Award Categories

Adam Cheyer

Co-Founder @ Siri & Change.org

Adam helped start four successful companies: co-founder of Siri (sold to Apple to build the Siri assistant, with 1B users), co-founder of Viv Labs (sold to Samsung, technology available on hundreds of millions of devices), co-founder of Sentient (a machine learning company), and founding member of Change.org (the world's largest petition platform with 400M+ members). Adam has more than 60 publications and 38 patents to his name, and has degrees in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from Brandeis University and UCLA.

Dr. Anita Jindal

Senior Director of Engineering @ VMware

Dr. Anita Jindal is a Sr. Director at VMware, leading engineering for VMware Skyline product that provides proactive insights to drive intelligent customer actions. Prior to VMware, as Engineering leader at NetApp, she led strategy and execution of Active IQ product. Anita’s team developed data science, microservices, and API platforms using Big Data (Hadoop) and cloud technologies. Anita held various engineering leadership positions at Oracle and Sun. She worked as Resident Research Associate at Argonne National Lab, researching application of parallel computing to deduction systems, an area of AI. Anita has multiple software patents and publications. She holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Anita has been awarded IDG 2020 One’s to Watch, which honors rising technology leaders who have what it takes to become strategic, C-level business technology executives of tomorrow. She received the Bay Area Timmy Award 2019 for Best Technical Manager. Anita is a regular speaker and moderator to support STEM and Women in Technology (WIT) goals globally. She serves as a Board Member for STEMentors Silicon Valley (a California nonprofit) that promotes STEM for underrepresented children in Bay Area.

Bruce Wang

Engineering Director @ Netflix

Bruce Wang is a software technology leader, tech entrepreneur and early stage startup advisor. He has extensive experience in leading software teams, establishing a strong agile development culture and building scalable and reliable cloud software. He is passionate about helping early stage startups with pragmatic and practical technical, organizational and business advice. He is currently Engineering Director at Netflix, leading API Systems. The team creates a unified abstraction and aggregation layer over disparate Netflix mid-tier systems, enabling device teams to build innovative user experiences through a consistent API layer. On the consumer side they enable signup, content discovery, and partner experiences on 1000+ device types and on the studio side, they maintain a federated GraphQL service that powers dozens of internal applications that enable Netflix’s global studio functions. He is also a serious foodie and resides in San Francisco with his wife and two daughters.

Erin Liao

Vice President, E2E 5G Systems @ Ericsson

Erin has twenty years of global R&D leadership and program management expertise in mobile communication industry. She is passionate about accelerating 5G innovation with strategic vision and flawless execution.

Kevin Wang

Vice President @ .406 Ventures

Kevin is a Vice President at .406 Ventures where he focuses on data, AI, and cloud. Prior to .406, Kevin spent a few years investing in software and tech services. He started his career at J.P. Morgan in the technology investment banking group. During his free time, he enjoys backpacking, playing poker, scuba diving, skiing, and traveling. Kevin received his BA in Economics and Political Science from The University of Connecticut, and his MA in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University.

Tim M. Edwards

Executive Director, Infrastructure Engineering @ Ally

Tim is a highly skilled and energetic Senior Technology Leader with a diverse background in infrastructure engineering, architecture, consulting, design, operations and service delivery. With over 20 years experience in building and leading various teams across a broad array of technologies, Tim has a proven track record of designing and implementing solutions for high volume and mission critical applications.

Stacey Yudin

President @ NEP Services

Stacey Yudin is a driven entrepreneur & business consultant with experience in diverse markets including non-profits, fundraising, sales, international medicine, and small businesses. She currently works for New Equity Productions as President, as well as Cofounder of Yantra Beauty. Stacey's passion is solving problems. She finds enjoyment in inspiring even the most skeptical client to examine a new modus operandi. She is driven for professional success and has a track record to prove it. Stacey is the epitome of GRIT: A determined display of Passionate Perseverance that will lead her and others to success and fulfillment. Stacey is a leader and has a proven track record of success. Before leaving UCLA Department of Medicine to pursue her entrepreneurial dreams, she was a junior founding member of the Global Health Education Program (GHEP) at the DGSOM and was apart of the team that developed the Center for World Health at UCLA.

Siddharth Bhai

Product Management Leader @ Splunk

Siddharth Bhai is an experienced product management leader, with 14+ years of experience across Splunk, Google and Microsoft. He is a sought after speaker, having presented at leading technology and software product conferences. He has deep experience in identity, security, provisioning and cloud computing. His work has been covered in major media including the CIO Magazine & Techcrunch. He holds multiple patents.

Justin Michela

Vice President, Architecture @ Fidelity Investments

As a technical and business operations leader, Justin offers a substantive background in small to large team management, budget and vendor management, effective use of resources, project direction and management, and global infrastructure and enterprise software experience. His stellar management record is augmented by comprehensive Project Management using Agile methodologies; along with dual degrees in Computer Science and Engineering Management. His driving passion is to ensure significant improvement in all processes followed by expert implementation and execution. Being an astute senior director with the ability to analyze processes, increase efficiencies, and resolve customer issues, he revels in the challenges of accomplishing goals where others have failed. He understands the importance of results and effective team management. During his career, Justin has sought opportunities to accomplish cost-reduction goals, meet and exceed production targets, and motivate co-workers to perform at a high level. He has successfully worked with stakeholders across a diverse array of platforms in challenging environments while earning a reputation as a strong, empowering technology leader.

Akshaya Aradhya

Director of Engineering, Data Platform Edge @ Netflix

Akshaya is currently the Director of Engineering in the Data Platform Group at Netflix. She is passionate about building high performing teams and working directly with the stakeholders. She has managed teams in Asia, Europe and the USA. She has a MBA from Wharton. She has extensive experience in cross-functional team management, incubating new businesses and technology partnerships, software development and thought leadership. She has served on the leadership committee for the IEEE WIE ILC and on the content committee for Anita Borg's Grace Hopper Conference. She is currently serving on the advisory board for two non-profit organizations. She is a successful tech speaker and thought leader. She has spoken at several conferences and meet-ups around the San Francisco Bay Area and other parts of the US.

Freddy Rivera

Senior Program Manager - Diversity Programs @ Oracle

Freddy is a first generation college graduate and proud Latino, born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. Freddy has over 10+ years of experience in technical recruiting, diversity/equity/inclusion recruiting programs, and has had the wonderful opportunity to recruit at all levels (Campus Recruiting > Full-Lifecycle Recruiting > Sr. Program Manager - Recruiting Programs > executive recruiting). He's also been very lucky to have experience redesigning recruiting processes, training (inclusive interviewing, sourcing, hiring manager trainings, empathy walks, etc) as well as worked with large data sets to create, implement, and execute large scale recruiting programs on a global scale.

Kapil Agarwal

Engineering Director @ Salesforce

Kapil Agarwal is an Engineering Director in Salesforce and leading the Service Cloud Voice product that integrates intelligent telephony into Salesforce for a seamless agent experience. The v1 launch of Service Cloud brings voice calls and digital channels together helping agents better help customers. He takes great pride in building a culture where people are constantly learning, growing and innovating. He empowers teams with operational excellence and processes that scale. Prior to Salesforce Kapil worked in both consumer and enterprise products. He worked in Microsoft for hotmail.com(now outlook.live.com) and in IBM on the unstructured data. As a passionate and engineering leader, Kapil is focussed on building high performing teams and has a proven track record of delivering enterprise quality products.

Denise Reed Lamoreaux

Worldwide Learning Director of Customer Success @ Microsoft

Nirmal Srinivasan

Software Engineering Director @ PayPal

Nirmal is building high-performance engineering teams driven by the purpose of bringing great products to customers. Prior to PayPal she has spent close to two decades working in companies like Netflix and Apple. In her roles as an engineering leader she has led transformational initiatives such as migrating core products from on-prem to cloud, and create platforms enabling SAAS models. She takes great joy in building a culture where people are constantly learning, growing and innovating. She brings a mindset of simplifying process there by scaling remote teams with focus on diversity and work life balance.

Benjamin David Novak

Angel Investor @ Delaware Crossing Investor Group