Meet your fellow ambassadors

Adam Nelson

Adam Nelson is a US Army Veteran. His love of supporting the veteran community brought him to Bunker Labs, a non profit that helps veterans start businesses. Working for this organization inspired Adam to start his own business and follow one of his passions, video games. Adam is the Founder of Philly Esports, a tournament organizer that provides opportunity for local gamers to peruse their dreams in esports.

Albert Pak

I'm a passionate software engineer, with an entrepreneurial spirit, focused on building high-performance web applications. I am interested in newer technologies and frameworks, and love helping people discover, learn, and build next generation applications. I work hard at staying up to date on the latest trends and technologies to ensure each project utilizes the best tools and methodologies available.

Ali Rosenthal

Founder and Managing Partner, Leadout Capital. Former pro cyclist. Avid reader

Allison Reitz

Allison Reitz is a creative director and entrepreneur who is passionate about building tools that empower the growing loving awareness of human beans. She has served as a web designer, creative director, audio engineer, and composer, and is a natural community builder wherever she goes. Allison is the is the founder of Good Elephant Inc, an on-and-offline platform that connects yoga and meditation teachers with creative, unused local spaces to offer pay-what-you-can classes for communities across the nation.

Amanda Guilno

Amanda Gulino is an accomplished coach, facilitator, speaker, and leader with a passion for helping individuals and organizations unleash their potential. As a trained coach, Amanda is passionate about coaching women in leadership to find their confidence and achieve their big goals and dreams. She is also an expert in building healthy, thriving teams in the workplace. She’s worked with a broad array of clients across the U.S., including nonprofits, tech companies, start-ups, philanthropic organizations, and entrepreneurs. Clients have described Amanda as a kind, yet honest truth-teller who inspires people to take steps toward building what they want in work and in life.

Ameed Mallick

Ameed is Director of Business Development at InfoArmor, an Allstate company. He leads Strategic Partnerships and is currently focused in data privacy, identity protection, and digital identity technology and solutions.

His career highlights include most recently leading regional BD at Instacart, corporate strategy and M&A due diligence at Bain & Company, and sales & marketing consulting at ZS Associates. Ameed hails from Chicago and has a BBA from University of Michigan and an MBA from Northwestern (Kellogg).

Anjuan Simmons

Anjuan operates at the intersection of business and technology by relentlessly focusing on delivering delight to customers while effectively applying engineering talent.

He is currently an Engineering Coach at Help Scout. Anjuan is a pragmatic Agilist who loves technology and protects the people who ship products to customers.

Anthony Vennare

A 2018 honoree of Forbes 30 Under 30 and United States Marine, Anthony is a sales- and product-driven CEO who has closed $10M-plus in partnerships and successfully exited a media startup.

Barry Hartunian

Barry Hartunian has more than 25 years of business and human resources experience across a number of industries. Most notably, he has been an active People, Culture & Business Leader in the technology and software sector with companies that have experienced significant growth and success in their markets. His passion for global HR has grown out of his experiences living and working abroad while successfully pioneering and growing global operations for a number of successful companies including ATG, Spotfire, C Space and Toast.

Brianne Caplan

Brianne is the Founder and Executive Director of Code Your Dreams, a non-profit dedicated to helping students build community-focused applications from ideation to delivery.

Brianne is also the Data Scientist for Edovo, a company that provides a tablet-based education and communication platform to incarcerated people.

Carleen Pan

Carleen is a launcher who brings brands and products to market. She now runs Program Management at Videri. Previously, she worked with other city governments to map out their tech and startup ecosystems.

Carlo Navarro

Carlo Navarro is a Filipino-American entrepreneur, marketer, and content creator. His 16 years of startup experience led him to work at IGN.com, Apple, the Startup Institute and speak at SXSW Music.

He was named one of ChicagoInno’s 50 on Fire Entrepreneurs in 2017, and founded several tech startups in the areas of music, family-tech, diversity and education focused ventures.

Carlo is currently collaborating as a marketing & business consultant over a breadth of industries from early-stage tech startups to corporations. He also serves as a startup mentor at 1871 Chicago, advising on growth marketing, marketing strategy, customer acquisition and content strategy.

Chad Copeland

I am believer in Christ, an uncle, a brother and a son. I started a professional blackjack company immediately after graduation that I still manage and play sparingly on the side. During this stint I fell in love with entrepreneurship. I went on to work as a real estate project manager in Maryland, focused on flips. Due to success in this field, I was hired as a business/brand manager for an NFL Player who owned the real estate company. My main duties in this role include, real estate project management, liaison for speaking engagements, video editing & social media campaigns, and sponsorship contract negotiations.

Charles Li

Charles is currently in the early phases of building a consumer fintech startup with his co-founder, Nimit, and he loves to chat about all things fintech.

He has experience in tech both at a startup level as the second hire and Head Architect at Plaid as well as the other end of the spectrum as a PM at Microsoft. Charles is a native Iowan and studied Computer Science at Harvard.

Chris Erickson

Chris Erickson is the COO & Co-founder of Apartment List - the fastest growing online rental marketplace. Apartment List hosts over 90M annual renters visits and works with 6M rental units.

Prior to Apartment List Chris spent 6 years with with The Boston Consulting Group focused on strategy, corporate development and transformational work. Chris is an active angel investor and his portfolio includes Denver based companies.

Chris has an undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering from Northwestern University and an MBA from Stanford. When not working Chris spends time with his wife, two children and his Peloton.

Christian Schaub

Christian Schaub is a leader and advisor focused on business outcomes and competitive advantages through people, culture and organization.

Having worked both as a management consultant and a human resources executive, Christian is experienced in identifying and developing talent, coaching leaders, building effective and efficient organizations, and managing change.

He has worked with teams around the world and called New York, London and Cape Town home. He is a graduate of Yale University.

Courteney Real

Courteney Real currently holds the role of Investor Relations at Portfolia, a Venture Capital Firm based out Palo Alto, CA. She is also the host of The Real Capitalist Podcast, a show that features Female Founder and Venture Capitalist. Courteney was born & raised in Denver, Colorado. She completed her undergraduate degrees in Finance, Entrepreneurship and International Business Management at Arizona State University. Courteney has a vast experience working within the Startup Ecosystem. She has done everything from being an early-stage entrepreneur to launching coworking spaces, with experience in seed-stage Venture Capital. Most recently Courteney worked on the Global business development team a silicon valley's leading pre-pre-accelerator Draper University. She is passionate about revenue models, early-stage investments, traveling the world and emerging startup ecosystems.

Dan Price

Dan is a Creative Director in New York City. He knew he wanted to be in the creative industry since he was about 13 years old. While the other kids were dreaming of being doctors or athletes, Dan was dreaming of creating the next great campaign. And he’s grateful that he gets those opportunities every day.

Dan’s industry has worked at major advertising agencies like Deutsch and Saatchi and Saatchi, as well as VaynerMedia when it was still very much a growing startup. Dan has also worked at quip (the toothbrush brush company) and help them define their brand identity.

Dannie Fountain

Dannie Lynn Fountain is a marketing strategist and whip-smart whiskey drinker currently working at Google. She has 10+ years of experience as an entrepreneur and strategist. Today, she works with creative entrepreneurs and corporations to strategize and implement marketing processes to increase their leads and sales. Her specialty is focusing on passionate storytelling, regardless of industry. Beyond strategy, Dannie is the author of four books and a regular speaker on marketing and entrepreneurship worldwide. She is also the founder of the #sidehustlegal movement and host of the Side Hustle Gal Podcast. Her work has been recognized by Forbes, Bustle, Business Insider, Cosmopolitan, Digiday, Girlboss, PR News, and more.

Dhruv Washishth

Dhruv is an entrepreneur who has lived and worked in India, US, and the UK. In 2018, he received the EB1 'Extraordinary Ability' Green card from the US government. He ran his first venture profitably for 3 years, launched AngelHack in India, ran TiE Banglaore's accelerator program, won first place at Draper University and studied at The London School of Economics.

He is based out of San Francisco and is currently also involved with projects at Unshackled Ventures and Segment.

Gene Juang

Entrepreneurial growth marketing expert with 10+ years in helping internet startups to identify product-market fit, reaching critical mass, and scale.

Passionate about creating business value and attacking hard problems. Currently, I am the VP of Growth at Root Insurance company.

Gwen Cheni

Gwen is currently a Venture Partner at Fusion Fund, an early stage venture fund in Palo Alto, and an Entrepreneur in Residence at Singularity University Ventures. Her love of technology started at age thirteen when William Hewlett, an alumus of her high school, donated a brand new computer lab. Before joining Singularity University, Gwen was the Assistant Portfolio Manager at a technology focused hedge fund in San Francisco. She started angel investing in 2012 and finds the most rewarding part of investing to be building companies with founders. She's a frequent speaker and judge at startup pitch contests. Prior to San Francisco, Gwen spent fifteen years as an Equity Analyst on Wall Street.

Janice Christine

I’m a NYC-based designer with a white-hot fanaticism for iced-black coffee, clean typography, and meaningful graphic bravado.

Jeffrey Williams

Jeffrey Williams is a software engineering leader with close to two decades of software development experience, most recently as VP of Engineering/Data Engineering at Label Insight. Jeffrey specializes in helping early-stage companies overcome both technical and cultural growth pains, and has worked in various domains and markets around the world including Australia, England, and Scotland. At Label Insight, Jeffrey oversaw the growth of the technical team from five to over forty, while also guiding the organization through technical scale issues to achieve multiple rounds of funding.

Jessica Lambrecht

Specializing in organizational strategy for startups and upstart small companies, Jessica has experience across a variety of industries – from finance to entertainment – rooted in organizational culture, where a strong foundation impacts the bottom line, leadership, and everything in between. With a passion for finding better ways to do bigger things, she founded The Rise Journey to focus on creating more engaging, diverse and inclusive workplaces from the ground up.

Her work, including organizational development, fundraising, research, and communications, has supported the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Women’s Global Leadership Initiative, Hearts of Gold, The Children's Defense Fund-NY, Dreamers//Doers, Harlem School of the Arts, Dance Theatre of Harlem, the National Action Network, and many more.

Jonathan Wolf

Jonathan has spent nearly two decades at early- and growth-stage companies in Austin, Chicago, London and San Francisco. Having worked across the org chart and led teams in Sales, Customer Success, Product and elsewhere, he was an early employee at an eventual 9-figure acquisition and at a 10-figure IPO.

Most recently, he co-founded, led as CEO and eventually sold his own startup. He now lives in San Francisco with his wife and labradoodle and consults with startups on their go-to-market strategy.

Joshua Gentes

Joshua is a technical, mindful technology executive. He enjoys mentoring humans, and teams through the development of reasonably correct software, and works hard to correct his occasional mistakes.

He believes in empowering his colleagues, and reports to make the tough decision.

Kara Leary

Kara has spent the last five years helping to build the future of education at Thinkful, where she works as a full stack web developer. In her time at Thinkful, she has contributed to countless projects, including overseeing the construction of a brand new student platform, leading engineering work on an in-house video chat app, and building a custom payment plans system and checkout flow, to name a few.

When she isn't coding, you can find her in a yoga studio or on the water either surfing or sailing. She is based in Kaneohe, Hawaii.

Kathryn Giancola

Professionally, I love helping find a win win solution with my clients and networking with people in and outside my industry. personally, I’m a cyclist addict and take as many trips to Tahoe to enjoy the outdoors as possible!

I have been at New Relic for 2.5 years and moved into the Commercial Named Accounts Role, focused on our Commercial Clients in Eastern Texas and the Nashville geos.

Please reach out over LinkedIn or email at kgiancola@newrelic.com if you are interested to learn more about New Relic’s digital intelligence platform - or just have a good joke.

Lauren Jacobson

Lauren is a community organizer and activist in the Women in Tech community. Currently, she manages the student experience as the Associate Director of Program Management at Thinkful, which provides 1-on-1 mentorship to individuals looking to switch careers and move into the tech field.

Lauren is the Network Director of Women Who Code DC, the largest women in tech organization in DC. She also leads coding workshops + panels across the DC area and works as a freelance front-end web developer.

She writes about whatever moves her at www.startwithlauren.com. In her free time, you’ll find her listening to Lizzo, sewing, or reading a good book.

Lisa Murphy

Lisa is a 2x entrepreneur who sold her first business at age 29. She bootstrapped the business, raised $100K on Kickstarter and was able to get the brand to 250 stores nationwide and profitability before selling the business.

She has worked in finance, evangelized Augmented Reality technology, built a sauce and condiment business from scratch, and is now working on her second startup to democratize big data for small businesses by creating a modern financial management system for small businesses.

Lola Ojabowale

I'm the founder of Refolo, a software company making plant-based eating more affordable and convenient.

I also have experience at a B2B eCommerce company where I lead our sales and product operations teams.

Marco Della Torre

Marco is an engineer and serial Entrepreneur based in San Francisco, California, who has raised over $100M for ventures to date and had 2 successful exits. Marco is currently the CTO of Derive Systems, where he is responsible for product vision, roadmap and execution of Derive’s fast-growing automotive technology platform. Before Derive, Marco was involved in 2 successful consumer product startups (BAM Labs and Basis Science), each of which had successful exits. Marco has also held business development and lead technologist roles at Intel, launching product-driven partnerships with Red Bull, New Balance, ESPN X Games, the NBA and more. Marco’s products have been featured in SuperBowl commercials, integrated with Olympic events, and built into products for global top 20 brands, shipped by the millions of units.

Maria Yuan

Maria Yuan is the Founder of IssueVoter, a non-partisan platform that offers everyone a voice in our democracy by making civic engagement accessible, impactful, & efficient. Maria’s political experience includes introducing and passing a bill as a constituent, working in a State Representative’s office in Texas, and managing and winning one of the most targeted races in Iowa – an open seat in a swing district. Maria’s professional experiences also include recruiting, social enterprise, investment banking, strategy, and corporate development. Maria has consulted the San Francisco Conservation Corps, PlaNet Finance, Big Brothers Big Sisters, and Urban Outfitters. She has served on the boards of Gibney Dance and The University of Texas Co-Op, and was a founding member of Friends of the Children NY’s Young Professionals Board.

Martin Gordon

Martin leads product engineering at Custora, where he joined as the first engineering hire and was responsible for scaling the team through over $20m in venture capital funding. He is also co-founder and part-time CTO of Astrolabe Diagnostics, a cytometry analysis platform used by three of the top 5 pharmaceutical companies.

Martin loves exploring new technologies and building businesses. He built, Flickup, one of the first 1,000 apps in the App Store; developed observe4success, a classroom observation platform used by over 250 schools; and was co-founder and CTO of StageGrade, an aggregator of theater reviews that was acquired in 2012.

Maya Brooks

Maya is New York-based Product Manager, Educator, Speaker, and Entrepreneur. Fueled by her passion to create new ideas (and perhaps a bit too much Cold Brew), Maya enjoys helping fellow entrepreneurs & tech enthusiasts reach their full potential.

She is currently a Product Manager at iFundWomen, a crowdfunding ecosystem for women-led businesses, where she builds thoughtful and intuitive products & experiences to empower female founders. Prior to iFundWomen, Maya held positions at JPMorgan Chase and Techstars.

Monica Wheat

Monica is a Strategist, Investor, and Venture Developer leading Backstage Detroit as the Managing Director. She is the Founder + Partner at Venture Catalysts, a venture and ecosystem development group.

Monica is the Lead for Techstars Startup Programs including Detroit Startup Week, and a Co-founder of Startup Boost Detroit, a global pre-accelerator.

She has built accelerators and tech / investor education initiatives for 100,000+ attendees for over 10 years.

Murali Bhogavalli

Product professional with expertise in building and implementing data products.

Natalie Viragh

Natalie Viragh is an Ohio native, but has found roots in San Francisco, California, Portland, Oregon & soon-to-be Denver, Colorado.

She has 8 years experience working in a variety of start up industries including Media, Tech, CPG, & Performance Footwear/Apparel.

When she isn't creating experiences for the fastest growing running company on the planet, On, she's spending time in the woods with her corgi & husband.

Nathan Broslawsky

Nathan, currently VP of Engineering at SmugMug, has been building software and leading engineering teams (local and remote) for over a decade. Though he routinely finds himself back in the code, he believes he has found his calling coaching and mentoring new engineering leaders and helping organizations accomplish great things by bringing the best out of their teams. In addition to getting an extraordinary amount of inspiration and motivation from the people surrounding him, some of his best professional and creative moments can be attributed to long, solitary motorcycle rides, most of which started right here in Colorado.

Neal Conrad

Neal Conrad is a Chicago-based software engineer with over a decade of experience. His professional interests include: designing and building innovative, large-scale web applications; data visualization; and open-source libraries to support scientific research in bioinformatics. Neal holds an M.S. in Computer Science from The University of Chicago and a B.S. in Mathematics from Northern Illinois University. In his free time, Neal writes, performs, and records music. He also enjoys biking, billiards, Tetris, making veggie sushi, and taco science.

Nimit Jain

Nimit is in the early phases of creating a new company to help people build credit, with his co-founder Charles.

He previously worked on consumer internet products at Yahoo, Google, Bain & Company, and his own small business Scholastic Readings.

Nimit studied at Wharton and Cambridge, and is proud of being an Eagle Scout and his volunteer work with Amnesty International.

Peter Kim

Peter is a Solutions Architect at Apollo GraphQL, an exciting startup based in San Francisco aiming to change the way front-end app developers access data. GraphQL is quickly becoming the de-facto standard query mechanism in modern React and mobile apps.

He’s one of the first pre-sales engineers at Apollo and helping to build out their sales organization. He joins Apollo after a successful five year run at Elastic where he was their second pre-sales engineer and helped take Elastic to an IPO in October 2018.

Philip Mckenzie

Philip Mckenzie is an anthropologist/strategist focused on human-centered design and culture.

Scott Salzberg

Partnering with 1,000+ brands in my 6 years as a Google Marketing Consultant, I have built everything from startup go-to-market strategies to multi-million dollar multi-channel branding efforts. My success is that of my partners and I strive to efficiently grow brands and exceed goals.

Recently I have focused on driving performance through SEM automation for Google’s largest FinTech and Travel clients (15 brands, $825M / year). I partner with my clients to holistically understand objectives aligning to existing or build custom bidding solutions, testing, iterating, and scaling success - in some cases even doubling revenue at improved ROAS.

Sean O' Connor

Sean began his career working in Sri Lanka on a Fulbright. After that, he helped design and launch half a dozen EdTech products.

Several years ago Sean fell down the blockchain rabbit hole and spent a year building Dapps at ConsenSys before starting his own product strategy consultancy.

Say hi on twitter @aseoconnor

Shanker Sahai

Born in Zambia, raised in Botswana. A Civil Engineer turned entrepreneur who founded a unique company which combined hardware, a patented software and payment integration and lead it to a successful acquisition. Raised a small angel round through prominent angel investors both in the Boston area and west coast. Won numerous awards in Business Competitions and was nominated one of the top 12 innovators in Massachusetts. Currently managing a small team in LogMeIn's Innovation Org that works directly with executives, and product leaders across the company running custom workshops helping them build confidence around a risky business initiative.

Tiffany Yu

Tiffany Yu is the CEO & Founder of Diversability, an award-winning social enterprise to rebrand disability through the power of community and the Founder of the Awesome Foundation Disability Chapter, which has awarded $27.5k to 28 disability projects in 6 countries. She is the reigning Miss Amazing California Queen, and previously served on the Leadership Committee for San Francisco’s Disability Cultural Center. Tiffany started her career in investment banking at Goldman Sachs, working on over $14 billion of announced transactions. She is a member of the World Economic Forum Global Shapers.

Ty Williams

Advertising Strategist handling Paid Search for Top 15 U.S. Automotive Group.

Five years of experience handling automotive advertising, extremely interested in learning how alternative opportunities to utilize tech can positive impact the advertising and user experiences throughout the car-buying process.

Vera Kutsenko

Vera is currently the Founder and CEO of Modern Basket (https://www.modernbasket.co). She's on a mission to put healthy on autopilot by making personal grocery shopping and nutrition accessible to all. Before Modern Basket, she was an engineer at Facebook, Uber, and multiple startups. She's also authored a paper in Journal of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), one of the most prestigious academic Comp. Sci. journals. She got her undergrad and Master's degree from Cornell University (Go Big Red!).