Google Office Hour Mentors
Ajinkya Rasam
Customer Engineer - Data & AI
Google Cloud
I have 10+ years of experience building data and AI strategies both for startups as well as enterprises. Have been consulting startup to think about their data as a monetization channel and productize it. My current work involves, meeting C-level execs, understanding their goals, providing information about market and competitive analysis.
Alex Monteiro
Field Sales Representative
Google Cloud
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Alex has 20+ years in technical sales, including services, SaaS, and platform sales. He has worked for companies such as Salesforce, Oracle, and now Google Cloud - and in 2000-2003, was one of 4 co-founders of a startup where he was the CEO. Alex has worked with businesses of all sizes through his career, including startups. He currently resides in Kansas City, MO.
An Nguyen
Staff Software Engineer
Google
An is an execution-focused product engineer with a passion for building great software. In 2020, she joined Google Cloud through the acquisition of Looker. Prior to that, her career spans over five startups, where she has delivered products in diverse domains such as DevTools, ML Ops, BI, and GenAI. She enjoys the challenge of creating products from scratch, navigating ambiguous problem spaces, and designing iterative solutions. As a leader, I've had the privilege of mentoring many individual contributors, helping them thrive in their professional journeys.
UX Designer
Aparna is a UX designer with 8+ years of experience shipping meaningful solutions for complex problems. She is passionate about advocating for user-centric solutions and has facilitated over 30 Design Thinking workshops for a variety of teams and organizations.
Astha Garg
Search Ads 360 Lead
Google
Astha is a seasoned digital marketing strategist with 8+ years of experience at Google. Her journey has taken her to three diverse countries, each contributing to deep understanding of global markets and trends. Her expertise lies in crafting innovative strategies that drive performance advertising and tech selling using Google's Ad tech platforms. With a solid foundation in coaching, mentoring, stakeholder management, and project coordination, she is adept at fostering cross-functional collaboration to achieve shared goals.
UX Writer / Content Designer
Google
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Austin has 3+ years of experience as a UX Writer / Content Designer at Google, enhancing the Stadia Partner Experience to make it a joy to develop, publish, and manage games on Stadia.
He has both enterprise and consumer app UXW experience for web and mobile. He can help define voice and tone, cut the noise to optimize and streamline designs, write compelling and clear UI text, review designs for accessibility standards, and help introduce "fun" into flows. :)
Field Sales Representative
Google Cloud
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Bruno has over a decade of experience in the technology industry, having covered both Private and Public sector organizations both large and small in both the US & Canada. His background includes helping people understand the value of & implement technologies to improve their Reliability, Security, Scalability, Sustainability & Cost. He's been a mentor for Google for Startups for several years, having participated in 10+ Accelerators while providing advice on both B2B GTM strategy & technical excellence for building Cloud systems - particularly on Google Cloud.
Product Manager
Google
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Carolyn has 10+ years experience working on consumer and developer products, specializing in mobile app products. Prior to Google she spent 4 years at Apple on the App Store team working with app developers such as Tinder, HBO, and Facebook, helping them grow and monetize their products. She also spent 6 years at Expedia leading mobile app growth. She is currently a Product Marketing Manager at Google and has just been approved to transfer to the Product Management ladder.
Chetan Ramaiah
Software Engineer
Google
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Chetan has 7+ years of experience in building widely used Machine Learning products, from research to deploying in production at scale. A PhD in Machine Learning, Chetan has worked on Computer Vision, Natural Language processing and on sensor data from IoT devices. His industry experience has spanned Fintech, Business automation, Software services, and Augmented / Virtual Reality, and ranges from early stage startups to Google. Chetan also has leadership experience and has mentored entrepreneurs and advised startups.
Field Sales Representative Enterprise
Google Cloud
Chin has 10 years experiences in cloud sales across Azure, AWS and Google. She has deep understanding how the cloud provider structure their sales team and how to better engage with the Sales team to get resources. Her current role at Google is a enterprise account manager for AI start ups.
Cloud Architect
Google Cloud
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Daniel is currently working as a Cloud Security Architect at Google helping companies with foundational security in the cloud, previous areas they’ve also worked at Google was a Principal Architect in Financial Services as well as a Partner Solution Architect in the Channels organization. Daniel has over 26 years of industry experience and was the Chief Platform Architect for AWS globally at HSBC Bank prior to joining Google and worked at a startup, "Organic.com" back in the dotcom days.
Daniela Maszhold
Solution Manager
Google Cloud
Daniela is a Data Analytics and Enterprise AI Solutions Lead at Google Cloud and works with strategic customers and partners to define and execute on their data analytics and enterprise AI transformation. She works on industry use cases and entertains discussions between line of business users and the CIO/CTO offices to drive success with data and AI/ML - Modern Enterprise Data Warehouse.
Head of Value Advisory, Strategic Industries, Google Cloud
David Porter, based in Toronto Canada leads the customer value & transformation advisory team for NA Strategic Industries and focus on aligning Google capabilities with customer strategy to define the customer business outcomes and ROI. He’s been leading similar functions at application and infrastructure companies prior to joining Google Cloud in 2020. Over my 20+ year in David’s career in technology, he has led finance, operations, technical sales and business development teams. David is excited to share these learnings. David's education background is Honours, BBA with CPA designation. David is motivated to help startups grow and scale sharing knowledge on areas such as sales, strategy and partnerships. David enjoys spending time with his wife and two children, playing tennis and skiing with his personal time.
GTM Lead, AI and Modern Infrastructure
Google
David has spent over 20 of 30 years working in startups. David started in Silicon Valley back in 2000 just before the big crash and was in startups up until 2019 when the startup that he was with was purchased by Google. David has held titles including CIO, COO, VP IT, VP Cloud. He have been through every stage of rise and fall of startups, as well as all the adventures around fund raising, hard pivots, and customer growth.
Customer Engineering Specialist, Data & AI
Google Cloud
Erik has been at Google for over 4 years supporting the growth of digital native GCP customers in Canada. He has mentored over 30 startups to date, and focuses specifically on cloud architecture, data, security and machine learning use cases.
Evgeni Nikolov
Senior UX Designer
Google Cloud
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Evgeni has 20+ years of experience in design and 8+ in UX and product design. He has a deep understanding of design/product strategy, design process, and UX involvement in product development as part of a cross-functional agile teams. Before UX design, Evgeni was an Art/Creative director with top creative and digital agencies as Ogilvy, Tribal DDB and Havas. Most recently, Evgeni has joined Google Cloud, owning the post purchase experience for Google Marketplace.
Developer Relations Engineer Core
Fred is a passionate Developer and User Advocate. He enjoys hacking on open source projects, occasionally spawning new ones, and knows first hand how painful it can be to get up and running with a new product for the first time. It's therefore no surprise that he spends much of his time working to improve the developer "getting started" experience, in order to make developers happier and more productive.
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.
Giulia Sclabi
Digital Native Growth FSR East
Google Cloud
With a background in Spotify's early stages, entrepreneurship, and current role as a Startup Grower at Google, I specialize in driving startup growth and forming strategic Google Cloud partnerships. I excel in optimizing tech footprints for startups, leveraging a decade-long industry expertise.
Hitesh Arora
UX Solutions Architect
Google
Hitesh has 4+ years of experience in qualitative & quantitative UX research, with a focus on improving conversion rate for mobile apps & websites. He has a deep understanding of Heuristics Analysis, Usability Testing, Competitive Benchmarking, and getting founders to accept A/B Testing suggestions to SaaS product features. Before UX research, Hites was an App Ads Performance Specialist. Most recently, Hitesh has shifted into a Program Manager role at Google, managing and scaling a vendor operations that offer UX & Performance audits to priority partners for Google.
Technical Lead/Manager
Google
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Jason leads a Chrome team to ensure there are reliable metrics to capture real world user experience on the web. Before Google, Jason spent 10+ years leading and growing agile teams to deliver great products and systems on the web, including SaaS, enterprise software, and custom solutions. Jason has a wide range of experience in startups, interacting with customers from small client consultations up to multi-year engagements with Canada’s largest financial institutions. Above all, Jason wants to improve the web so users have better experiences and broader opportunities.
Customer Engineer
Google Cloud
Helping customers reach technical and business outcomes using Google Cloud technology. Jeffrey is most comfortable with cloud infrastructure and application modernization.
Jon Harmer
Senior Product Manager
Google
Jon is a product manager at Google on the Google Cloud team, working on GKE. Previously at Google, Jon was on the Gmail team, where his team built platform and extensibility features that enabled 3rd parties to integrate with Google Workspace. Jon has more than 20 years of experience at startups and midsized companies, mostly in the SaaS and online media spaces, has been on the early team at a few startups and also co-founded LaaSer, a Techstars Atlanta ‘16 company. Jon has also been a mentor to startups through Google For Startups, Techstars, and Atlanta Tech Village.
Head of Brand Strategy
Google
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Karen Zuccala is the Head of Brand Strategy at Google Canada. Karen is a marketing industry veteran with 20+ years of Global business leadership experience, having lived and held executive positions across Europe, the US and Canada. During her career, she has built a strong reputation in brand and digital marketing, strategic business planning and eCommerce. Her passion for technology and innovation has fuelled market disruption for some of the world's most iconic brands including adidas, Nike, Diesel and Twitter.
Cloud Consultant
Google Cloud
Kiran believes that Technology has the power to bring out the best of your most logical and the most creative sides. She’s had the experience to turn ideas into a product like dating apps with her friends to audience measurement for ads for a corporation. In her current role as a Cloud Consultant, she works with Google Cloud customers to unleash their new ideas on cloud using Data and Analytics.
Technical Account Manager
Google Cloud
Lakshmanan is a Technical Account Manager for Google Cloud in North America where he works with enterprise customers to help them succeed on Google Cloud. He is currently focusing on Generative AI/ML & Data Solutions. With more than a decade of experience in the technology industry, Lakshmanan has a passion to transform enterprise organizations with Google Cloud. Prior to Google, He had helped fortune 500 companies to migrate to cloud across North America & Asia & UK regions.
Director Strategy & Product Acceleration
Google
Matthew Rivard, Director of Strategy and Product for Google Canada leads teams responsible for developing and supporting our go-to-market product and activation strategy for Google & YouTube’s suite of advertising and measurement solutions. Rivard joined Google in 2010 and has held a variety of roles in a number of different areas including analytics, research & sales team management. Prior to Google he worked in both Engineering and product development roles. Matthew graduated from the University of Western with a BESc in Software Engineering and holds multiple patents in the areas of paid and organic search.
Sales Manager, Ads
Google
Mieke has been at Google for 7 years, working with some of the largest advertisers across the globe to help them grow their brand with YouTube. Before joining Google she worked in the startup scene in Amsterdam and Berlin, working with various startups and organising accelerators.
UX Designer
Google
Molly is a Product Designer with over 12 years of experience designing consumer and enterprise products for startups to Apple and Google. She has been a Googler for over 8 years. Molly is passionate about the responsible development of technology and products. She has spent the past few years on the Trust UX team. She has led projects to launch info literacy tools, to improve age appropriate access to Search and to empower people to protect their personal info. Mentorship and elevating others is incredibly important to Molly. She has mentored Google Certificate UX learners, is an active member of the G Mentors community and often participates in youth in tech programs. Molly has previous experience mentoring start ups through Google.org Women’s Impact Challenge and Fast Forward, a Google.org grantee which is an accelerator for tech nonprofits.
Mike Nimer
Data Solution Specialist
Google
I have over 26 years of experience building web applications and server software. During this time I have worked at startups and in a consulting role doing development & mentoring with teams around the world. At Google I am responsible for helping customers moving to Google Cloud with their future architecture, debugging, enablement, and deep dive education.
Nazan Khan
Engineering Manager
Google
Nazan is an experienced engineering leader with a proven track record of building and launching impactful ML-powered features for high-profile products like Google Assistant, Google Ads, and Bing Search. She excels in driving results through data-driven decision making, possesses keen product intuition, and fosters high-performing cross-functional teams that thrive in ambiguous environments. Nazan is adept at navigating hurdles, organizational boundaries, and shifting priorities to deliver meaningful results, making her a valuable asset to any startup looking to scale and succeed.
Osaze Osoba
Account Manager
Google
I have over 8 years of experience leading digital marketing and product teams. Currently an Account Manager at Google where I work with some of the largest Canadian brands to drive user growth and profitability. Before Google, I spent my early career leading growth teams at multiple startups within Finance, Travel, Service and Retail verticals.
Osmond Ng
Enterprise Customer Engineer
Google Cloud
Osmond has more than 25 years in the IT industry. Osmond has been with the Google Cloud team for around 5 years. He is an experienced startup mentor who specializes in helping startups adopt open source, cloud technology to drive business value or innovation.
Patrick Alexander
Customer Engineer, Retail
Google
With over twenty years of dedicated experience as a cloud solution architect, my expertise lies in a wide spectrum of cutting-edge fields including RMDBS (Relational Management Database Systems), NoSQL Databases, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Business Intelligence (BI) solutions. Throughout my illustrious career, I have consistently demonstrated an unwavering commitment to excellence, delivering outstanding results for an extensive roster of large enterprise clients.
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.
Prabhu Thiagarajan
Customer Engineer
Google Cloud
Prabhu is a business-savvy-techie with a twenty year career across global enterprises and technology companies like Google. During this period, he has led business transformation initiatives and realized practical technical roadmaps for large organizations and digital natives alike.Prabhu's academic, professional, and startup experience; and personal interests are founded in using technology to make financial decisions easy for everyone. He has a solid understanding of the broad GCP technology portfolio and modern application architectures using Kubernetes, DevOps, and AI/ML. Recently, he has been leading Cloud engineering for GCP's strategic customers and has helped on-board two digital-native startups on GCP.
Qayam Sayani
Strategic Agency Manager
Google
Qayam is a Digital Marketing & Partnerships expert who has specialized in performance marketing & media strategy that produces long-term, sustainable business growth. He's worked with a wide variety of startups and Fortune 500 brands across search, social, programmatic, and other paid & organic marketing channels. While at advertising agencies he worked with some of the largest global restaurant, CPG, retail, finance, technology, and automotive brands. Qayam focuses on creating real-world outcomes, and developing strategies that ultimately influence the bottom line.
Ruchi Mahajan
Staff Interaction Designer
Google
Ruchi is a design leader with 18+ years of experience across domains and geographies. She works at the intersection of product strategy, user experience design, and human insights to solve complex business problems. She mentors start-up teams at Manush Labs (start-up accelerator) and provides guidance to designers in various industry forums and groups.
Saboora Alsikafi
Senior Account Executive
Google
Saboora is a dynamic leader and coach with 18+ years’ experience driving massive growth and building high performing teams, with an emphasis on sales, marketing and general management. Saboora is a Google and ex-Pinterest Sales team lead. She has a track record of transforming CPG (Food & Beverage), Retail (eCommerce & Omnichannel), and B2B advertisers’ businesses and developing talent. Prior to Ad Sales, Saboora was a Brand Director - running $XXXM+ P&Ls, product innovation and cross-functional teams; and a Finance leader - covering investment research, forecasting, and deal valuation. Across these roles she’s worked with early, growth stage, and mature startups. She deeply understands brand and performance marketing, sales strategy and go-to-market, product strategy and roadmapping, pitching and presenting, and team and leadership development. Most recently, Saboora has more heavily focused on advising startups, particularly women and URM founders - to help them flourish leveraging Google’s expertise and tools.
Shannon Ong
Product Manager Lead
YouTube
I'm a tech, creator, and fashion enthusiast who is quad-lingual. Currently, I work in Product at YouTube, building on the long-term strategy for creator monetization on YouTube. Creators are critical to the success of platforms today - conveying information through engaging mediums and pushing them to niche audiences. Previously, I worked in Product at a startup called Narrativ, focused on building products for the creator economy. Before that, I was a product lead at Amazon- specifically on the Alexa team focusing on the go-to-market strategy for new-to-world products. Products I've launched include: Echo Buds (first in-ear Alexa enabled earphones), Echo Studio (first Alexa speaker to render 3D sound). I've launched a few side businesses- ranging from a two-sided marketplaces to an outdoor floating sauna business. I'm passionate about entrepreneurship and the intersection where technology meets fashion. I'm interested in many things and pursue relevant hobbies- entrepreneurship, culture, travel, personal finance, fashion, politics, photography, and education.
Silvian Calman
Software Engineer
Google Cloud
Silvian is a software engineer working on supporting various table formats (parquet, orc, etc) on BigQuery. Silvian has also worked on Google maps and analytics projects and has experience with search infrastructure. Prior to joining Google I worked on optimizing compilers at Intel.
Sr. Account Executive, New Business Partnerships
Google
Sofia has been working in tech sales for over 6 years, she started her career at a startup company called Assent, which is now a unicorn Canadian company. Than transitioned into an Account Executive role at Shopify and most recently over 1 year ago at Google in the Canadian New Business Sales Partnerships team. Sofia has an entrepreneurial mindset, she's had multiple eCommerce brands and when not selling and closing deals at Google, Sofia is thinking of new ideas, investing in Crypto/NFTs or playing tennis. Sofia is also the founder of Women in Web3 at Google and a weekly NFT talk within Google.
Strategic Partner Development Manager
Sukriti has 10+ years of working in customer or partner-centric roles, with a focus on strategic initiatives. She has a wealth of experience from her finance and M&A background, strategy consulting, product growth and adoption, program management, and technology implementation and transformation work. Sukriti's experience has spanned Fortune 500 clients, nonprofits, growth-stage companies, and startups. She joined the Global Ads Partnerships team ~2 years ago, and works with new and emerging ad formats to grow and scale them via strategic partnerships.
Tarun Sharma
Partner Solutions Architect
Google Cloud
Tarun has 15+ years of experience in technology, with a focus on security and blockchain. He has a deep understanding of cloud technology, application development, cloud security, and decentralized applications. Before joining Google, Tarun has co-founded two web development startups and bootstrapped them from a single person to 30 people. Most recently, Tarun has been leading partner engineering efforts in Google Cloud while focusing on cybersecurity and web3 enablement for partners to deliver quality products and services to the end customers.
Taslim Okunola
Global Strategy & Operations Manager
Google
Taslim looks after strategy and operations for Android, Enterprise, and Developer Marketing at Google. In this capacity, he leads strategy deep dives to help marketing leaders sustainably grow Google’s complex platforms and ecosystems, and help them to run a tight ship by managing ongoing business operations needs. Prior to this role, he was a Product Manager on the Chrome Browser team where he built content products for the browser. Before that, he drove research and product marketing efforts for Search, YouTube and Assistant in Sub-Saharan Africa. He has also worked with Google.org to run the Google Impact Challenge in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, which supported 36 nonprofits with $6M in grant funding.
Software Engineer
Google Cloud
Valerii has 15+ years of experience in software development for different industries(transportation, utilities, manufacturing, cloud) using different technology stacks (.Net, Java, NodeJS, etc.). He was developing web, mobile and desktop applications and web services. Currently he’sworking on UI Infrastructure for GDCH, previously on Google Cloud Data Analytics and Dialogflow UI.
Yang Du
Capital Engineering Principal
Google
Yang led Sequoia Capital's investment strategy and operations function for ~ 2 years. At Sequoia, Yang helped manage the investment team's full end-to-end investment processes and design / execute strategy for their investment partners, while serving as the connective tissue between Sequoia's investment teams and operating teams. Yang was also a co-lead of Sequoia's EPD team, focusing on building the best investor and founder products for the ecosystem. Yang’s expertise is in how a top tier VC fund make investment decisions, which extends to helping with early stage startup ideation, pitches, fundraising strategy, etc
Yu Gu
Software Engineer
Google
Yu has worked at Venture Capital, HedgeFunds, MobileGame Startups, FinTech Startups prior to Google and was engaged in research domains including Augmented Reality and Computational Neuroscience. He has experience working at very small, close knit teams, building solutions@scale and navigating technical architectures. His expertise lies in Technical Solutions, Engineering and cross-field domains like AR and Neuroscience.
This program gives you access to dozens of Google mentors! Schedule office hours with them by visiting the Google for Startups Accelerator: Black Founders - Technical Advisors Tool!