Breaking Into Startups

Marcelo Claure is a Bolivian tech entrepreneur who founded Brightstar which was later sold to Sprint after they reached $10 billion in revenue, becoming the largest Hispanic-owned business in US history. Currently, Claure serves as Chief Executive Officer of SoftBank Group International and Chief Operating Officer of SoftBank Group Corp. Claure oversees the vast portfolio of the Group’s operating companies, including Arm, WeWork, Brightstar, Fortress, SB Energy, Boston Dynamics, among others, along with SoftBank’s ownership in T-Mobile US. He also runs Club Bolivar, Bolivia’s most popular and successful soccer team, and is Chairman and Owner of Club Internacional de Futbol Miami (Miami Beckham United). Today, he talks about why he decided to invest in Career Karma and why data is now the future of work.

Not only a true believer in the power of networking, Erik Torenberg definitely walks the talk. Erik is big on community building and networking. He is known for organizing huge events as well as intimate meetups called On Deck, where they allow people to get to know each other on a personal level instead of a professional level. Back in Michigan, Erik started his career by creating rapt.fm, which led him to go to 500 Startups, that also led him to become the first employee of Product Hunt. Later on, he started the Product Hunt Podcast. He then ventured into investing, having seeded notable companies including Omni, Metaverse, Bot.me, and Tribe.pm, to name a few. In 2017, he launched a $100-million fund called Village Global, built around the concept of networking embedded in their company’s DNA. He has curated a group of people including some of the world's greatest in technology - Amazon's Jeff Bezos, LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman, Marissa Mayer, Mark Zuckerberg - to believe in him. How did he do that? Let’s find out! Recently, he also launched another podcast called Venture Stories Podcast by Village Global. Another one of Erik’s passion project is The Rise Awards, an awards series and community celebrating top talents across all positions.

Jake Schwartz is the co-founder and chief executive officer of General Assembly, a global company advancing the future of work. Jake leads GA's growth, creating sustainable talent pipelines for businesses, and building transparent career pathways to the most transformational work. In the face of the COVID-19 crisis, about 33 million Americans have lost their jobs in the last seven weeks. GA has around 120 campuses globally which they had to shut down in two days and go completely online. Today, Jake talks about how they’re disrupting the marketplace landscape and getting creative so they could be more accessible to students. It’s all about merging business excellence and education excellence!

Dan Friedman is the Co-Founder of Thinkful, a coding bootcamp that provides online courses Software Engineering, Design and Data Science courses. Dropping out of Yale, Dan is proof that you don't need a college degree or certain qualifications to find your way to success. Thinkful is the first coding bootcamp that came out and created offerings for people impacted by the COVID-19. Listen in to find out more about their initiatives. Another thing Dan emphasized today is the principle of reversibility.

Vaibhav Sahgal is the Head of Growth at Reddit, Inc. which has 500 million unique users around the world. Prior to this, he worked at Zynga for 8 years as a product manager. He led teams building games like Words with Friends, Cityville, and Mafia Wars. Vaibhav immigrated from India to the U.S. to get a degree in Computer Science at Purdue University. Today, he talks about his journey into tech, the qualities of effective engineers, and how to build and grow products to millions of users.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Kesha Lake is a member of the Career Karma community from Atlanta. She joined Career Karma in the beginning of 2019. Less than a year later, she got a job as a remote software engineer at Stitch Fix. Today, she talks about her life as a mother, her transition from nursing to tech, her bootcamp journey, and her job search experience.

Jerrick Warren has an inspiring story of breaking into the Blockchain Tech Startup Gemini coming from a background in medicine. He went from joining the Career Karma community, to getting accepted into Lambda School to getting a Software Engineering job in a year! Today, he shares with us the many struggles he had to overcome and how Career Karma helped him pave his way to success. Career Karma is a community that helps you figure out a road map that is customized to you, your preferences, and your needs. Lambda School is a coding bootcamp that offers a unique pay structure to its students. Find out more about them.

#119: Career Karma Origin Story (by the CEO of Free Code Camp) by Breaking Into Startups

Darrell Silver is the CEO and Co-Founder of Thinkful. Their mission? To build the world’s next workforce. Since its inception in 2012, Thinkful has graduated thousands of students. Founded based on two elements – transparency and return on education – Thinkful has recently been acquired by Chegg. Together, they continue to help transform how people acquire tech skills in the most efficient way possible. On this episode Darrell covers how Thinkful help career transitioners acquire tech skills through income sharing agreements and living stipends. Tune in to learn more.

Coming to the states with two suitcases and a pocketful of dreams, Chock Ooi is currently the CEO of Kenzie Academy. Chok is a startup veteran working at places like Loopt and AgilityIO, and is a 500 Startups mentor. He has a background in Finance and Technology at Goldman, Bank of America, and BNP Paribas during the financial crisis. Today, Chok talks about how he has realized his dreams to help people break into tech and his thoughts on income share agreements (ISAs). Career Karma now has over 30,000 members. Please come check it out and learn more about income share agreements where we've put together a comprehensive report highlighting emerging players, innovators, and potential influencers.

Today, we have a special group of people joining us who go by the #FFTSquad. #FFTSquad is a group of people on Career Karma who are working together to help each other grow, learn how to code and switch careers into tech. They were with us early from the very beginning. In fact, a lot of the members of the FFT Squad were part of Career Karma before the app even came out. Here are their names: Meet the FFT Squad: Melanie Harris (Ms. CEO, Lady Savage) Jennifer Weaver (J-Smooth) Elisabeth Earley (Lady Boom) Benjamin Earley (Benny Boom) Tyrone Smith (Fly Ty) Elise Spain (Famous Amos) Levar Morris (The Wizard) Jennifer Carney (J-Chill) Gregory Jordan (Papa Smurf) Kesha Lake (Rose Code) For those of you who may not know, Career Karma was started by Artur, Ruben & Timur as a result of us breaking into tech and launching the Breaking Into Startups Podcast together. Today, Career Karma is a community that matches people to the best coding bootcamps and gives them support for the rest of their careers. The FFT Squad is a living testament that developing your technical skills can totally change your life. No matter who you are, what color you are, what race you are, or what religion you are – you DEFINITELY can do this!

Angela Ceresnie is the CEO of Climb Credit. She has experience working in and starting multiple startups. She has led teams at Citibank and American Express. Interestingly, she studied computer engineering at the University of Michigan with a technical background. Today, Angela talks about skill-building and the work she's doing at Climb Credit as she tries to build the future for her own kids.

Phaedra Ellis is the CEO of Promise, a startup that uses technology for good in the process to change the criminal justice system. Prior to this, she was the leader of the South Bay Labor Council, managing over 110,000 members. Before that, Phaedra was also the CEO of Green for All and is known as a music industry icon for having helped Prince get his master's back as his manager, without having any legal background. What’s interesting is Ruben met Phaedra when he worked with her at Honor. She became his mentor and also was responsible for hiring former podcast guests Rita Henderson and Natasha Vianna.

Tonio DeSorrento is a New York-native who spent time in the Marines as a captain. He has also worked at several institutions including SoFi. Currently, he serves as the CEO of Vemo Education, a leading provider of income share agreements, which is an innovative financing model not only for coding bootcamps, but also for traditional universities. They are working now with 22 colleges and universities! If you're someone looking to manage your finances as you're preparing for a career transition, this episode is a must-listen!

Rodney Sampson is the CEO of OHUB while Young Guru is widely known as Jay-Z's DJ. On today’s episode, Ruben joins Rodney & Young Guru to discuss how and why they came together and why they're passionate about creating opportunities for people outside of tech. OHUB has also partnered with Flatiron School, to give $1M in scholarships to people with color who wish to pursue a career in tech through coding bootcamps.

Ameer Brown is a Software Quality Engineer at Adobe. He talks about what it takes to be a successful engineer at Adobe. Outside of work Ameer also organizes parties. He also covers how that helped him take it to another level hosting parties in multiple cities. From being a journalism major, he suddenly left his job, flew to LA, and applied to General Assembly. Through the bootcamp’s Opportunity Fund, Ameer’s coding education was fully funded by Adobe until ultimately getting hired (and he didn’t even apply for it!)

Dan Rosensweig is the CEO of Chegg, an American education company with the aim to provide education that is less expensive, more available, more affordable, and more relevant. On the podcast, Dan explains how it's their responsibility to learn from, listen to, and build for young people. He was formerly the COO of Yahoo! and CEO of Guitar Hero. He's also on the board of several amazing companies. Dan admits Chegg was considered a failure for most of its first 7 years. 8 1/2 years later, they're a $3.5 billion Education Technology company and is considered a leader in their space.

Cameron Yarbrough is the CEO of Torch and one of the best leadership and executive coaches in the world. In this episode, Cameron talks about coaching for everyone! How Torch got its start and the problems that many CEO’s as well as startup employees have when they are faced with pressure.

Dan Sommer is the CEO and Co-Founder of Trilogy Education Services. Dan has launched partnerships with over 37 of the world's leading universities, providing alternative forms of education on their campuses. smarturl.it/trilogy_learn_more They have instructors teaching 200 classes every week. They have thousands of students who have completed Trilogy-powered programs, and 1,500 companies employ them. In May, Dan secured a $50-million Series B and he's been doing a lot of exciting things related to future work. Prior to Trilogy, he was the President of Zeta Global, also a large education company. Interesting takeaways from this episode: learning how to learn, developing your superpowers, and being aware of not just engineering jobs but specific technologies companies are hiring for in different geographies!

Announcements: Watch the video recording of this episode on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Rg8SHeq1Ns Rich Smith is a Senior UI engineer at Netflix but did you know this was his 17th job? Today, he talks about how he started hustling as early as 4th grader and eventually discovered his interest in coding! On the episode he covers a lot of topics as what it was like growing up with role models who were athletes, which a lot of us could relate with. And how not until he dropped out of college that Rich stumbled upon coding and later realized that this could be a viable career path! Rich’s journey to become a Senior Engineer at Netflix was certainly not an easy feat, but he lays out the roadmap on this episode that anyone can follow to attain the same results. Hint: it doesn’t involve a computer science degree :)

Balaji Srinivasan is the CTO of Coinbase. Prior to that, he was a co-founder of Counsyl, Earn, Teleport, and a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Today, he talks about his insights into traditional education vs. alternative education, as well as numerous concepts on technical debt, voice vs. exit, idea maze, idea vs. education, and more! Balaji has a very interesting mindset in that he believes that not everybody can be a founder, but everybody can be an investor.

Rick O’Donnell is the Founder and CEO of Skills Fund, a place that provides people with an opportunity to acquire skills and they also provide financing for students as they're doing a career transition. Prior to Skills Fund, Rick worked as an Executive Director for the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies as well as the Director for the Department of Higher Education where he oversaw 29 public colleges and universities in Colorado. Since its founding in 2015, Skills Fund has provided over $100 million in students loans. Today, Rick talks about how you should be thinking about your career transition and how you can afford it as well.

There are half a million open tech jobs, and yet, diversity in tech continues to be a problem. The key is in building relationships and connecting people with the right companies that need their skills the most. Leanne Pittsford is the founder of Lesbians Who Tech, the largest LGBTQ community of technologists in the world with over 40,000 members. She is also the founder of Tech Jobs Tour, connecting diverse, underrepresented, and nontraditional talent with companies across the country. Among other companies she has created are include.io, and Lean Impact. Fun fact about Leanne is when she’s not helping people find jobs she really loves to surf.

Our guest on the podcast has a remarkable story. Madelyn Tavarez did a part-time bootcamp, while holding a full-time job. She taught herself how to code. And became a software engineer at Pinterest now building products for hundreds of millions of people. She is also a Dominican Republic-native who grew up in Washington Heights and due to her own drive and curiosity was able to change her circumstance. Her senior year of college she went from being a bartender to an “eat, pray, love” moment which took her to Italy. Which eventually played a big role in Madelyn deciding to teach herself how to code. Fast-forward to today, she works as an Android engineer at Pinterest. She also continues to get actively involved in different community projects, including the TECHNOLOchicas among others.

Austen Allred is the CEO and Co-Founder of Lambda School. Recently coming out of Y Combinator, Lambda now has thousands of students. Prior to this, he served as a Growth Expert at LendUp. Lambda School is an online bootcamp that gives students the tools and training they need to launch their career in software engineering at no upfront cost. Their end goal is to eliminate all the distractions related to income, living expenses & time so students can focus on transitioning into their dream careers. They also don’t get paid, unless you get a job!

Avi Flombaum is a lifelong educator. He is the Co-Founder of Flatiron School, which grew to thousands of students and got acquired by WeWork. Prior to starting Flatiron School, Avi also built several companies. Avi’s philosophy believes that education should mold and flex to the needs of the student. On this episode, he shares his insights about their different programs and how they’re making education more accessible to people without having to carry that huge financial burden themselves.

Moving from Atlanta to the Bay Area, from being a writer, artist, to mathematician, David Harris completed App Academy and became a software engineer. By combining hard work and the power of networking, David ultimately landed a full-time job at Omada Health. In this episode, David talks about his struggles and how he hustled his way to success. He’s also dishing out a ton of resources you can use whether you’re preparing for a bootcamp or prepping for an interview. David is the brother of Ruben Harris. He also shares how Ruben, Timur, and Artur have helped him throughout out this entire journey, along with some other amazing people in the industry that he met along the way.

In 2017, Iris Nevins decided to leave her work as a teacher in Florida to attend a bootcamp in the Bay Area - but it was not without its own struggles. Iris believes that when you’re on your path, no matter the road blocks, serendipitous things will happen. In 2018, Iris landed a job as a software engineer at MailChimp, an Atlanta-based marketing automation platform (although Iris works remotely in Oakland). Quick trivia: MailChimp sends out a whopping billion emails per day! Iris is also the founder of Organeyez, an organization that provides relevant tools and content to groups and organizations that work towards fostering social justice.

Galvanize and Hack Reactor have now merged to become bigger and better in the bootcamp space. With the merger, Shawn who is the Cofounder of Hack Reactor and a returning guest on the Podcast, is now serving as SVP of Strategy and Innovation. Galvanize has eight campuses across the U.S. including San Francisco, Seattle, Phoenix, Austin, Denver (2), Boulder, and New York City. They're primarily engaged in immersive education, enterprise work, and co-working. Hack Reactor is one of the largest coding bootcamp that focuses on web development and is now expanding their offering to corporate clients. In their effort to create lifelong learning programs for alums and work transformatively with companies trying to set up, they decided to join a bigger company in order to realize this. As the industry is going through consolidation, together Galvanize & Hack Reactor will be offering software engineering and data science across eight campuses and become the largest bootcamp.

Ryan Carson is the Founder and CEO of Treehouse. He grew up in Colorado and is currently in Portland. Today, he talks about the future of education, work, and more! Treehouse is an online school that teaches adults how to code and build apps so they gain a super power. Running for 8 years now, they've taught over 850,000 people how to code, with currently 80,000 enrolled students. Their mission is simple: to change lives through rebooting the talent pipeline in America and the world!

Today, we have two amazing people behind the widely successful early stage venture capital firm, Initialized. Today, they discuss the power of coaching, the cryptocurrency space, building teams and community, and some tech trends to watch out for. Dubbed as "Mayor of the Internet," Alexis Ohanian is the Co-Founder of Reddit, Breadpig. He was a former partner at Y Combinator before co-founding Initialized. Garry Tan is also a Co-Founder of Initialized, Posterous.com, and Posthaven.com. Also a former partner at Y Combinator, where he advised over 700 companies. In addition to that, he is the first seed investor at Instacart and Coinbase which will discuss in greater detail on the episode.

It all started when Jacob Hsu immigrated from Taiwan at an early age! Fast forward to now, Jacob spends his time between San Mateo and Baltimore while he’s building and managing his team as the CEO of Catalyte. An ex-banker, Jacob went on to create two startups, one of which is Symbio, a product development and R&D outsourcing services company. In just less than 11 years, the company has grown from $10 million to over $600 million in revenue. In 2016, Symbio got acquired for over a billion dollars. Catalyte has a very unique business model, specifically using AI to find exceptional people from different backgrounds and helping them become great software engineers. Based in Baltimore, the company is now looking to expand to other cities where they can bring massive impact to local people within the community. Today, Jacob talks about the different key elements Catalyte is built upon and why now is the time to kill the resume!

A melting pot of different cultures, Miami is now seeing a dramatic shift in its career ecosystem geared towards technology and startups. But a little more work is needed for the educational landscape to align with the rapidly growing tech space. Raul Moas is currently the Miami Program Director for the Knight Foundation, a national foundation with strong local roots, specifically focused on entrepreneurship. Formerly, he was the Managing Director for Miami Angels, a local angel group with more than a hundred investors putting seed stage capital behind tech and tech-enabled companies from Florida. He previously served as an executive director for Roots of Hope. In today’s episode, Raul talks about the current trends in Miami from both educational and labor perspectives and what they can do to help bridge the gap.

Miami-native Saif Ishoof is the VP of Engagement at Florida International University and a leader in the Future of Work. He started up a nonprofit called City Year Miami and has run family business prior to it. He got his JD from the University of Miami. We wanted to highlight the importance of radio, part of the reason this podcast got started. Undoubtedly, radio is still the strongest way to reach people in the community you want to reach. Alice McLaughlin also joins in as she throws out some interesting questions. Alice is the host of Ask Alice, a radio show on Key Biscayne Radio 94.5 FM in Key Biscayne, Florida. It's also known as Blink Radio, where they feature business, technology, and lifestyle. The show is going to be on live simulcast multi platforms so they're able to reach above and beyond their local footprint.

Marlon Nichols is the Co-Founder & Managing Partner of Cross Culture Ventures, along with co-founder Troy Carter. Marlon previously served as a Partner at Intel Capital. He has worked with several startups, invested in companies like Mayvenn, Gimlet Media, Blavity, Airspace Technologies, Codeverse, and many others. Marlon is huge on CULTURE when it comes to uncovering hidden opportunities. Today, he talks about the power of culture and diversity, the value of mentorship, and how to assemble a winning team.

From economic development to a career in tech, Laurence Bradford is a software engineer and she’s now working as a product manager at EdTech startup Teachable, which is an online course platform. Aside from being a contributor at Forbes, she also runs a podcast called, Learn to Code With Me, which now has over a million downloads. She runs a blog with over 40,000 subscribers and she has a community of over 14,000 people on Facebook where she's helping them learn how to code. Laurence has traveled to over 30 countries, is an avid writer, and is very passionate to help others break into tech.

Daniel Barragan was the first sales rep at Zoom that was able to rise all the way up to the top of the ranks on the Enterprise team. He helped the company grow to over 700,000 accounts in six years, reach a billion dollar valuation, get into 90% of the top universities, and expand into different verticals. What started out as just being a beta product with only one customer supporting 25 people, Zoom now supports hundreds to thousands people on a single call serving a wide range of customers ranging from small and medium-sized businesses to enterprises.

A lot of times in startups, roles are not defined. And although we wear many hats, sometimes it never gets solidified. Today, Evan talks about his humble beginnings. Born in Alaska, he sold his cream puff and shaved ice business that he put up in high school. He then studied Philosophy and Business in Seattle, until finally moving to SF to hustle his way through, living in a hostel while looking for a job. Evan is employee #1 at Checkr, a startup that offers background check and screening solutions, which has grown from a two-person company to persently a hundred-person high-growth organization where he now leads their customer success team.

After the recording of the podcast, Erika joined the Impact Team at Amazon Cloud Services. Prior to that, at the time of the episode recording, Erika was the Head of Strategic Initiatives at Twilio.org. Before that, she also worked for TaskRabbit. Erika has not only in tech for a long time, she served on several boards and she also has deep experience in the nonprofit industry. Under the Impact Fund at Twilio, they've given away about a $1.5 million in investments and grants where they take a platform and portfolio approach. Her vision? To have a platform in Twilio where nonprofits have a one-stop shop for technical help. Erika is about to launch The Only, it's a storytelling project and podcast that documents the stories of women who were The Only in all male or mostly male environments. Do you know someone who's been an "only" woman or if you've been an "only" woman yourself in your company or organization, submit a nomination form and Erika will reach out to you. This covers people in practically all types of industries.

Aline Lerner is the CEO and Co-Founder of interviewing.io, a platform for engineers that practice technical interviews and land jobs at the top tech companies. Millions of people have read her writing and thousands of engineers sign to work with her platform each month. You can easily check her out in TechCrunch, Bloomberg, and other publications. From being a chef to breaking into startups, Aline is now the founder of one of the largest platforms in the game focused on getting people to tech companies.

In May 2015, the Congressional Black Caucus launched CBC TECH 2020 to bring together the best minds in the tech, non-profit, education and public sectors to chart a path forward to increase African American inclusion at all levels of the technology industry. Since the launch of CBC TECH 2020 in May of 2015, the following companies have added African Americans to their board of directors: AirBNB – (Kenneth I. Chenault Former Chairman & CEO, American Express), Apple, Inc. (James A. Bell, Former Executive Vice President & CFO of Boeing Co), Facebook, Inc. – (Kenneth I. Chenault, Former Chairman and CEO, American Express), HP Enterprise – (Leslie A. Brun CEO, Sarr Group, LLC), HP Enterprise – (Pamela Carter, Former President of Cummins Distribution), HP, Inc. – (Stacey Mobley, Former Senior Vice President, DuPont), HP, Inc. – (Stacy Brown- Philpot, CEO, TaskRabbit), Twitter – (Debra Lee, Chairwoman & CEO, BET Networks), Uber – (Ursula Burns, Former Chairwoman & CEO, Xerox, Corp), eBay – (Adriane Brown, Advisor with Intellectual Ventures, LLC)

Michael Ellison is currently the Chief Operating Officer of CodePath where he leads product, operations, and business development. CodePath is an education technology startup that has a reputation for excellence in training engineers with the skills that they need for cutting-edge tech jobs. Running for four years now, CodePath has worked with over 850 of the top tech companies. Not to mention, they're the most popular Android resource on the Internet with over 20,000 startups and over 500,000 developers using their resource every month. They've also helped redesigned onboarding programs for companies like Facebook and Airbnb, of which 25% of their engineers have been taught by their program. Recently, they launched CodePath.org that is powering under-searched schools with coding curriculum. Presently, they've worked with over 30 schools and 1,200 students.

Joe Musselman was spending his time in the military working with Navy SEALs and upon finishing his service, he started The Honor Foundation to help special operation forces who have left service to transition and find jobs in tech. Joe has supported over thousands of people with over 200 employee partners who have raised funding from people all over Silicon Valley including Marc Andreessen, and other organizations. Part of their vision is to grow their special operations community to 65,000 by 2020. Here are some surprising stats: -In 2013, only 13% of Navy Seals had jobs when they finished service and their average salary after leaving the service was $87,000. -In 2017, graduates that go through The Honor Foundation received a 97% placement rate with a salary of $130,000-$140,000+.

John Maeda is the Global Head of Computational Design and Inclusion at Automattic. Previously, he was a Partner at Kleiner Perkins where he founded the design and tech report that's read by people all over the world. Fascinated with the idea of remote working, John is an inspiration in the design world currently serving on the boards of Sonos and Wieden+Kennedy. He recently created a site called Design From Anywhere, that tells you more about remote work, inclusion, and how you can get into these positions and basically do it from anywhere. Being in a educational field for a long time, John noticed the art education in the U.S. was decreasing and most educational programs were becoming geared towards STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). So he had been advocating in Washington, D.C. to add Art through STEM and transform it into STEAM, which has become a legislation in 2013 to bring back Art into schools.

If you're a mom or you know some moms who want to know what it takes to break back into tech after you've been out of work for several years, this is a must-listen episode. Today's guest is Wendy Padua who has been out of work for 16 years and is not part of the marketing team at Zendesk. We also have Tami Forman on the show today. She's the Director of Path Forward, a nonprofit organization that creates mid-career returnship programs to ease the transition back to work for women and men after taking a break for raising children or other caregiving responsibilities. Wendi and Tami share their beautiful experiences with regard to motherhood, the struggles with putting yourself out there as you try to return to the workforce, and how to ultimately set yourself up for success!

Melissa has been teaching negotiation tactics for the last 22 years. Today, Melissa Hereford is going to teach us how to negotiate, not only in terms of salary, but life in general - deadlines, relationships, friendships, etc. She's going to give you actionable strategies you can use to negotiate a higher salary with your manager. Previously, Melissa worked for BayGroup International, the biggest negotiations consulting company in the world. She's worked with huge clients like Cisco, At&T, Oracle, GE, and several pharmaceutical companies. Stop selling yourself short! You’ve got to ask for more. But the biggest question is how. Negotiation can be scary, but it doesn’t have to be. You just have to know how you can prepare for it!

Jason is widely known as a global brand director for the Jordan Brand at Nike, where he led and contributed to the creation of several shoes for athletes and cultural icons including Carmelo Anthony, Chris Paul, Russell Westbrook, Derek Jeter, and Michael Jordan. Following his 13+-year stint at Nike, he started several things in tech at Accel and as an advisor for Stanford’s Design School. He then co-founded a startup with Stephen Curry and eventually creating his very own startup called Super Heroic, a tech-enabled system of play for kids starting with shoes that help them discover that they're actually superheroes. Contrary to what many people think that San Francisco is Silicon Valley, but it's not. In fact, it's not a place. Jason is therefore doing a lot to make sure they're able to leverage this platform to do a ton of educational work in places such as StreetCode Academy and collaborate with other teams like Black Jedi ZULU, and so much more. Jason is the founder of Trillicon Valley, a community of entrepreneurs, athletes, designers, and creatives.

Ghazal Asif is the heading Channels Sales at App Dynamics and she shares her path into tech!

Ana Díaz-Hernández is the Head of Sales at interviewing.io, a platform for engineers that set technical interviews and land jobs at top tech companies. Sacramento-born, Ana talks about how she leveraged online communities to get into Stanford, break into startups, how she went through an acquisition process, hustled her way into venture capital at Kapor Capital. In addition to that, she also led business development and online education platforms like Udacity. She founded the Women of Color in Tech - Bay Area. She is a member of the Diversity Advisory Council for Code.org. She is in the Board of Directors for Chicana Latina Foundation.

Prior to her current role as a rockstar product designer at Headspace, Vicki Tan holds an impressive portfolio having worked previously at Lyft and interned at Google. She has worked in the HR and also used to be a research intern and research coordinator at Stanford University School of Medicine, doing studies in Pediatric Oncology. Find out more about Vicki’s transition from the academic realm to the tech space, along with some nuggets of wisdom along the way.

Gary Vaynerchuk does not need an introduction. For those of you who haven’t heard of him yet, he is not only a rockstar entrepreneur, he's an author and a speaker. He's a four-time New York Times bestseller. He now runs a 800-person media agency, VaynerMedia. He is also an early investor in Twitter, Snapchat, and Uber. Big on giving back and making people happy, the one legacy he wants to leave is that he has given more than what he has taken.