Susan Breyer
Susan Z. Breyer is a Woodside, California painter of abstract and impressionist landscapes. In her work, she endeavors to reflect her reverence for the mystery, power and vulnerability of nature. Susan is a graduate of Stanford University and subsequently worked in strategy and marketing for the advertising agencies Benton & Bowles in New York, HBM/Creamer in Boston and Hal Riney in San Francisco. After graduating from Harvard Business School, Susan served as Director of Marketing for First Republic Bank. In moving from the corporate world to art, Susan studied for seven years with Bay Area master painter and former SF Academy of Art teacher, Ning Hou. Susan has worked to increase her community’s awareness of and investment in Room to Read since 2012. She currently serves on the Leadership Council of NARAL Pro-Choice America and in the Leadership Circle of WANDA (Women’s Advancement Network and Development Alliance,) of Silicon Valley.
Erin and Jitendra Ganju
Erin Ganju is currently the Managing Director of Echidna Giving, a private funder that will grant over $500 million over the next 40 years to advancing girls’ education in countries with limited resources. She is a Co-founder, former CEO, and former COO of Room to Read. From the early start-up days, Erin was instrumental in the design and implementation of the organization’s scalable, replicable model for improving the quality of education around the world. In 2009, Erin became Chief Executive Officer of Room to Read. As CEO, Erin oversaw Room to Read’s global operations across 15 countries; a technical assistance unit called Room to Read Accelerator; fundraising teams in North America, Europe, Australia and the Asia Pacific region; and a worldwide staff of more than 1,500 employees. Erin captured her experiences and insights as co-author of Scaling Global change: A Social Entrepreneur’s Guide to Surviving the Start-up Phase and Driving Impact. Erin has been selected as one of the World Economic Forum’s Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneurs for 2014 and in 2012 was one of Fast Company’s Extraordinary Women. Before founding Room to Read, Erin worked at Unilever, Goldman, Sachs & Co. and a couple of technology start-ups. She has spent extensive time working and living in Asia, where she saw firsthand the need to enhance developing countries’ educational systems. Erin holds a combined bachelor’s and master’s degree in international relations and economics from The Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C.
Jitendra (Jeetu) Ganju, Ph.D. is a clinical trials consultant trained in statistics with over 20 years experience in the pharmaceuticals and biotech industry. His prior employment includes tenures as the VP of Biometrics at Global Blood Therapeutics and Hyperion Therapeutics and Senior Director at Gilead Sciences. Therapeutic areas include hematology, diabetes, pulmonology, cardiovascular, inflammation, vaccines. Areas of interest include speeding up Phase 1-3 development, statistics representative at FDA / EMA meetings, collaborations on regulatory documents, clinical development plans with attention to mitigating risk, endpoint selection, competitive analysis. Jeetu has been published in peer-reviewed journals on non-inferiority trials, improving operational efficiency, methods to increase power.
Krista and Matthew Glotzbach
Matthew Glotzbach, CEO of Quizlet, has over 20 years of experience building large-scale, engaging products that solve-real world problems while generating substantial revenue. Matthew joined Quizlet after 12 years at Google, where he was most recently VP Product Management at YouTube. Prior to this, he was on the founding team of Google Apps. Matthew studied mechanical engineering at Cornell.
Krista Glotzbach has 25 years’ experience helping build successful enterprise software companies. She currently leads western region sales for on-demand transit company, Via, preceded by executive roles in sales and marketing at Tamr, Vast.com, and Trilogy. Krista studied Economics and Japanese at Stanford.
Krista and Matthew live in Menlo Park with their two teenage daughters.
Diksha and Divesh Makan
Diksha Makan leads Technology Engineering at ICONIQ Capital. With a mindful approach, Diksha focuses on systems architecture, strategically mapping business process to technical design and data construct. She believes process management, organizational skills and detailed project management are key drivers to success. Prior to ICONIQ, Diksha took a break to raise a family for 9 years and transitioned to reenter the workforce through a mothers community program at Care.com. Diksha also spent 10 years before her break working on ERP systems implementations in the Retail, Manufacturing and Pharmaceutical spaces. She was responsible for project implementations on engagements for Accenture, Deloitte Consulting and Levi’s Strauss. Diksha holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. Diksha lives in San Francisco, with her husband Divesh, and 3 daughters. She is passionate about girl’s education and empowerment, and enjoys free time with yoga and meditation.
Divesh Makan is a Founding Partner of ICONIQ Capital, a global multi-family office and Merchant Bank. Prior to ICONIQ, Divesh was at Morgan Stanley for four years, and at Goldman Sachs as a Vice President for eight years. Prior to Goldman Sachs, Divesh was a senior manager at Accenture in the Financial Services area, specializing in the private equity investments. Divesh serves on the Board of SFJAZZ and the Board of Overseers at UCSF. He received an M.B.A. from the Wharton School and his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Natal, South Africa. Divesh lives in San Francisco, with his wife and three daughters.
Angel Mehta
Angel Mehta is an early stage investor in technology companies with a particular interest in artificial intelligence, enterprise software, bio-hacking/longevity, and meat-alternative food companies. He also serves as an advisor to entrepreneurs, coaching them on human capital/recruitment, automation, and outsourcing.
Between 1998 and 2018, Angel served as Chief Executive Officer of Sterling-Hoffman Management Consultants, a global executive-search firm with over 300 employees worldwide and offices in 5 countries.
Angel is an active member of several CEO mastermind groups, including Young President’s Organization (YPO), and Tiger 21. His philanthropic interests are focused on girl’s education, human trafficking, fact-based journalism, and animal rights. Mr. Mehta Holds a BA degree from York University in Toronto.
In his spare time, Angel enjoys weight lifting, ice hockey, and learning magic.
He can be reached on Twitter: @angelmehta99
Kim Anstatt Morton
Kim Anstatt Morton worked almost a decade on Wall Street as an equity research analyst at UBS and Hambrecht and Quist in New York City. She later joined Montgomery Securities in San Francisco where she covered emerging growth and big cap biotech companies. Kim is passionate about literacy, education and the arts. She enthusiastically serves on the advisory board of 10x10, a global movement for girls' education through a film and social action campaign (and a partner of Room to Read). She is a member of San Francisco’s Edgewood Arts Advisory Board, has trained as a docent for middle school children with SFMOMA, and is active on their Artist’s Circle Donor Development Committee. Kim has worked with the Department of Health and Human Services in San Francisco with abused and neglected children and has tutored a special literacy program for sixth through eighth grade students struggling with reading at Francisco Middle School in San Francisco. Kim received her bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College, and fine art and graduate painting degrees at the San Francisco Art Institute. Kim travels extensively in the developing world and lives in San Francisco with her husband Ian and son Baker.
Stasia Obremskey
Stasia Obremskey is the strategy director for Contraceptive Technology Development at Rhia Ventures, a social impact investing firm focused on women’s health. She has more than twenty-five years of experience providing financial and strategic planning consulting to organizations in the U.S. and Asia. She began her consulting career as a management consultant with Bain & Company. Previously, she worked in investment banking for Morgan Stanley & Co. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration with a concentration in finance, from the University of Notre Dame and an MBA from the Harvard Graduate School of Business. In addition to her consulting work, she has extensive experience as a member of several non-profit boards where she has held a number of leadership positions.
Jesse Purewal
Jesse Purewal is a father, husband, son, and grandson to some of the most wonderful women and girls on the planet. At work, he is the SVP and GM of the Global High-Tech Sector at Qualtrics, an SAP company whose SaaS platform enables companies to deliver breakthrough employee and customer experiences. Prior to Qualtrics, Jesse was a Partner at Prophet, a brand and marketing strategy consultancy, where he worked with B2B and B2B2C tech clients to grow by developing and linking business strategy, product strategy, and marketing strategy. His professional expertise is in working with cross-functional teams in marketing, product management, engineering and sales to develop growth strategies that drive relevance, loyalty and market value.
Prior to joining Prophet, Jesse ran a business delivering college prep services to high school students and families which sold to Kaplan, Inc. He also worked in corporate strategy and marketing at Starbucks Coffee, where he helped create the company’s loyalty program and develop its whole bean coffee portfolio.
Jesse has an MBA from Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and a BS in Mathematics and Sociology from Northwestern University. He lives in San Francisco. (And, with respect to the father role above, he is the proud dad of two identical twin girls who are learning and loving to read.)
Mythili Sankaran and Shekar Ayyar
Mythili is the Principal at Stratalens. She previously served as Director of West Coast Operations at U.S.-India Business Council (USIBC). Mythili joined USIBC from the business world of the Silicon Valley. She has a wealth of experience in IT and venture capital. Earlier, she served as Chief Executive Officer of a Telecom/Web startup, Koollage. Prior to this, she was an Executive at the American India Foundation. She has degrees in physics and electrical engineering and an executive management certificate offered jointly by AT&T and the Wharton School of Business.
Shekar Ayyar joined VMware in June 2007 and serves as executive vice president and general manager of VMware’s Telco and Edge Cloud business unit, which is designed to help communications service providers as well as enterprises with integrated platforms for 5G, edge, telco cloud and IoT use cases. Ayyar also serves as general manager, Edge/IoT for Dell Technologies. Prior to July 2019, Ayyar led the company’s strategy and corporate development efforts for the past 10 years and also helped incubate the telco Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) focus area. Under his leadership, the company has executed on dozens of acquisitions including significant platform additions such as Nicira, AirWatch, VeloCloud and Heptio, as well as a portfolio of strategic investments in technology startups.
Shekar brings more than 20 years of senior leadership experience in enterprise software, communications and semiconductors. Prior to joining VMware, he held senior executive roles at BindView, Instantis and Lucent, spanning product management, marketing, and business development, and was also a consultant with McKinsey & Co. Ayyar earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Johns Hopkins University and his MBA from the Wharton School, where he graduated as a Palmer Scholar. He earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. Ayyar serves on the Boards of Puppet and the VMware Foundation.
Pierre Towns
Mr Towns is Managing Partner at Human Resource Capital Consultants, Inc., an Organization Development consulting firm, which over almost two decades, has solved human resources business issues for startups, non-profits, government, and Fortune 500 companies. As Managing Partner, Mr. Towns’ responsibilities include: managing the enterprise, business development, client relations, hiring service providers and occasionally designing and delivering, strategic and tactical organization development services.
Formerly, as Chief Talent Officer for Room to Read, Mr. Towns was responsible for all aspects of Human Resources, IT and Legal for this International Non-Governmental Organization. He is a Lecturer at CSUSM and a Mediation Panelist for the American Arbitration Association. He has also taught several business and human resources classes for the Business Schools at USC, Cal State Universities at San former Marcos and Long Beach and guest lectured at the Andersen School of Business, UC Riverside.
Mr. Towns is the SVP, Board Secretary, & Chief Administrative Officer of MedUnite Inc., an IT Services company that provided real-time connectivity between payors and providers in healthcare. He joined MedUnite from DreamWorks SKG, an entertainment company. There he directed DreamWorks' human resources activities corporate-wide, including Live Action Feature film, Animated Feature film, Television Production, DreamWorks Records, and DreamWorks Interactive Divisions.
Prior to working with DreamWorks, Mr. Towns was with ARCO, a publicly held $39 billion integrated oil and gas company. During 19 years at ARCO, he worked domestically and internationally in positions of increasing responsibility. Mr. Towns' ARCO responsibilities included: heading up Human Resources and Administration for ARCO Latin America, which included Central and South America, and the Caribbean; world-wide HR Generalist head for ARCO International Oil & Gas Company; managing a corporate culture change effort for Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, operators of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline; Corporate Manager of the Organization, Compensation and EEO organization; HR for ARCO British Limited in London; and management of the Insurance Plans Administration Group, which managed all benefits for 90,000 lives. Mr. Towns also worked with Wells Fargo Bank in Los Angeles and the Monsanto Company in Tennessee and New Jersey.
He has a BA in Administrative Studies and a BS in Economics from the University of California at Riverside. He earned his MBA in General Management and Organization Development from the University of Southern California.
In his spare time, Mr. Towns volunteers with several non-profit organizations. He is on the Board of Just in Time for Foster Youth, Carlsbad-Laguna-Temecula Alumni Chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity Inc. and the CLT Charitable Foundation. Mr. Towns is also an Executive in Resident and University Council member for the President of Cal State University San Marcos.
Mr. Towns lives in Carlsbad, California with his wife Anisa D. Towns.
Hilary Valentine
Hilary is a board member of the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health and a member of Part the Cloud whose mission is to fund Alzheimer’s research with the highest probability of slowing, stopping or ultimately curing Alzheimer’s disease. Hilary serves on the Board of Directors of the Valentine Family Foundation and the Canary Foundation. She also serves on the Emeritus Board of Breast Cancer Connections. Her primary focus has been to evangelize the Room to Read mission in front of high net-worth donors in the technology world. The Valentine Family Foundation provided the initial multi-year seed funding for Room to Read's Girls' Education program. Hilary served on the Room to Read Board of Directors from 2003 to 2012 and was Co-Chair of the Board of Directors from 2005 to 2008 and was Chair of the Board of Directors from 2008 to 2010. Hilary graduated with a BS in Psychology from St. Lawrence University.
Frank and Leslie van Veenendaal
Mr. Frank van Veenendaal retired from Salesforce in 2015 after almost 14 years with the company in multiple leadership roles including Vice Chairman, President of Worldwide Sales and Services, President of Worldwide Sales and Chief Sales Officer, President of North American Operations and Global Corporate Sales, President of Worldwide Corporate Sales and Services and Senior Vice President of North America Sales at Salesforce.com. He was instrumental in growing Salesforce from $5M to $5B+. Mr. van Veenendaal has over 30 years of technology sales and executive management experience. Previously Mr. van Veenendaal held various sales and sales management positions for companies such as Actuate, Interleaf, Integrated Solutions, Pyramid, and Harris Corporation. Mr. van Veenendaal also serves on the board of directors of Coupa, NewVoiceMedia and Vlocity. Leslie van Veenendaal was a Certified Travel Consultant for 20 years.
Priya Venkatesh
Priya Venkatesh, a highly experienced prestige beauty retail leader, serves as Sephora’s Senior Vice President of Merchandising for Skincare & Hair. In her 15-year tenure, Priya has focused on category vision and development, including building a robust brand portfolio of indie, emerging, clean and classic brands, as well as the first introduction of K-Beauty in prestige retail, while driving innovation in formulation offerings, product and services experiences at Sephora.
Under Priya’s leadership, Sephora’s Skin and Hair business has grown dramatically, ensuring these areas play an integral role in the retailer’s in-store and digital experience offerings for clients. She has developed and executed many successful initiatives, including the launch of “Clean at Sephora,” providing clients a clear point of view on the clean beauty category and Sephora’s offering across 50+ brands and 2,000 products; Skin IQ, an in store skincare solutions diagnostic tool; and introduced a range of high performing brands including Algenist, Bumble and bumble, Dr. Jart, Drunk Elephant, Dyson, Farmacy, Glam Glow, Living Proof, Olaplex, Summer Fridays, and TATCHA.
Prior to her current role at Sephora, Priya was a clinical skincare merchant and before joining Sephora, she was the Director of Makeup at The Body Shop. Priya earned a Masters in International Economics and Finance from Brandeis University and currently resides in the Bay Area with her family.
Susan Wojcicki and Dennis Troper
Susan Wojcicki is CEO of YouTube, the world’s most popular digital video platform used by a billion people across the globe to access information, share video, and shape culture. An early champion of online video who was instrumental in Google's 2006 acquisition of YouTube, Susan now oversees YouTube's content and business operations, engineering, and product development. Prior to joining YouTube in February 2014, Susan was Senior Vice President of Advertising & Commerce at Google, where she oversaw the design and engineering of AdWords, AdSense, DoubleClick, and Google Analytics. She joined Google in 1999 as the company's first marketing manager and led the initial development of several key consumer products including Google Images and Google Books. In 2002, Susan began working on Google’s advertising products and over the next 12 years she led teams that helped define the vision and direction of Google’s monetization platforms. Before joining Google, Susan worked at Intel, Bain & Company, and a number of start-ups. She graduated with honors from Harvard University, holds a master's in economics from UC Santa Cruz, and an MBA from UCLA.
Dennis Troper is the Product Director for Wear OS by Google. He joined Google in early 2003 and has worked on several product areas since then including AdWords, G Suite and Google Fiber. Prior to Google he held positions Oracle, Concur Technologies and Deloitte Consulting. Dennis holds a BA in Economics from the University of Texas at Austin and an MS in Applied Economics from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He lives in Los Altos, California with his wife and five children.