Meet our Speakers

Bonita Coleman Stewart
  Board Partner, Gradient Ventures Vice President, Global Partnerships Executive in Residence,Google LLC

  Bonita C. Stewart brings extensive consumer technology and operational experience as her career spans over three decades of digital transformation across multiple industries. Since joining Google in 2006 she has driven adoption of digital technologies within the C-Suite in the US and globally. Currently, she serves as Board Partner for Google’s Gradient Ventures where she advises companies across their portfolio and board practice.

Maya Kulycky
  VP for Strategy and Operations for Google Research
 

 Maya is VP for  and Operations for Google Research. She joined us from IBM where she was Chief of Staff and Research Advocacy for IBM Research. She brings expertise in strategic planning, building partnerships, communications, intellectual property, developing markets and transforming operations. In her previous role, Maya facilitated the growth and focus of IBM Research, and was responsible for top-level government and client engagements. Before joining IBM she was based in Nairobi, Kenya, as the Head of East Africa for African Business News, a company that included the CNBC and Forbes Africa brands. Before that, she lived and worked in South Africa - she spent a total of ten years on the African continent. She began her career as a journalist - working as a reporter for organizations including ABC News and CNBC. Maya is a lawyer by training, a graduate of Yale Law School and member of the New York bar.

Marian Croak
  VP, Engineering - Responsible AI and Human Centered Technology

 Marian Croak is the Vice President of Responsible AI and Human Centered Technologies at Google,  She was formerly a VP for Site Reliability Engineering for Ads, Corporate Engineering and YouTube, at Google.  Marian joined Google in late 2014 after retiring from AT&T as an SVP responsible for advanced research and innovation, and designing and developing one of the world's largest wireless and broadband networks.  She managed over 2,000 world class engineers and computer scientists.  Marian holds over 200 patents mostly focused on IP technology. Marian has received numerous awards, including the 2013 and 2014 Edison Patent Awards, and was inducted into the Women in Technology International's Hall of Fame in 2013. She is a strong supporter of STEM initiatives, served on many boards including NACME and Catalyst, and personally mentors many individuals in STEM.  Marian attended Princeton University, and the University of Southern California where she received her doctorate in quantitative analysis and social psychology. She is currently a member of the Corporate Advisory Board for he University of Southern California’s School of Engineering, and the Schwartz Reisman Institute Advisory Board. She was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022.

Peter Norvig
  Director of Research
Google


  Peter Norvig is a Director of Research at Google; previously, he directed Google's core search algorithms group. He is co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the leading textbook in the field, and co-teacher of an Artificial Intelligence class that signed up 160,000 students, helping to kick off the current round of massive open online classes. He is a Fellow of AAAI, ACM, the California Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and Stanford University HAI.

Jason Scott
  General Partner
ANIM 

 Jason Scott is a Partner at ANIM, an early-stage venture fund based out of New York and London. Prior to ANIM, Jason led Google's startup developer ecosystem in the US, and has been responsible for launching and running funds and accelerators for Google worldwide, including Google's Accelerators for Black-led, women-led and climate-focused companies. Jason also launched Alphabet's Black Angel Group in early-2021. Today, in addition to his role at ANIM and leading the Black Angel Group, Jason also remains an active seed investor and startup advisor.

Candice Morgan
Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Partner Google

 Candice Morgan has dedicated her career to helping companies attract and grow talent and global market segments of the coming generations. As the first-ever equity, diversity, and inclusion partner in the venture capital industry, Candice focuses on creating inclusive strategies for GV and its portfolio companies. Before joining GV, Candice was the first head of diversity efforts at Pinterest, where she built an inclusive product management strategy to increase diverse content and grow users globally. She also served as a management consultant at Catalyst, advising CEO and leadership teams at Fortune 500 companies, including Boston Consulting Group, Deutsche Bank, The Coca-Cola Company, and Nestlé. She moved to Switzerland to grow Catalyst Europe and coach businesses across Europe, and upon return to North America, founded an annual D&I conference in Canada.

 Candice’s skills in organizational change management and effective ESG strategies have led to honors, including Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business, The Root’s Most Influential African Americans, International House’s Young Leadership Award, and her alma mater Carnegie Mellon University’s first “Tartans on the Rise” list. A Stuyvesant alum, Candice holds a B.S. from Carnegie Mellon University, where she studied Psychology and Business, and a M.Sc. in Cross-Cultural Psychology from Brunel University in London. Passionate about inclusion, Candice is a board director for Women Who Code and a Steering Committee member of BLCK VC.

Jewel Burks Solomon
Managing Partner
Collab Capital 

Jewel Burks Solomon is Managing Partner at Collab Capital, an early-stage venture capital fund she launched to close the funding gap for Black entrepreneurs. Prior to leading Collab Capital, Jewel was Head of Google for Startups US, where she created initiatives that deployed over $30M in non-dilutive capital to Black and Latino-led businesses since 2020.  Jewel's passion for leveling the playing field for Black founders was born from her own experience. Jewel was the Founder/CEO of Partpic, a startup that was acquired by Amazon in 2016, which streamlined the purchase of maintenance and repair parts using computer vision technology. After the acquisition of Partpic, Jewel became a product leader at Amazon’s Visual Search and AR team. She led the integration of Partpic’s technology and launched it as Amazon PartFinder in 2018 to the over 150M users of Amazon’s Mobile Shopping App.Jewel serves on the boards of The Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta, where the mission is to lead and inspire philanthropy to increase the vitality of the region and the well-being of all residents, and Endeavor Atlanta, which helps the fastest-growing entrepreneurs create lasting enterprises by providing the resources they need to scale without dilution. She is a member of the 2019 Class of Henry Crown Fellows within the Aspen Global Leadership Network at the Aspen Institute.Jewel received a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration with a concentration in Marketing from Howard University. She currently resides in Atlanta, GA with her husband, Zekarias, and their son, Mekai.

Jim F. Anderson
VP, Google Cloud NA Partner Ecosystem and Channels

  As an Executive on Google’s Cloud team and a board member for Altair (NASDAQ:ALTR), Jim has more than 25 years of experience with some of the world’s leading technology companies including Hewlett Packard (HP), Dell and Cisco. Jim works with customers and partners to leverage emerging Cloud, AI/ML and Data Analytics technologies to accelerate Digital Transformation through drive data-powered nnovation.Jim is known for his experience in helping businesses, at an inflection point, take advantage of market ransitions. He has been described as a thought leader with the agility to always make an impact thatmatters. Throughout his career (including 6 years with Global responsibility), Jim has been successfully running businesses that help customers leverage digital technologies to drive efficiencies and enter new markets. He has been selected as one of the “Most Influential Black Americans in Corporate America” (2020 Savoy Magazine) and a “Best of Biz 2015” awards winner in the Executive of the year category.

Tobias Toft
  Hardware UX Lead
Google
 

  Tobias Toft is a multidisciplinary designer, educator, and design leader with an engineering background. He’s currently leading a UX team in the AR/VR group at Google, before that he was Head of Visual Design for Google Assistant, he led the creative technology group at Pinterest, and was a Design Director at IDEO. As a staunch believer in the power of prototypes, Tobias prefers hands-on work and “building to think” as the best way to inspire and accelerate creative teams and their partners.

Ovetta Sampson
  Director, UX, Core Machine Learning Google

  Ovetta Sampson is currently the Director UX Core Machine Learning at Google working to drive excellence in machine learning at Google and around the world. She was formerly Vice President of Machine Learning Experience Design, at Capital One supporting the bank’s enterprise machine learning platform teams and leading the Responsible AI Team. Before joining Capital One, she was a Principal Design Director at Microsoft, leading a transdisciplinary design, engineering and research team in developing cross-industry innovative solutions for Microsoft’s biggest enterprise customers. 

Grace Nicklin
Head of UX
Google Labs

As a practiced human centered designer, Grace believes the best solutions are inspired by the people for whom they’re intended. She spent 10 years at IDEO, where she helped build out their Venture Design and Research & Insights practices. She's a year into her role building out the UXR team for Labs, a 0-1 style group within Google.

   Leslie Fine

General Partner
Enjoy the Work

 Leslie’s career as a startup founder and product leader began after earning her PhD in Game Theory and Behavioral Economics from Caltech. In 2008, she founded her first startup, Crowdcast, and successfully exited the company in 2012. Following Crowdcast, Leslie helped lead three more startups: Spigit (SVP Product), tenXer (Head of Product), and Swerve (Founder, CEO). After her four startup experiences, she ventured into the enterprise world and joined Salesforce (VP Product), where she helped ship the company’s first AI product. But it was through her involvement in Salesforce’s M&A process that she ultimately realized she wanted to return to startup life. 

   Lesley Ross

 General Partner
Enjoy the Work

 Lesley has worked in tech for 14 years as an operator in growth and analytics roles. She founded Quantified Ardor in 2016 to support growing startups around the world on data-driven decision-making. She has also spent the last 7 years as a startup advisor (including as a mentor for Google For Startups since 2016) while holding multiple COO positions for startups at various stages. 

  Ruben Ortega

 General Partner
Enjoy the Work

 Ruben joined his first startup more than 25 years ago and was immediately delighted by the blank slate in front of him. He has always sought out companies that were early in their growth stories, which led him to join Amazon, Google, and Pinterest many years before they became some of the world’s largest enterprises. The common denominator – novel software, products, and teams that surprised and delighted massive numbers of customers. His joy comes from bringing new products to the world. He’s learned that there is a right way, a harmonious way, to ship those solutions. And he’s grateful now to have the experience (and scars) to help others get there faster. His journey from engineer to CTO to advisor has taught him that there is a cadence of communication, delivery, and metrics core to every successful company. With the right foundation in place, a founder can build a company that delivers on the promise of a better tomorrow. The best part of advising is having the insight to guide a company towards their own unique answers – the ones that both reflect their values and lead to business success. He’s excited to be a General Partner at Enjoy The Work as he continues to teach, learn, and be in awe of the imagination of our founders.

Alex Gould

  Founder and Managing Director
Long Story Short

  For more than a decade, Alex has helped organizations big and small successfully build their brands and “tell better stories”. A communications and design specialist by trade, he understands the complexities of technology and how to best deliver your message in a persuasive & memorable way. Born and raised in Toronto, he’s helped build brands and businesses on a global scale with stints in New York and London, UK along the way.To date, he’s collaborated with clients that include MasterCard, Unilever, TELUS, Nissan, MIT, Colliers & AB InBev to launch iconic initiatives across Europe and North America throughout his career.

     Will Greenblatt

Co-founder & CEO

OutLoud Speakers School

Will Greenblatt has been acting professionally since he was seven years old, initially starring in The Homecoming with Oscar Winner Anne Bancroft. He worked throughout his childhood and decided to go to acting school to hone his craft. He graduated from the National Theatre School of Canada in 2010, but the toxic environment of the program left him jaded, so he quit acting. He moved to Spain where he discovered his love for teaching English, and then dived into the world of entrepreneurship, co-founding an English/Business Training company in China. After exiting, he co-founded OutLoud Speakers School, an agency of actors teaching public speaking & communication skills to entrepreneurs and executives. He has repeatedly spoken and coached at Google, Wayfair, Boston Dynamics, TechStars, Founder Institute and Ericsson, as well as providing coaching to over 4500 individuals virtually worldwide. OutLoud’s clients have won numerous pitch competitions and raised over $200 million USD in investment. When he’s not running OutLoud, he still acts in film, television, theatre and video games. He is also a performing and recording musician, with his albums Borden Street and City Folk available on all streaming platforms. Will speaks 4 international languages, including Mandarin Chinese and is currently learning his 5th, Urdu, to speak with his wife’s family.

Geoff Anderson

Senior Product Manager
Google Cloud

Product focused with extensive experience in founding, operating and growing startups through exits (3x) and utter crash-and-burn scenarios. Lots of experience in navigating fortune 500 companies with stints at Salesforce.com, Cisco, and Broadcom. Geoffrey always finds himself close to infrastructure, DevOps and the engineering organization in general. His hands-on product experience ranges from B2C adventures like wearables and textiles and to B2B with various SaaS solutions and Developer Tools. AI / ML, Cloud, MarTech, E-Comm, Apps, Dev Tools and more.

Christine De Sario 

Cloud Architect/Customer Engineer Google Cloud

Christine is a Cloud Architect at Google with a background in Data Analytics. She works with vc-backed start-ups to architect and enable adoption of cloud solutions. She has a decade of experience in both tech and upstream energy, having worked with a range of customers, from start-ups to large enterprises. She is passionate about the start-up space and also volunteers at local start-up accelerators to help founders establish a strong foundation capable of scaling efficiently as they grow.

Daniel Watrous

Customer Engineer
Google

Daniel Watrous is an Electrical and Software engineer with 28 years experience creating software solutions for premier global technology companies, like Micron, Hewlett Packard, TriNet and Google. His leadership in Enterprise Architecture at these companies has resulted in the successful modernization of key infrastructure and applications. Expertise includes automation, containerization, CI/CD, application modernization and all things cloud. Today he is helping Enterprises in Houston achieve the same modernization results on Google Cloud.

Nikita Namjoshi 

Developer Advocate for Generative AI Google

Nikita helps developers build, deploy, and scale generative AI applications on Google Cloud. She previously worked on the TensorFlow team. When she's not creating demos or tutorials, you'll find her caring for houseplants and discovering new ways to lower her environmental footprint.

Alan Ranciato
Learning Portfolio Manager,  App Modernization, Google Cloud

Alan joined Google in 2019 as a Cloud Customer Engineer, specializing in Application Modernization and DevOps.  Since then, Alan has joined the Learning Services organization and is now responsible for all Google Cloud training in the Application Modernization and Development areas. Prior to his time at Google, Alan held multiple development, architecture and technology leadership roles with a focus on DevOps and enterprise transformation. 

Taylor Roper
Program Manager
Google

Taylor Roper is Program Manager on the Responsible AI PgM team in Research and has been working at Google for a little over 2.5 years. She focuses on creating tools, processes, and resources to help teams integrate Responsible AI themes, practices, and tools into their work streams and products. Taylor is from the Chicagoland area, home of the best pizza (in the US), and is an avid fan of historically Black institutions, pierogies, and Korean dramas.

Philip Parham
AI Principles Ethics Specialist
Google

Philip Parham joined Google five years ago and for the last two years has worked with teams across the company to implement Google's AI Principles into products, research, and processes.  Prior to joining Google, Philip worked with education and health care nonprofits focused on improving equity and increasing access for underserved populations.

Inderdeep Matharoo
Specialist Customer Engineer Infrastructure, Google

Inderdeep is a Specialist Customer Engineer at Google Cloud, focusing on Infrastructure Modernization and Security. Specifically, Inderdeep helps enterprises realize the benefits of modernizing and migrating their on-premise infrastructure and leveraging the various solutions Google Cloud provides for heterogeneous infrastructure, as well as helping them secure their cloud-based applications and data. Inderdeep is passionate about helping companies of all sizes through their digital transformation journey and capitalizing on the benefits of Cloud. 

Vikram Gangulavoipalyam
Customer Engineer, Analytics
Google Cloud

Vikram is a part of the Strategic Outcomes Engineering Team. He has now been at Google for 5 years. He is a Principal Architect  focussed on Data Analytics and AI/ML. He has helped multiple customers accelerate their Cloud adoption. 

Adam Muise
Principal Architect
Google Cloud

Adam Muise is a Principal Architect in Financial Services at Google Cloud. Adam has worked as an architect and technology leader with some of the largest scale data platforms in the world at IBM, Cloudera/Hortonworks, Paytm, Pythian, and Google. He is a passionate photographer and will take your picture. 

Juana Mahadik
Account Executive
Google

Juana has over 12 years of experience advising top brands on their digital marketing strategy. She has worked in various industries both B2B & B2C across India, US & Canada. She works with Canadian counterparts of Global Auto companies helping them build their marketing strategy to build brand love and sell more cars while using Google's entire suite of advertising products.

Cameron Davis
Sales Engineer
Google 

Cameron began his career in startups focused on sponsorship analytics managing athlete programs with brands like Nike, Bose and GoPro. Understanding the value of data through the lens of privacy regulations and comprehensive analysis, Cameron found his way to Google as an Audience and Privacy expert and now facilitates performance driven marketing for enterprise businesses.

Megan Howard
Sales Engineer
Goolge  

Megan Howard is a part of the Sales Engineer team at Google. She has over 11 years experience as a seller of media and digital technology platforms. Her background includes works across a variety of industries.

Peter Hand
Brand Strategy Lead
Google

Peter is a Brand Strategy Lead at Google with over 10 years of experience working with some of the worlds biggest & most innovative brands. Aside from his tenure in advertising Peter worked in fashion and beauty photography for years and holds a Masters in Molecular Genetics.

Uchechi Udeoka
International Growth Consultant Google

Uchechi is an Ad Tech Sales & Marketing professional with over 8 years experience in marketing communications, international business development, ad tech sales & customer relationship management. She is currently working at Google as an International Growth Consultant, partnering with clients in identifying & tapping into high growth opportunities in global markets while ensuring operational readiness in doing so. She has a Masters in Strategic Marketing from London School of Business & Finance and is well-versed in advertising & marketing communications globally.

Liane Aihara
Product Inclusion Lead
Google

Liane Aihara transitioned at the start of 2020 into what she calls ‘ a dream FT role’ that she defined for herself, driving Product Inclusion initiatives for an 10.5k+ member organization in Google comprising 9 separate business units.  In this role she guides Googlers to build for the broadest set of users with each product or feature by fostering organizational awareness, refining existing behaviors, and defining processes and best practices that center equity and inclusion. 

Jeremy Neuner
Head of Startup Content & Curriculum Google


Jeremy is a fellow founder and startup CEO. He started and ran a company for seven years, and is now the lead of Google's startup content and curriculum program.

Rich Jones
Retention & Progression Consultant Google

  Rich is a Certified Wellness Coach (NASM-CWC), 2022 and 2023 national champion in masters' level track and field, motivational speaker, and Founder of Find More Balance, a health and performance company offering coaching, community, and a collection of resources to help busy professionals thrive inside and outside of work. He's also a Retention & Progression Consultant in Google's Leading through Equity and Diversity organization, and regular internal speaker on mental health and wellbeing.

Courtney Caldwell
Cofounder & CEO, ShearShare
and Google for Startups Accelerator: Black Founders Alum (2020)

 Courtney Caldwell is the Cofounder & CEO of beauty-tech startup, ShearShare, the largest provider of on-demand salon and barbershop space rentals and the most affordable leases in the market. The ShearShare app gives licensed beauty and barbering professionals the freedom and flexibility to rent workspace by the day in cities all over the world, while salon and barbershop owners make money on unused space. Prior to co-founding ShearShare, Courtney managed an award-winning salon with her husband and cofounder, which was the genesis behind ShearShare. Before that, Courtney ran a boutique consulting firm where she fast-tracked international sales and marketing success for brands such as Zendesk, Zenefits, and Qualtrics. Courtney spent two decades building winning teams in tech marketing and has held leadership positions in both early-stage and late-stage technology organizations: vice president of marketing for Marketing Advocate, global director of Oracle’s worldwide digital marketing strategy and innovations group, head of digital demand generation and JAPAC field marketing at RightNow Technologies. Her leadership in demand and revenue generation at RightNow Technologies was instrumental in the $1.45B acquisition of the company.

Shannon McLoughlin
Senior Vice President at Nectar Communications

 Shannon has spent her career working with top enterprise technology companies and movers in the B2B space. Passionate about strategic storytelling as well as helping companies and executives elevate their brands through thought leadership, I am driven to help my clients and my team succeed beyond expectations.