Sylvia serves on the Public Company Boards of Directors for Qualcomm, Credo
Technologies, and the private companies Quark.ai, and Ambri Battery. Sylvia is on the
Qualcomm governance committee and chairs the Credo governance committee. She began her career as a rocket scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and held
executive roles at Apple, Autodesk, Dell, and IBM. In 2010, President Obama appointed
Sylvia as a White House Education Commissioner. From 2016 to 2020, she was the
CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA, modernizing the organization with over 126 new
STEM badge programs. Throughout the USA, millions of STEM badges have been
earned launching girl’s interest in STEM. Sylvia authored the bestselling memoir,”Path
to the Stars: My Journey from Girl Scout to Rocket Scientist” promoting perseverance
and self-determination. She holds a Bachelor’s degree with Honors in Industrial
Engineering from New Mexico State University and a Master’s engineering graduate
degree from Stanford University. Duke University awarded Sylvia an Honorary
Doctorate of Science in 2022.
What is your biggest leadership mistake?
Not keeping my managers and leadership aware of my accomplishments and value add to the organization.
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Erica Lockheimer
CEO & Founder
HumanizeHer
Erica Lockheimer is the CEO & Founder of HumanizeHer, a platform aimed at cultivating a world where every woman thrives, shattering glass ceilings and redefining success on her own terms. She also serves on the advisory board of SJSU and advises several start-up companies.
Erica is known in the technology industry as a prominent engineering leader with vast experience over her 25+ year career in tech. She started out at Good Technology in 2001 as an individual contributor rising to management. In 2010, she joined LinkedIn and rose to serve as VP of engineering throughout her 13-year tenure at the company. During the peak growth of LinkedIn in her first 7 years, she created the Growth team from the ground up where she focused on increasing membership from 150 million to now over 1 Billion members and deepening engagement with members across LinkedIn's products. Later at LinkedIn she also led LinkedIn Learning and leading the LinkedIn’s Talent Solutions/Careers team.
Erica was responsible for founding LinkedIn's Women In Tech (WIT) initiative in 2014, focused on empowering women in technical roles within the company and scaling the program to have a broader reach for women in engineering globally. She continues to be seen as a prominent leader in the space of diversity, inclusion, belonging, and building community.
What is your biggest leadership mistake?
My biggest leadership mistake was not going with my gut and following rather than leading.
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Kathleen Vignos
VP Engineering
Capital One
Kathleen Vignos has spent 25+ years working at tech companies and startups in Silicon Valley. She currently serves as VPE in the Card Tech organization at Capital One, leading large-scale transformation projects across web, mobile, and ML decisioning over two different business domains responsible for more than $1B in revenue.
Previously in her 6 years at Twitter, Kathleen led teams working on promoted tweet ML review, tweet translation, abuse tooling, and infrastructure automation across on-prem, Google Cloud, and AWS environments. She also personally trained 150+ Twitter engineering managers in hiring and leadership programs. Prior to Twitter, Kathleen led the engineering department at WIRED through complete site and infrastructure redesign and was tech lead for projects like Apple News.
What is your biggest leadership lesson?
Making the transition from tactical focus to strategic focus. Being highly productive can be a trap as you try to scale yourself. I have learned that I cannot do it all, I must delegate, and I must work at a higher, more strategic altitude to be successful as an executive.
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Avital Arora
Director Engineering
Google
Avital Arora is Sr. Director of Engineering at Google, leading Compute Storage and Solutions. Prior to Google, Avital has 20+ years of experience leading Engineering teams in various stages at companies such as Salesforce, NetApp and Dell as well as a seed stage startup. She has been on both sides of acquisition integration and has led teams delivering products from scratch, cloud migrations as well as engineering stack integrations. She prides herself in building and empowering stellar teams.
Avital holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan school of Business and a Masters in Computer Science from Texas A&M University.
What is your biggest leadership mistake?
Wanting to “do it all” and not leveraging my TPM, PM counterparts as much as I should and could have. Thankfully this was earlier in my career and I’ve since learned from it 🙂
What is your biggest leadership lesson?
Business context is everything. You can be darn good at what you do, but understanding the big picture and figuring out your / your team’s role in it is crucial
Why are you excited to speak at our Summit?
Share my experiences, hope others can learn from my mistakes. And to listen and learn from all of you!
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Akriti Dokania
Partner
Ridge Ventures
Akriti is a Partner at Ridge Ventures. Her background in computer science, product management, and building a B2B business from the ground up have expertly positioned Akriti to understand the complexities that founders face not only in developing software, but in all aspects of the lifecycle of a startup.
Previously, Akriti was an investor at Octopus Ventures and was part of the Deep Tech pod focusing on everything from AI/ML automation to Quantum Computing. She worked as Product Manager with Windows Security and in the User Experience team at Windows Edge. While completing her MBA at the London Business School, she worked with the Amazon Alexa team to help launch Alexa in new territories. Prior to this, she built a B2B business focused on accounting in the retail space in India.
She holds a BS in Computer Science Engineering from the University of Michigan and an MBA from London Business School.
Akriti enjoys tennis, soccer, and pretty much any competitive sport.
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Kathryn Koehler
Director Engineering
Netflix
Kathryn Koehler is the Director of Productivity Engineering at Netflix. Her teams focus on the development environment and associated experiences, which enable and empower developers at Netflix to bootstrap, code, build, test, debug, and maintain software more effectively and efficiently. Before Netflix, she was the VP of Engineering for the Science Initiative at Chan Zuckerberg (CZI), where her teams built applications, tools, and platforms for biomedical researchers to accelerate scientific discovery. She has worked in various areas, including productivity, entertainment, gaming, automotive, and finance. She enjoys people leadership and creating environments where everyone can do their best work. Kathryn also serves as a mentor and coach for leaders within the tech industry. Off the job, you can find her railing against social media, biking, running, or embarrassing her two adult children. She holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University, a degree she uses solely to fix cars and bicycles or assemble furniture.
What is your biggest leadership lesson?
Take opportunities as they arise, don't have a fixed plan. You gain experience faster that way, and you can't be an effective leader without some hard-won experience under your belt.
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Jocelyn Goldfein
Partner
Zetta Ventures
Jocelyn Goldfein is a Managing Director at Zetta Venture Partners, where she invests seed capital in AI-native startups with B2B business models.
Jocelyn is a widely recognized industry expert on product strategy, infrastructure and fast operational scaling. Her career as an engineering leader spans from early stage startups to high-growth years at Facebook and VMware.
During her tenure at Facebook, she helped convert News Feed to Machine Learning and spearheaded the transition to a ‘mobile first' product organization. As an early engineer at VMware, she built core virtualization technology and ultimately created and led VMware’s Desktop Business Unit. Jocelyn also held engineering and leadership roles at startups Datify, MessageOne and Trilogy/pcOrder.
Jocelyn has a passion for STEM Education. She currently lectures at Stanford University where she received her BS in Computer Science and has served as vice chair of the board at Harvey Mudd College.
Biggest leadership mistake:
assuming other people can read my mind.
Biggest leadership lesson:
outcomes matter in the short term; relationships and reputation matter in the long term - the rest is details
Why excited:
meet and be inspired by top leaders in tech
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Diane Tang
Fellow
Google
Diane Tang is a Google Fellow currently leading a team dedicated to empowering decision makers with robust data, tools, and insights around our users and product ecosystem. Prior to 2017, she worked in Google Life Sciences on building data infrastructure and analytics for biological & medical applications. Before that, she was a leader on the Ads Quality team at Google. Since joining Google in 2003, Diane has focused on logging, large-scale data analysis & infrastructure, experiment methodology and ads systems. She earned a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Harvard in 1995 and a master's degree and PhD in Computer Science from Stanford in 2001. She is the co-author of “Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments: A Practical Guide to A/B Testing” as well as numerous other publications in mobile networking, information visualization, experiment methodology, data infrastructure, and data mining / large data and holds many patents.
What was your biggest leadership mistake?
Choosing based on the project rather than people.
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Navin Chaddha
Managing Partner
Mayfield
Navin leads Mayfield as Managing Partner. Under his leadership, Mayfield has raised eight U.S. funds and guided over 80 companies to positive outcomes. He has been named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and has ranked on the Forbes Midas List of Top 100 Tech Investors sixteen times, including being named in the Top Five in 2020, 2022, 2023 and 2024. Navin’s investments have created over $120 billion in equity value and over 40,000 jobs.
During his venture capital career, Navin has invested in over 60 companies, of which 18 have gone public and 27 have been acquired. Navin was one of the earliest Silicon Valley investors to leverage the promise of tech in India. He is Vice Chair of the Stanford Engineering Venture Fund and advisor to Neythri.org.
Navin is an active philanthropist who supports education, diversity, equity, inclusion, and food scarcity groups. He is the champion of the 25+ year Mayfield Fellows program at Stanford University, which trains students in entrepreneurship. He is the co-founder of Plaksha University in India, which is reimagining technology education. Under Mayfield’s Access for All program, interns from College Track are placed at Mayfield companies. Navin has partnered with The Farmlink Project, an organization that fights food insecurity by repurposing surplus produce, to create the Field Fellows changemakers program. He is also a board member of HimForHer, which is aimed at accelerating diversity on corporate boards. Other groups Mayfield supports include Neythri.org, AnitaB.org, Khan Academy and Second Harvest.
As an entrepreneur, Navin has co-founded or led three startups including VXtreme: a streaming media platform, acquired by Microsoft to become Windows Media; Rivio/CPA.com: a SaaS provider for small businesses, and iBeam Broadcasting (NASDAQ:IBEM): a streaming media content delivery network. Navin holds an MS degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University and a B.Tech degree in electrical engineering from IIT Delhi, where he was honored with the distinguished IIT Alumni Award.
What is your biggest leadership lesson?
The foundation of a successful company isn't capital, product or markets, it's the people behind it.
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Mallun Yen
Founder/CEO
Operator Collective
Mallun Yen has devoted the past 20 years to changing the status quo and shifting industry norms, as a founder, operator, investor, and category-creator. In 2019, she founded Operator Collective, a $150M venture firm and community, to make venture accessible to a group critical to a startup’s success but largely left out: top operators from diverse backgrounds who have built and scaled the most admired companies in the world. Its 200+ limited partner investors are 90% women, 40% people of color; most of whom had never invested in venture before.
Prior to founding Operator Collective, Mallun was a VP at Cisco and at the forefront of other category-creating companies also rooted in community, including RPX ($0-$100M and IPO in 3 years), SaaStr (world’s largest b2b software community), and ChIPsNetwork.org (5,000 members and 25 chapters around the world). She is also a member of Pure Storage Board of Directors and the US Patent & Trademark Office’s Council for Inclusive Innovation (CI2), whose mission is to expand innovation by increasing opportunities and tapping into the strength of our nation’s diversity.
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Jodi Alperstein
Executive Product Leader
Jodi Alperstein is an executive product leader, GM and advisor who has been leading Product teams at both private and public companies for over 20 years. Her experience includes being in the top product leadership role at Twilio Segment, Digital Ocean, Credit Karma, Moody’s Analytics, Roofstock, Hired, and E*TRADE Corporate Services. In addition to product management, her direct leadership responsibilities have included product & infrastructure engineering, product marketing, strategy, product design, user research, product analytics, product operations, technical program management, documentation and data operations. Her superpowers are developing empowered high performance teams that deliver incredible impact and helping them to achieve their career goals.
What is your biggest leadership lesson?
Creating a culture that motivates individuals and teams drives the most impact and satisfaction.
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Jane Chiu
Engineering Chief of Staff
Coda
Jane is the Engineering Chief of Staff at Coda. She is an empathetic and seasoned leader with over 15 years of experience in technical program management; spanning across corporate, start-up, health, and nonprofit sectors. She has extensive expertise in influencing without authority, strategy, and operations.
Jane is committed to foster a diverse and psychologically safe work environment in the tech industry. She has built and cultivated many ERGs and communities for minorities. She is an active, contributing member to GHC (the world's largest gathering of women and non-binary technologists); serving as a Co-Chair to the Software Engineering Committee for GHC 2023 and 2024.
What is your biggest leadership mistake?
Caving to the desire to please everyone
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Elaine Dai
Partner
Alt Capital
Elaine is a Partner at Alt Capital, a $150M VC fund founded by Jack Altman. At Alt, she leads early-stage infrastructure and enterprise AI investments.
At her prior fund, she served on the board of companies such as Harness and Spiff (acq. by Salesforce in 2024) and invested in Workato, Veza, and Enable. Elaine is a Microsoft alum and holds a bachelor's degree from Harvard University.
What is your biggest leadership lesson?
People will forget what you said and what you did, but they will always remember how you made them feel.
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Jameeka Aaron
Chief Information Security Officer
Headspace
Jameeka Green Aaron is the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Headspace. She is responsible for delivery of enterprise technology while ensuring holistic security and compliance of Headspaces’s platform, products, and corporate environment. She is a recognized industry leader and brings 25 years of experience to the role, with a career that has spanned a wide variety of industries, including aerospace and defense, retail, and manufacturing, at both Fortune 100 and privately held companies—including Nike, Hurley, Lockheed Martin, and the U.S. Navy.
Jameeka lives in Irvine, CA, with her husband Amilcar who serves as Diversity Equity and Inclusion Commission for the City of Irvine. She is, a board member of Digital Brands Group, a member of Black Women on Boards and Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. She enjoys traveling and all things outdoors; hiking, snowboarding, and anywhere with a beach.
What is your biggest leadership lesson?
Both IQ and EQ are valuable leadership qualities, the ability to balance them can be the difference between a good leader and a great leader.
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Anuradha Gali
Director Engineering
Apple
A creative, award-winning, and accomplished leader in technology and product development in both consumer and enterprise product/services with 20+ years in increasingly more responsible roles. Strong balance of Engineering, Leadership, Product and Business savviness that has led to successes in a number of initiatives. Experience includes building great engineering teams from the ground-up, integrating Acqui-hires, and delivering large-scale projects across various technologies and fields with a unique grasp of end-to-end systems to deliver impactful customer experience and sustained revenue growth.
What is your biggest leadership mistake?
The biggest leadership mistake I have made is to let myself think that my peer’s problems aren’t my responsibility.
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Lakshmi Bhaskaran
VPE
Metdata
Lakshmi Baskaran is a tech executive, entrepreneur, and an angel investor. Throughout her dynamic career, she has built and managed high-performing engineering teams across startups, scale-ups, and Fortune 500 companies in North America, Europe and Australia.
Lakshmi is deeply passionate about building products from inception to scale, with a strong emphasis on driving growth and generating revenue. She has successfully led engineering teams to build and maintain high-availability, mission-critical applications that serve over half a million customers globally.
She embraces the cliché of "building the plane while flying it," excelling at delivering customer value while skillfully building, scaling, and optimizing engineering teams.
Lakshmi shares her insights on leadership and technology through her writing on Medium. You can connect with her on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/lakshmibaskaran.
What is your biggest leadership mistake?
Believing that leadership style is binary, thinking I had to choose between being a democratic leader or an autocratic one.
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Lizzie Matusov
CEO & Co-founder
Quotient
Lizzie Matusov is the co-founder and CEO of Quotient, a developer tool that surfaces the friction slowing down engineering teams and resolves it directly. Her team also co-authors Research Driven Engineering Leadership, a newsletter that uses research to answer interesting questions on engineering leadership and strategy. She previously worked in various engineering roles at Red Hat and Invitae, and has an MS in Engineering Sciences and MBA from Harvard.
What was your biggest leadership mistake?
Not restating our shared goals consistently when working across teams to achieve those goals.
Why are you excited to speak at our summit?
I believe the strongest communities are the ones that actively seek to learn from one another. Summit is the best place to seek wisdom and share knowledge with one another, and I can’t wait to contribute to the incredible corpus of knowledge here.
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Kathryn Vandiver
ex-VPE
Quanata
With over 30 years of experience as a global engineering leader, Kathryn has guided companies from agile startups to Fortune 500 enterprises toward growth and scalability in both B2B and B2C technology solutions. She specializes in engineering and team culture turnarounds, often stepping in to provide new leadership when previous leaders were let go or stepped down. Kathryn believes that every team member brings unique value and actively seeks the perspectives of both influencers and naysayers to drive positive change. Her approach has consistently led to doubling or tripling growth and enhancing company value through successful team turnarounds.
Passionate about 'paying it forward,' Kathryn mentors, teaches leadership skills, and supports young women in tech on their career journeys. In her spare time, she enjoys hiking the trails of the Bay Area and spending quality time with her family.
What is your biggest leadership lesson?
As a people pleaser, I used to say 'yes' too often, which overwhelmed both me and my team with extra work. Learning to say 'no' has been a powerful lesson
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Abby Kearns
Chief of Staff
Alembic
Kearns is an accomplished technology executive, board director, and angel investor with a proven track record of driving growth and innovation across both Fortune 500 companies and startups, including Puppet, Cloud Foundry Foundation, Pivotal Software, Verizon, and Totality. In addition to her executive roles, Kearns is a dedicated board director, currently serving on the boards of Lightbend, StackPath, and Invoke.
What is your biggest leadership mistake?
Not trusting my gut and moving quickly.
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Shibani Sanan
CTO
Ladder
Shibani is Ladder’s CTO, overseeing engineering, IT, and security. She has spent the last 25 years at tech companies large and small, delivering scalable, high-impact products through her deep technical expertise and robust leadership. Her background includes leading a 1000+ engineering organization as VP of Engineering at Google, and serving as the Head of Engineering at Plaid. She brings a wealth of expertise and experience in scaling massive organizations. Shibani is a graduate of Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology.
Fun fact: Shibani’s no fan of cooking and claims to take lots of shortcuts, but her dishes get raves from her friends and family, so she must be doing it right.
What is your biggest leadership mistake?
Not providing prompt and in the moment feedback (both critical and positive). I have since then learnt and become a lot better at it.
What is your biggest leadership lesson?
As a leader, authenticity and taking responsibility are critical but also very tough and take courage.
Why are you excited to speak at our Summit?
I am excited to inspire and get inspired by powerful women engineering leaders. Can't wait to be surrounded by such immense talent under one roof!
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Ronit Bohrer Hillel
Engineering Leader
Microsoft
Ronit Bohrer Hillel is an Engineering Leader at Microsoft and the former VP of Engineering at Smartsheet. With over twenty years of experience in developing innovations and enterprise-level products, she has worked with a diverse array of technologies, including SaaS, AI, no-code, mobile, telecom, and big data, across both startup and enterprise environments. Outside of work, Ronit is a co-host of SheTO Seattle, a for-profit board member, a career coach, and is a passionate advocate for women in tech.
What is your biggest leadership lesson?
As you advance as a leader, the time you spend managing up will increase relative to the time spent managing down. Don’t underestimate the importance of managing up
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Laura Wrisley
Chief Revenue Officer
Vayu Robotics
Laura Wrisley, Chief Revenue Officer at Vayu Robotics, is responsible for overseeing sales and business development efforts. Before joining Vayu Robotics, she was SVP of Worldwide Sales and Marketing at Velodyne Lidar where her teams were focused on long-term strategic partner relationships and sales in emerging markets, including robotics, intelligent transportation, automotive, mapping and more. Laura brings 15 years of experience in tech-related leadership and management, with expert knowledge in sensor solutions for autonomous mobility, software to enable the movement of robots, and full-scale robot-as-a-service solutions for last mile delivery. As a business development and sales executive, Wrisley has consistently demonstrated the ability to develop and articulate a strategy for her teams. Her mission is to inspire others to collaborate, perform and execute against the strategy.
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Padmasree Warrior
FOUNDER, PRESIDENT & CEO
FABLE
Padmasree Warrior is the Founder, President and CEO of Fable, a social and AI discovery
platform for content. Previously, Padma was the Chief Executive Officer of NIO U.S., Chief
Development Officer and Board Member of NIO Inc., a manufacturer of smart electric vehicles.
In this role she scaled the company from start-up to a successful IPO NYSE:NIO in 3 years.
Prior to NIO, Warrior served as the Chief Technology & Strategy Officer (CTSO) for Cisco until
September 2015. In this capacity she was charged with aligning the company's technology and
business strategy to business results. She led corporate strategy, mergers, acquisitions, venture
investments, and strategic partnerships. Before that, she was the SVP and GM for Cisco
Enterprise segment and co-led Cisco’s worldwide engineering organization. Prior to Cisco, she
was EVP and CTO at Motorola. Under her leadership, Motorola was awarded the 2004 U.S.
National Medal of Technology.
Padmasree Warrior has been widely recognized for her creative, visionary leadership. Forbes
has named her one of "The World's 100 Most Powerful Women" for three years running. In
2013, The International Alliance for Women gave her the World of Difference Award. In 2012,
Business Insider called her one of the "25 Most Influential Women in Wireless". The Wall Street
Journal has called her one of "50 Women to Watch." Fast Company included her among the
"100 Most Creative People in Business." The Economic Times listed her as "the 11th Most
Influential Global Indian."
Warrior served on Boards of large public companies like Gap and Microsoft. She also served on
key government initiatives, industry advisory boards, and charitable organizations. She received
the United States Pan Asian American Chamber of Commerce’s Excellence Award and YWCA
Metropolitan Chicago’s Outstanding Woman of Achievement Award. In 2007, she was
inducted into the WITI Hall of Fame.
Warrior holds a Bachelor of Technology degree in Chemical Engineering from the Indian
Institute of Technology in New Delhi, India and a Master of Science degree in Chemical
Engineering from Cornell University, New York, U.S.
Warrior currently serves on the board of Spotify.
Warrior is married and has a son. You can follow her on Instagram and Fable @Padmasree.
What is your biggest leadership mistake?
Assuming people are aligned simply because they nod their heads
What was your biggest leadership lesson?
Active Listening
Why are you excited to speak at our Summit?
Love to help technical women break barriers
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Eleanor Meritt
Senior Vice President Engineering
Oracle
Eleanor Meritt is senior vice president of product support, sustaining engineering, and IDM development at Oracle. Over her Oracle career, she has worked at various product development, sustaining engineering, and product support leadership positions. She has been recognized as one of the Power 50 Technology leaders, Top 50 Women in Tech, and Top 100 Women Technology Leaders to Watch. Passionate about positive customer experience, she applies that to all aspects of her work. Eleanor is an agile learner, something which she attributes to her cultural background, having grown up in Ireland. She sees every day as a new opportunity for growth and loves to share experiences with other women in technology.
What was your biggest leadership lesson?
To avoid falling into the comfort zone trap
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Nidhi Gupta
CEO & CO-FOUNDER
SHETO
Nidhi is the CEO and Co-Founder of SheTO, a private community for women and non-binary engineers and engineering leaders. Less than 9% of engineering executive roles are held by women. SheTO is working on changing that.
Prior to founding SheTO, Nidhi was an accomplished engineering and product executive who has built, scaled, and transformed companies. She has extensive expertise in strategy, R&D, business development, and operations. She has led various Marketplaces, and SaaS businesses. As an Engineering and Product leader she is passionate about building and growing thriving operational organizations that deliver world-class products at scale.
Prior to founding SheTO, Nidhi was the Chief Technology & Product Officer at Hired, Upwork and Ning
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Wen Hsu
Leadership Coach
Wen Hsu is a transformative career and leadership coach with over 15 years of engineering leadership experience in the tech industry. As an immigrant woman who has navigated the complex challenges of climbing the corporate ladder, Wen empowers immigrant women leaders to break free from cultural conditioning and confidently chart their own paths to success. Through her coaching, Wen helps clients step into their power, elevate their influence, and achieve not only better titles and higher pay but a deeply fulfilling life.
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Surabhi Gupta
BOARD MEMBER
GetYourGuide
Surabhi serves on the board of GetYourGuide and advises early stage startups. Most recently, she was the SVP and Head of Engineering at Robinhood, overseeing technology areas including Data Science and Corporate Engineering. Prior to Robinhood, she spent seven years at Airbnb, leading Engineering for the core Homes business and managing teams focused on Search, Host, Business Travel, and Growth. Before Airbnb, she was a Staff Software Engineer at Google, contributing to web search ranking and predictive search for Google Now. She holds an MS in Computer Science from Stanford University.
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Nandini Easwar
VP Engineering
HR Acuity
Nandini Easwar is the CTO and Co-Founder of www.SpeakFully.com who led her company through an acquisition in Nov 2022. At Speakfully, she was responsible for the product and tech side of the human-centric SaaS platform to address workplace mistreatment including retaliation, harassment, and microaggression. Known for humanizing tech solutions, Nandini ensured the success of the Speakfully mission by integrating social and emotional intelligence into the overall product roadmap of the brand. Prior to joining Speakfully, Nandini was the Global Head of Engineering at Esurance and led the engineering function through the acquisition of Esurance by Allstate in 2012.
Nandini is now VP, Engineering at HR Acuity, the acquiring company of her startup Speakfully. She currently also serves as a Board Member at SheTO.org, an organization whose mission is to increase the 9% representation of women+ in engineering leadership. She is a technical advisor at Intelliswift, Good4Work, Fikia and is a founding member at FirstBoard.io, working on increasing representation of women on corporate boards. A passionate proponent of women in STEM, Nandini was invited to a special White House briefing where she expressed her support for SheTO. She supports access to diverse talents while enabling women to grow and learn to their fullest potential.
Nandini holds a Masters degree in Computer Science and holds a certificate on Executive Leadership from UC Berkeley Haas School of Business. She speaks about equity and equality of women in tech and has been featured in many articles including Medium. Her startup Speakfully was named the top 20 startups to watch for in 2022 and 2019.
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Monica Bajaj
VPE
Okta
Monica Bajaj is a seasoned technology executive with over two decades of industry experience leading global, diverse engineering teams. Her expertise spans technology, operations, global expansion, M&A and product launch in areas such as Consumer/Enterprise, Infrastructure, Business Intelligence, DevOps, and Security. She is currently the Vice President of Engineering, Developer experience at Okta. Prior to Okta she has held senior engineering leadership positions at various global enterprise companies like Workday, UKG, NetApp and Cisco.
Her expertise lies in building high-performance, and secure software platforms that can handle from Millions of users and billions of transactions, keeping resiliency and scale as the first principles. Monica holds a BS and MS in Computer Science from IIT Mumbai, India. In 2021, she won the Mentor of the year award from the WomenTech Network and was selected as one of the Top 60 Women technical leaders to watch by the Girl Geek X Community across fortune 500 companies. Monica is an active speaker in the Silicon Valley, a supporter of diversity in STEM, and an exec sponsor for Women at Okta. When not obsessing over technology, she can be found spending time with Boy Scouts, enjoying hiking and supporting the cause of mentorship and uplifting women and young girls.
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Jan Chong
VPE
Tally
Jan Chong was most recently the Vice President of Engineering at Tally, a financial automation startup based in San Francisco, where she led the company’s client engineering, infrastructure, security, and technical operations teams. Before joining Tally, Jan was a Senior Director of Engineering at Twitter, where she played a critical role in launching and scaling Twitter’s core mobile and web products. Jan led the charge in overhauling the entire engineering hiring process, as well as founding womEM, a support and peer mentorship group for female engineering managers. She holds a BS, MS in Computer Science, and a Ph.D. in Management Science & Engineering from Stanford University.
What is your biggest leadership mistake?
Undervaluing metrics 😀
What is your biggest leadership lesson?
Even assholes are right sometimes.
Why are you excited to speak at their summit?
It’s always fun to debate these topics with my top peers in industry!
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Rajas Mhatre
Senior Director Engineering
Salesforce
Managing teams for driving the Sales Productivity portfolio focusing on boosting guided selling with the power of AI.
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Sharadha Venketasubramanian
Engineering leader
Atlassian
Sharadha is an engineering leader with over 18 years of industry experience ranging from web applications, database design and performance tuning, plug-in development to UI Frameworks. She currently leads Engineering teams in Confluence, Atlassian building the new Permissions experience. Her team inspires trust and confidence that the right information always reaches the right people by empowering customers with user friendly access controls. Prior to Atlassian, Sharadha has led engineering teams in Enterprise companies like AWS, Workday, Salesforce, Oracle and startups like Ticketfly and Hara. Personally, she has 2 little girls (ages 9 and 6) who keep her on her toes. Well literally, she ran a marathon in Honolulu last year and hiked Machu Picchu recently 🙂
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Vidya Eashwer
Chief Technology Officer
Forge Global
Vidya Eashwer is a seasoned technology leader with 20 years of experience in creating and executing innovative fintech technology strategies. She is currently the Chief Technology Officer at Forge Global, where she oversees the company's global technology strategy and roadmap, focusing on creating an integrated tech-enabled experience for all stakeholders in the private market. Before joining Forge, Vidya was the Head of Technology, Edge Systems, at Intercontinental Exchange. In this role, she led overall program delivery and management for software development and data sciences. She also spent six years as Managing Director of IT at the New York Stock Exchange, managing software development across the U.S. and Europe. Vidya holds a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Mumbai and a Post Graduate Diploma in Software Technology from the National Centre for Software Technology in Maharashtra, India.
What is your biggest leadership mistake?
The importance of recognition and of celebrating our wins.
The biggest leadership lesson I’ve learned is the importance of recognition and of celebrating our wins. As engineers, we spend a lot of time evaluating what goes wrong or what didn’t meet expectations. It's important to remember that while that reflection is critical to the success of projects, it’s equally important to celebrate and recognize what we did right. That recognition and celebration is important to building a strong and motivated team. And individual recognition is an easy -- but often forgotten – gesture to ensure team members feel appreciated for the good work they do.
What is your biggest leadership lesson?
Seize the imperfect opportunity.
While I was working at the NYSE, all the developers and engineers wanted to work on the trading platform because that was the coolest part of the business according to engineers. When my boss approached me to consider a different opportunity that I could lead around market data I took it because I hadn't done anything like that before. It was a chance to learn something new and I felt I could turn that project into something cool. By the time I was done, I was known as the Market Data Queen. What I built and brought to that opportunity really made my career. And it also taught me that success is often not achieved by waiting for the perfect opportunity - but by what you do with the not-so-perfect ones.
Why are you excited to speak at our Summit?
It’s always exciting to see so many incredible talented, successful female leaders in one place.I really get energized by environments like this. On a personal note: I have two daughters and seeing how women are transforming the tech environment today and taking charge and making a difference is inspiring as it makes me believe there is a better world for them.
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Hersh Tapadia
Co-Founder & CEO
Allstacks
Hersh Tapadia is an entrepreneur, mentor, consultant, and, most recently, co-founder and CEO of Allstacks, an outcome-driven software engineering intelligence and predictive forecasting company based out of Raleigh, N.C, backed by VCs and key strategic funds like M12, Microsoft's Venture Fund, Atlassian Ventures. After formal training as an engineer, Tapadia founded multiple healthcare startups leveraging machine learning for infectious disease diagnostics and anti-counterfeiting technology where he led the engineering and product organizations before leveraging those experiences to co-found Allstacks.
He’s actively involved in the local entrepreneurship community, working as an advisor/mentor with early-stage companies and students, including DukeGEN and the NC State Engineering Entrepreneurs Program. He also serves on the board of NC State Entrepreneurship.
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Archana Chaudhary
Director Engineering
Adobe
With 25+ years of experience in engineering leadership, I have track record of developing successful SaaS products. My expertise includes Product and Platform engineering, Enterprise Customer Engagement Software, Web and Mobile SDK, Electronic Signature Tech, Geo-Location APIs, EDA and Search. I have founded a non-profit and currently lead a program for last 6 years which delivers training to female CS students. Training is in Design Thinking and mobile development.
I am committed to delivering value to customers by driving innovation and working in a symphony with my co-workers. I believe that relationships and authenticity are most powerful tools for effective leaders.
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Rose Elliott
SVP Engineering
Green Check
Rose Elliott is a dynamic engineering leader with over 20 years of experience driving revenue growth and technical innovation in the tech industry. Currently serving as the SVP of Engineering at Green Check, Rose has a proven track record of building high-performing teams and leading strategic initiatives across various domains, including Cybersecurity and Fintech. Her expertise lies in architecting modular platforms that streamline development from the data layer through the UI. Throughout her career, including roles at Tenable, PayPal, and as a successful tech entrepreneur, Rose has consistently delivered data-driven customer experiences that exceed user expectations. She is passionate about fostering innovation, implementing best practices for globally distributed teams, and championing diversity in tech leadership.
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Gowri Sivaraman
Director Engineering
Intuit
Gowri is a trailblazing technology leader who brings over two decades of success driving multi-million dollar global product strategies. With specialized expertise in amplifying digital solutions for consumers and small businesses across channels, platforms, and devices, she is renowned for her visionary leadership in developing and scaling innovative technologies. Gowri's exceptional ability to orchestrate AI-driven solutions and enhance user engagement has led to her reputation for steering companies toward substantial business growth. Her forward-thinking approach and proven record of building and amplifying world-class products position her as an inspiring force in driving digital transformation.
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Maria Alvarez
VPE
Microsoft
Maria currently serves as VP, AI Platform, Cloud and AI Division at Microsoft Corporation, a technology company, and has served in senior roles at Microsoft since 2011, including as General Manager, Shared Engineering Services, AI & Research Group. Before joining Microsoft. She served as Chief Technology Officer and Product Head at Panda Security, and she previously held senior roles at Yahoo! Inc., Hewlett Packard Company, and Symantec Corporation. Currently Maria serves as an independent board member in two companies:
Alkami Technology Inc., is a public, leading cloud-based digital banking solutions provider for financial institutions in the United States, and
BB Imaging, a private company that offers diagnostic ultrasound services, delivering accessible care for at-risk patients and turn-key solutions to providers as well as two non-profit Advisory Boards:
Steam:Coders, an organization that teaches underserved and underrepresented students the fundamentals of STEAM education.
Code the Spectrum which provides IT Education and Career Pathway for Neurodivergent People.
Our Annual Summit is a one-of-a-kind summit that is exclusive to women+ in engineering and focuses on advancing their leadership.
Even though this is a Summit, it will feel like an intimate gathering of friends… friends who are ready to connect, elevate and inspire you, to help shape your future!
Immerse yourself in a day brimming with insightful keynotes, engaging fireside chats, and intimate roundtables. Embrace opportunities to cutivate connections and build lasting relationships. Come, be a part of this exceptional event that celebrates you, your journey, and your future
SPECIAL GUEST
Kim Scott
Kim Scott is the best selling author of Radical Candor and Radical Respect. Radical Candor has sold over a million copies and is a must read for any leader!
In her keynote at the Summit, Kim will be sharing a practical framework for dealing with difficult situations at work such as bias, prejudice and bullying. This is an essential guide for leaders to build workplaces for effective collaboration.
Our Summit speakers are who’s who of leaders in technology, who have leveraged their engineering background to achieve amazing success in their careers. Meet some of these amazing voices in tech
WANT TO MEET OTHER WOMAN+ ENG LEADERS WHO HAVE GONE ON TO BUILD AMAZING CAREERS?
WANT TO SHAPE YOUR FUTURE AS A LEADER?
WANT TO FEEL THE VIBRANCY AND INTIMACY OF OUR TIGHT KNIT COMMUNITY?
WANT TO MEET SheTO’S PRESENT AND FUTURE?
Then this is the place for you.
Don’t be surprised if you leave bouncing off the walls ready to conquer the world. That’s what happened at #SheTOSummit2023 and we fully expect the same to happen this year!
Diane Tang Fellow — Google
Jane Chiu Chief of Staff — Coda
Avital Arora Director Engineering — Google
11:30 AM
Hidden Dimensions in Leadership
Mallun Yen Partner — Operative Collective
Jameeka Aaron CISO — Headspace
Surabhi Gupta Board Member — GetYourGuide
Ronit Bohrer Hillel Engineering Leader — Microsoft
12:05 PM
Business Acumen for Stronger Eng Leadership
Kathleen Vignos VPE — Capital One
Abby Kearns CTO — Alembic
Jodi Alperstein Executive Product Leader
12:50 PM
🍽️
LUNCH
Lunch, Networking and Book Signing
2:10 PM
Keynote: Trailblazing to the C-Suite
Sylvia Acevedo Board Director — Qualcomm
2:30 PM
Staying Ahead Amidst AI Revolution
Maria Alvarez VP of Experimentation — Microsoft
Jocelyn Goldfein Partner — Zetta Ventures
Shibani Sanan CTO — Ladder
Anuradha Gali Director of Engineering — Apple
3:05 PM
Keynote: Wield Your Power
Nidhi Gupta CEO & Co-Founder — SheTO
Executive Track
3:30 PM
Metrics that Matter: Data for Product & Engineering Success
Laura WrisleyCRO — Vayu Robotics Eleanor MerrittSVP Eng — Oracle Vidya EashwerCTO — Forge
4:30 PM
Wealth Creation Through Investing
Erica LockheimerCEO & Founder — HumanizeHer Elaine DaiPartner — Alt Capital Kathryn Vandiverex VPE — Quanta
Roundtables
3:30 PM
How do I scale myself and my organization? Led by Rose Elliott
How do I leverage AI in my day to day? Led by Gowri Sivaraman
4:05 PM
How do I manage cross functional relationships? Led by Sharadha Venketasubramanian
How do I balance Tactics and Strategy? Led by Archana Chaudhary
4:30 PM
How do I build high performing team in remote first environment? Led by Rajas Mhatre
How do I manage career transitions? Led by Wen Hsu
5:15 PM
🎉
Celebration & Happy Hour
Unwind, Celebrate and Mingle with fellow SheTOs!
Join us for our highly popular three-session workshopfor women+ engineering leaders, led by Kathryn Vandiver, ex-VP Engineering Quanata. She will talk about common characteristics and misconceptions of Executive Presence, how to attain it, and incorporate it into your daily work
In this workshop, you will
TUNE INTO WHAT IT MEANS TO HAVE EXECUTIVE PRESENCE
LEARN WHY COMPANIES VIEW THIS AS AN IMPORTANT ATTRIBUTE AND HOW YOU CAN BUILD THIS SKILL
LEARN SKILLS THAT WILL HELP YOU DEVELOP YOUR EXECUTIVE PRESENCE
LEARN ABOUT VERBAL AND NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION. THE LEADERSHIP PIPELINE AND EVOLVING YOUR COMMUNICATION THAT TARGETS YOUR AUDIENCE
“This program provides a step-by-step guide to excel and grow your career in the workplace”
— Shakun Mehrotra
Director of Engineering, Box
“Kathryn took an intangible concept like Executive Presence and broke it down into concrete topics with guidelines on what one should, and shouldn t do to build executive presence”
— Kanchana Padmanabhan
VP Engineering, Secure AI Labs
Sessions will be delivered virtually starting September 24 over three weeks. Weekly session on Tuesday and office hour on Thursday
Our members come from over 1800 companies across the tech industry, covering the entire spectrum of engineering leadership levels. Expect to meet and network with CTOs, SVPEs, VPEs and technical decision makers from a wide array of tech companies such as Google, Meta, Salesforce, Okta, Point, TrustedHealth, and a whole lot more
Our Summit last year had an NPS of 99%! Hear how they felt ...
“UNLIKE ANY OTHER WOMEN’S CONFERENCE, HECK, UNLIKE ANY OTHER CONFERENCE, PERIOD!”
“FELT THE WARM HUG OF COMMUNITY AROUND ME”
“FIRST TIME I MET A CTO WHO LOOKS LIKE ME!”
“EMPHASIS ON LEADERSHIP”
“CONFERENCE LEADERSHIP FOR WOMEN, NOT A WOMEN’S LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE!!”
“INSPIRED. MAGICAL. ENERGIZED.”
Venue
COMPUTER HISTORY MUSEUM 1401 SHORELINE BLVD, MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA 94043
