering young girls and women through mentorship by means of the wide array of STEM initiatives that Girls In STEM Trust provides to ensure that they become 21^st Century Workforce Ready and Fourth Industrial Revolution relevant.

Prior to joining Symantec’s Global Security Office to architect the global risk management program, Melike established the technology risk management program at Common Securitization Solutions, the joint venture of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to monitor the technology risk posture from development to after go-live as part of single securitization initiative. A passionate advocate for empowering and increasing visibility and influence of women in STEM fields, Melike holds a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from Pennsylvania State University and an M.S. in Systems Engineering from University of Virginia. She is CISSP, CIPP/IT, CRISC, PMP and ITIL certified.

Veni Singh is a technology industry veteran who has dedicated her career to building products and scaling businesses at organizations such as Walmart and Visa. Veni currently leads product and engineering at Volition Beauty, a technology startup redefining the beauty industry by combining crowdsourcing and artificial intelligence (AI) to build beauty breakthroughs. She also consults at a leading blockchain startup. Prior to Volition, Veni was Director of Product at Visa where she worked with c-level executives to redesign their payments experience. Before that, she was Group Product Manager at Walmart Labs where she led industry leading initiatives such as Savings Catcher. Earlier in her career, Veni helped Fortune 500 companies redefine their ecommerce strategy as a management consultant at PwC. A software engineer by training, she started her career as a software developer at IBM. Veni graduated with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Pune and master's degree in Information Systems Management from Carnegie Mellon University - both with highest distinction. Veni is a dedicated meditator, a trained yoga teacher and an avid traveler.

Mina has over a decade of experience in cybersecurity and has worked for multiple companies headquartered across three countries. She started her career as a Network Engineer, then moved on to Pen-Testing and Security Assessment. She currently holds a technical leadership role in customer-facing privileged access management at CyberArk. Learning everyday is her motto and she considers herself fortunate to be at the forefront of the modern cybersecurity revolution.

Outside work, Mina trains for triathlons. She has competed in half Ironman distances. Her happiest finish line moment was to finish Morgan Hill Sprint just before her baby boy turned one.

Deepika is a product geek with a passion for building and leading product teams and working with engineers and designers to build and launch great products that customers love. She is the founder and CEO of SolveforXX an organization, focused on helping entrepreneurs that target the female customer base. She previously led product management for the Amazon Alexa product. Prior to that, she was the head of product management at Marketron and built the first programmatic ad buying marketplace platform for the radio industry; in addition, her entrepreneurial bent of mind led her to co-found a fashion marketplace startup - Hautely based in Singapore. She led product for Intel's IoT and enterprise platforms for many years prior to that. As someone who is passionate about solving the diversity issue in tech, she is proud to have co-founded AWIP (Advancing Women in Product). She has an MBA from the Wharton school, a Master's degree in Computer Science from UC Davis and a Bachelors of Engineering in Computer Science from Osmania University. When she is not working, she is an avid yogi and a cinephile.

Rehana belongs to a small village in Gilgit Baltistan (GB) Pakistan. After graduating from the National University of Science and Technology (NUST) Islamabad, Pakistan in 2012, Rehana discovered her passion for the energy sector; amid the peak of energy shortfall crisis in Pakistan and the reality of the black fuels' effects on climate. And in the short time since, she has built herself a meaningful career in a completely male-monopolized energy transition. Her last job was with REON Energy Pakistan as Solar PV Product Manager. She has 7 years of experience in Solar PV industry, majorly involved in system designing, system costings, product sizing and product development.

With all her passion towards creating equal opportunity for men & women in renewables, she voluntarily launched multiple awareness campaign about women in energy through her initiative “SHE in Energy”, and she recently started “Female Solar installation training series” with the help of local solar PV companies. In addition to that, Rehana with four other passionate volunteers initiated “Solar for HER”, dedicated to establishing Solar Powered Schools for Girls in remote parts of Pakistan with no access to electricity. (https://solarforher.com/). She started her graduate school in the Energy System Management in University of San Francisco under Fulbright scholarship. During the course of her studies, she intends to develop a renewable energy microgrid model for remote parts of the world with no electricity.

Tracy Stone is the Global Leader for Tech Women @ Intuit, a strategic initiative sponsored by the CTO to attract and recruit, retain and advance technical women. In this role, she works with the leadership team and technologists to develop the strategy and programs to drive increased diversity in tech. Tracy has a degree in Computer and Electrical Engineering and has worked at Adobe, HP and Intel, including leading software development teams. Before joining Intuit, Tracy co-founded and led a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing the number of girls exposed to STEM at the elementary and middle school level.

Stephanie Rice leads a team at Yelp within Enterprise Marketing that oversees Yelp's Enterprise events and content creation for Franchise & Mid-Market brands. She is constantly coming up with innovative ways to connect Yelp's senior leaders with national brands. In addition to events, she's also worked with Yelp's largest clients to create case studies, industry reports, product videos and more to showcase how Yelp can strategically partner with multi-location brands. She graduated cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania and has been with Yelp since 2014.

Ling is a global customer officer who is passionate about digital transformation which powers the future of work. Her leadership guides the EdCast to a single vision across all customer contacts. The EdCast mission is to enable organizations to create a future ready workforce, enhance employee productivity and build a customer of collaborative innovation.

As a corporate official, Ling is responsible for global customer, and related legal/financing. EdCast is a customer centric organization, as such, Ling also influences marketing, sales, product, and engineering. A serial entrepreneur, Ling has been involved in Public Offerings and acquisitions by Nortel Networks and Amdocs.

Ginger is a Senior Director at Agilent Technologies with 20 years of progressive commercial experience developing markets, launching disruptive technologies, and driving growth in the Laboratory Automation industry. She spent the last two years in Mergers and Acquisitions, where she was responsible for developing and executing the commercial integration strategies for acquisitions across Agilent’s three business groups. Ginger recently took on the new role of Business Transition Manager for Agilent’s most recent acquisition, BioTek Instruments, where she is responsible for the business health of the integration. She is, more importantly, the co-founder of Agilent’s first Women’s Employee Networking Group: Women@Agilent.

Rashim Mogha, Founder of eWOW (empowered Women of the World) is a thought leader and technology evangelist who empowers professionals by articulating complex technology capabilities into crisp, clear, and attainable business benefits. A keynote speaker and #1 Amazon best-selling author of “Fast-Track Your Leadership Career”, Rashim speaks at conferences around the world. Her thoughts on leadership, innovation, women in technology, and enablement strategy have appeared in publications such as Forbes and ATD. With a goal to empower women leaders, Rashim founded eWOW- empowered Women of the World, an intellectual platform to help women with their technical and leadership skills to be successful, to thrive! Her extensive career portfolio includes leadership roles in companies such as Automation Anywhere, Oracle, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and VMware where she built high-performing teams to support over $2 billion businesses. Rashim is a recipient of Woman of the Year, Women Empowerment: Game Changer and Silicon Valley Woman of Influence awards.

Natalia Karayaneva is the CEO of Propy, a Silicon Valley proptech company revolutionizing home purchasing via blockchain. She is an award-winning real estate developer, software engineer, and a serial entrepreneur with extensive knowledge in international real estate and crypto-economics. Natalia is a frequent panelist and speaker at blockchain and proptech events globally. She is an advisor to Arrington XRP Capital and a contributor to Forbes. Natalia has a degree in Computer Engineering from Russia and a degree in Sustainable Urban Development from the University of Oxford.

Angie Chang is CEO and Founder at Girl Geek X (formerly Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners). Prior to Girl Geek X, she was VP of Strategic Partnerships at Hackbright Academy, a women's engineering school which has graduated over 500+ female software engineers. Angie led partnerships with employers at Hackbright, where she built valuable hiring partnerships (Uber, Slack, GoDaddy, Redfin, Indiegogo and more), launched the mentorship program (enlisting 700+ industry engineers as volunteers in 4 years) and connected countless women to new jobs in tech. Prior to that, she co-founded Women 2.0 in 2006, a media company which promotes women in high-tech entrepreneurship, and Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners in 2008 (now Girl Geek X). She was named in Fast Company's 2010 "Most Influential Women in Technology" and more recently Business Insider named her one of "30 Most Important Women Under 30 In Tech". Angie has been invited by the U.S. State Department to speak on women's high-tech, high-growth entrepreneurship in the West Bank, Switzerland and Germany. In her early career, Angie held positions in product management and web/UI production at various Silicon Valley startups. She holds a B.A. in English and Social Welfare from UC Berkeley.

Sukrutha is the CTO and co-founder of Girl Geek X, and a Senior Engineering Manager at Salesforce. Sukrutha graduated from USC with an M.S. in Electric Engineering. Sukrutha is involved in Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners because she wants to change the world for girls, one geek dinner at a time, and she is passionate about technology, gender diversity, and engineering leadership. Sukrutha was named in Business Insider’s list of “30 Most Important Women Under 30 In Tech“ in 2014 and “San Francisco Business Times 40 Under 40” Tech Titans of 2016. Sukrutha is a new mom to a tiny girl geek and in her spare time trains for races - swimming, cycling and running.

Spandana Nakka is the Co-founder & CEO of Sleek, an AI-based VIP experience that is set to transform the Live Entertainment space.

After spending a decade working in Product Management, Business Development and dabbling in angel investing, Spandana remains at the forefront of industry trends and has built several delightful products and scaled their growth. In her previous roles at Google, Spandana served as an early female PM on Google Fiber, and later Google Play, where these products touched the hearts of billions of users. She spent equal parts of her life in India, UAE & the US, and these diverse cultural settings shaped her into a stronger woman. An engineer by training, Spandana holds degrees from Stanford University & the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley.

Amira Alvarez is the Founder and CEO of The Unstoppable Woman, a global coaching company helping thousands of driven women in the workplace, entrepreneurs, and self-employed professionals achieve financial and career breakthroughs. As someone who has made a quantum leap (going from barely making 6-figures to making $700k in one year) and has lived to tell about it, she knows exactly what mindset shifts and growth strategies are required to get out of your own way, master the mental aspect of success, and gain the confidence and freedom to go to the next level.

Eleanor is the Co-founder and CEO of LeafWorks Inc.– a genetics company specializing in identification for the cannabis/hemp and herbal industries. Eleanor has a B.A. from Smith College and a PhD in Genetics from the University of Georgia. A trained herbalist under the mentorship of the "Godmother of modern American herbalism," Rosemary Gladstar, Eleanor has spent her career using plant genetics to design and implement best agricultural practices for natural product companies. With a career rooted in entrepreneurship, Eleanor additionally co-founded the Canndor Herbarium, the world’s first cannabis/hemp herbarium, to document and preserve cannabis/hemp diversity.

Kerin is the Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of LeafWorks Inc.– a genetics company specializing in identification for the cannabis/hemp and herbal industries. An award-winning scientist, author, and speaker, Kerin received a PhD in Genetics from the University of Georgia. Publishing her first scientific paper in plant genetics at the age of 19, she is now a leading figure in the intersection of genetics, tech, and entrepreneurship. Kerin currently leads daily operations and genetic test development at LeafWorks Inc. She also co-founded the Canndor Herbarium, the world’s first cannabis/hemp herbarium, to document and preserve cannabis/hemp diversity.

Vanessa has worked as a Senior Sales Leader in IT for 23 years. She retired from Cisco Systems, to run her non-profit , Love Never Fails (www.loveneverfailsus.com) which provides housing and IT Training for survivors of human trafficking. LNF was founded in 2010 when one of her 15 year old dance students was assaulted and sold for a year. Vanessa is a sought after speaker on the topics of human trafficking, diversity and inclusion. She is the recipient of several awards including 2013 Jefferson, 2015 Top 20 Dynamic Women Owned Nonprofits, 2017 Discovery Investigation & People Magazine Everyday Hero Award.

Tanya Sheckley is Founder and President of UP Academy, an elementary lab school which values innovation, empathy and strength and incorporates a unique neuro-development program for children with physical disabilities. UP Academy teaches communication, collaboration and problem solving skills to prepare students for a future we can’t imagine. She is a Social Entrepreneur, Writer, and National Speaker. Tanya earned her BA in Public Health and Dance and her MBA in Entrepreneurship.

Carol Fishman Cohen, builder of corporate career re-entry programs and leader of the iRelaunch #returntowork community, is a pioneer in the career re-entry space. Her viral TED talk "How to get back to work after a career break," has nearly 3 million views and is translated into 30 languages. She is the host of the popular 3,2,1 iRelaunch podcast and is the author of the seminal Harvard Business Review article "The 40-Year-Old Intern" which was recognized as an "HBR Article That Changed the Way I Think" as part of HBR's 90th anniversary recognition of HBR articles that made the biggest difference in readers and contributors lives, and was the subject of a TODAY Show segment. Her 2019 HBR article “Should You Accept a Lower-level Job After a Career Break, garnered over 1200 reactions and almost 400 comments on LinkedIn when it was featured by their editors, and topped the HBR weekly “Hotlist.” Cohen’s articles have been published in HBR, Fairygodboss, Forbes and Next Avenue. Carol speaks around the world on career re-entry topics and has addressed over 500 audiences.

Cohen and the iRelaunch team produce the iRelaunch Return to Work Conferences and work with over 70 global companies on return to work programs of all kinds. iRelaunch co-leads the STEM Re-entry Task Force with the Society of Women Engineers, which has 26 corporate members, representing leading companies in industry sectors including technology, defense, automobiles, industrial equipment, oil and gas, and more. Hundreds of “relaunchers” have participated in Task Force member return to work programs to date, and 86% have been hired. iRelaunch co-leads similar initiatives with the Certified Financial Planning Board and AARP. Cohen returned to work at Bain Capital after an 11 year career break before co-founding iRelaunch. A graduate of Pomona College and Harvard Business School, she lives outside of Boston. Website: iRelaunch.com, Twitter: @iRelaunch.

Sharada Bose is a strategically focused Silicon Valley executive. After 24 years at Hewlett-Packard, she shifted her career to start-ups. As a founding member of Way.com, she has helped the company grow 10x in revenue to $60M in ARR. Her experience spans technology, operations, business development and growth strategies. Sharada has seeded and grown global organizations and led high-performance teams through change, development and economic downturns. She regularly advises start-ups. In 2017, she was inculcated into the Academy of Distinguished Engineers by her alma mater, Oregon State University. Sharada is passionate about the empowerment of women in both in the professional and personal spheres.

Joy Dixon expands opportunities and creates community as the Founder and CEO of Mosaic Presence.

Joy holds a Master’s degree in Software Engineering and several professional certifications. In the course of a diverse career, Joy has lead teams as well as designed and developed applications. Joy loves learning new technologies and has a great deal of passion for teaching.

In 2008, Joy decided to move into technical training in order to assist people with successfully utilizing technology. Since that time, Joy has designed and delivered courses in-person and online to both professional and beginning developers. Now, at Mosaic Presence, Joy delivers essential and innovative software development training.

Chaitra Vedullapalli is recognized as an Influential Business Leader with a passion to enable digital equity and access to achieve economic prosperity in our communities. She is the co-founder and CMO of Meylah, focused on helping customers to modernize their business with cloud solutions. Vedullapalli is also the co-founder of Women in Cloud, sits on many boards and drives global conversations with the United Nations and top corporations throughout the U.S.

Using the power of AI, Cloud, and IoT, Vedullapalli Is fiercely committed to empowering business owners to access the digital economy. She is recognized as an author, speaker and change leader, holds a patent, is a TEDx and United Nation Speaker and was honored as a top 100 Small Business Influencer.

Priya Ramesh, President & Founder of CEO Communications LLC is an award-winning communications expert, who has trained Fortune 500 CEOs, global executives and professionals on leadership and communications. She has spent 16 years working closely with the C-Suite at IBM, Microsoft, Intel, HP, Ford Motors, Coca Cola, transforming them into effective leaders.

Steph has been working remotely for over three years, as a growth marketer, writer, and indie maker. She spent three years at Toptal, most recently leading their Publications team, and now is a Senior Analyst at the Hustle, working on their new product, Trends.

She’s a big advocate for remote work and actively writes about it over at her blog, which has been read by over 350k people since launch earlier this year. She is also a self-taught developer and has built multiple projects, some of which have gone to #1 on Product Hunt, won awards for inclusion , and led her to being nominated for Maker of the Year in 2018.

Sowmiya is the co-founder and CTO of Lily AI, passionate about the intersection of emotional intelligence and artificial intelligence. At Lily AI, she has built the core psychographic engines that decode a customer's emotional and perceptive needs to accentuate and de-emphasize certain parts of the body and use machine learning to match emotions, preferences, and perceptions about the body to clothes. Previously, Sowmiya has built top grossing mobile games in the app store at Pocket Gems, worked at different levels of the tech stack in areas like display ads, collaboration, mdm at Yahoo and Box. She holds a Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UT Austin and Bachelors in IT from PSG College of Technology (India).

Sheryl is a Mental Toughness and Certified High Performance Coach™, best-selling author, speaker and mother of three. She's the CEO/Founder of The Zone Lab LLC, and has facilitated local and global workshops for Hewlett Packard Enterprise, UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, Bank of America, Autodesk, Google Ventures and VMware to name a few.

Sheryl is passionate about speaking and coaching women to gain the clarity, confidence and influence to speak up, be heard and unlock their next level of impact.

Sheryl has been a featured guest on various national podcasts, radio shows and as a ThriveGlobal Journal contributor. She opened the The Women of Silicon Valley conference last year and hosted a standing room only workshop.

Her mission is to empower 10,000 female leaders and emerging leaders a year to be Mentally Tough, so they can reach that next level of ambition and joy in their career in a holistic and sustainable way.

Ellena Ophira is a successful entrepreneur and CEO/Founder of Weddingly, a dynamic B2B2C platform that makes wedding planning more social, personal and intuitive. As pioneers in WedTech, Ellena and her female-led team are on a mission to bring innovative Technology to the dated Wedding Industry.

With over 10 years experience in Marketing and Strategy, Ellena has worked with leading Brands such as John Lewis, LK Bennett and M&S, as well as supporting the launch and growth of over 200 Startups and SMEs.

Ellena started her first business in her early twenties; she is a passionate international speaker and advocate for entrepreneurship in Women and building inclusive and diverse working cultures.

This year, she is proud to have been featured in a new book, Secrets of Successful Female Entrepreneurs, celebrating Female Founders, alongside inspiring women such as Martha Lane Fox.

Gigi Gatti is the Director, Technology for Development at Grameen Foundation and leads the technology innovation team. Gigi formerly served as Regional Director, Asia where she led the development of groundbreaking programs, using technology and data to bring financial services and agricultural development to underserved, very rural, communities in the Philippines and Indonesia, and which are being successfully replicated in India, Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire. Gigi has over 25 years work experience in the IT, banking, insurance and microfinance industries. She holds an MBA and a Computer Science degree, is a Certified Microfinance Expert and a Certified Information Systems Auditor.

Julissa is a global sales enablement leader with over 15 years of experience in various Sales Enablement and Training roles for companies like Hewlett Packard, Adobe, New Relic, and Leanplum. She has trained and mentored many technology sales employees and has a passion for improving the learning experience of sales reps and sales support roles. Being the first in her family to earn university degrees at Sacramento State and St. Mary’s college of California, Julissa enjoys mentoring university students with resume writing and coaching them on interview skills. In her spare time, she appreciates international travel, volunteering for organizations like Vallejo Together which helps displaced families get back on track, and pouring at a Latino owned winery called Bodegas Aguirre in Livermore, CA.

Danielle Deibler is the Co-Founder and CEO of MarvelousAI, an early-stage start-up. Their focus is building natural language technology to discover and expose misinformation and bias to enable advocates to devise counter-measures and immunities.

Shilpi Chakrabarti is a Principal Product Manager at Ellation, an entertainment company that provides premium video experiences for niche content like Japanese anime. Shilpi is responsible for building Crunchyroll's recommendations engine, marketing automation solutions and analytics pipeline.

Prior to Ellation, Shilpi’s career has spanned several industries including oil and gas, finance, technology and media. She has consulted for JP Morgan, FMC Technologies, and the Department of Homeland Security. She studied Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. In her free time, Shilpi likes to write and is the author of “Doggy Paddle”, which is available on Amazon.

Maya Raber is the founder of Tulip Management, a leading management and leadership development training company based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Leveraging Maya’s extensive management experience, Tulip Management has developed a portfolio of classes to address the needs of managers and leaders in the high-tech industry, and has been working with over 80 companies delivering training globally.

Maya held senior level positions in the high-tech industry, building and leading high performance global engineering organizations, and delivering world-class products.

A graduate of the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) with an engineering degree, Maya started her career in software engineering.

Motivating, inspiring and supporting women in tech to “make a positive impact” as leaders and encouraging other women to get into and remain in the tech industry. Nichol believes that empowering women to become recognised as high performance and respected professionals, builds a culture that is welcoming and compassionate.

Having worked for over 20 years in the tech industry, Nichol is a proud advocate for inclusive workplaces, filled with driven female leaders who support innovation, individuality and diversity! Nichol is recognised for her passion and expertise in assisting organisations ‘push for greatness’, crafting inclusive workplace cultures built on the foundations of authentic leadership, learning, vision and values.

As the Vice President of content operations and assessment, Lynda is responsible for ensuring McAfee’s cybersecurity products have high efficacy and detection rates while keeping customers safe from the latest threats. She leads a global team that ensures all new detections are swiftly identified and solutions released quickly. Prior to this role, Lynda led a global team of senior technical engineers that brought McAfee’s future to life through innovative strategies and prototypes. Lynda also spent over two decades with Intel Corporation holding numerous technical and leadership positions.

A respected expert in her field, she has two patents and won the Intel Achievement Award, the Intel Software Quality Award, and the Society of Women Engineers Emerging Leader and Fellow Awards.

Lynda holds a BS in computer science and is a valued industry conference speaker. She has a passion for coaching, growing, and developing technical leaders and remains active in community outreach programs for the Society of Women Engineers