Meet our Office Hour Mentors
Almond Au
Customer Engineering Manager, Google
Almond leads a team of Cloud Customer Engineers to serve the national corporate segment in Canada focusing on technology, SaaS/ISV, and digital native organizations. He has worked with clients & partners to design and scale many types of applications in the cloud. With over 10 years of technical experience prior to Google, Almond held senior systems engineering roles at Commvault and Seagate, and held a number of technical roles at IBM where he worked in data center architecture, databases, and networking.
Anton Markov
Software Developer, Google Canada
Anton is a graduate of the University of Waterloo's Computer Science program and has worked in Waterloo Region at companies both big and small. Anton's technical focus is on performance and reliability of software systems, as well as the collection and analysis of engineering metrics to quantify the performance.
Aditi Bhargava
Senior UX Researcher, Google
Aditi Bhargava is a Senior UX Researcher working at Google, currently working on building products that improve people's financial health. Her work includes identifying user problems to drive new feature ideation, validating product-market fit for early concepts, and measuring success metrics for launches. Her recent work includes relaunching Google Finance to make investing information more accessible and Google Pixel's call screening feature that has the Google Assistant answer your unknown phone calls. Having worked at innovation Hub (MaRS Discovery District), Aditi is passionate about bringing UX power to startups to answer critical business questions and build successful products. She is an emerging angel investor dedicated to minimizing disparities in tech by supporting high-potential founders who are women and/or people of color.
Brooke Simon Krebs
T/PgM Sourcing Lead, Google
Brooke Simon Krebs leads a sourcing team at Google focused on hiring for Technical Program Manager talent across the Americas. She has spent the last 10 years in Talent Acquisition, starting her career at a boutique staffing firm where she primarily partnered with early to mid-stage startups. Brooke has direct experience building and leading high-performing teams, and has been recognized for her Inclusive Leadership and Innovation.
Caleb Mbakwe
Software Engineer, Google
As a Full Stack Software Engineer, Caleb has solved problems across several sectors which include but are not limited to Media Streaming, Health, Education and Religion. He relishes any opportunity to give back to the tech community by mentoring, offering training sessions and motivational speaking. He enjoys working with mission-driven companies so if you are, he would gladly use the skills he has gathered over the years to help you.
Carlos Smits
Talent Acquisition Lead, Google
A business-driven senior Talent Acquisition professional with over 20 years experience sourcing passive candidates with niche skill sets for start-ups, SMBs and large, global organizations. Carlos partners with cross functional teams to understand the needs, collaborate on solutions and create the best experience for all involved. Additionally, he trains teams to use an empathetic, consumer first point of view.
Christina Raftis
Search Product Lead, Google
Christina began her career at Europe’s biggest Startup Incubator, Rocket Internet, working in Business Development on the international expansion of Glossybox. She then left to create her own Startup, a subscription box for chocolate lovers, which sold in 2013 to a German chocolate manufacturer. She managed the German Account Strategy Team for 3 years at Criteo before joining Google in 2015. Currently she consults some of the biggest US retailers on their investment in Search and how to create a future-proof online-to-offline Marketing strategy.
Dinesh Chahlia
Engineering Manager & Trusted Advisor for Google for Startups
Dinesh is obsessed with supporting founders to solve fundamental problems with technology and make a positive impact on the world. He is a trusted startup advisor at Google for Startups and has held various engineering leadership roles at Microsoft and Netflix. He has worked with over 50 startup founders over the last year, advising them on vision, roadmap, product market fit, OKRs, pitching and fundraising.
Erik Saarenvirta
Customer Engineer, Data & AI Specialist, Google
Erik is a data and AI specialist supporting digital native companies in the Canadian region on their GCP initiatives. He has mentored at two of the Google for Startups Accelerator cohorts in 2020 and can mentor on topics such as GCP architectures, HPC, Kubernetes, data engineering, analytics, machine learning and security.
Eugene Losev
Software Engineering Manager, Google
Eugene is a Software Engineering Manager at Google Cloud Platform. Previously he worked at Amazon, led engineering teams at Borealis AI (RBC Machine Learning Research Institute) and Morega Systems. He has experience in a number of different domains: Cloud, Distributed Applications, Video Streaming, Data Processing Pipelines for Machine Learning Applications.
Fernando Belfort
Head of SMB, Waze Ads, North America
Fernando is a former business consultant, working in Tech markets since 2005 and with digital media sales since 2014. Curious, high-energy and results-driven professional, has exponentially grown business unit's market shares, revenues, and margins both rapidly and sustainably.
Iris Guo
Product Manager, X the Moonshot Factory (Alphabet)
With a deep passion in tech for social impact, Iris is a Product Manager at Google X, the moonshot factory on the Everyday Robot Project and Founder/ CEO at a food sustainability startup Neutrify. Iris has mentored and advised multiple startups and product-centric entrepreneurs to help them build products that customers love. Having built products from 0 to 1, she started a food tech non-profit OpenMeal that raised $24,000 to fund struggling restaurants to give out 3,300 free meals to food-insecure families during covid.
Jay Steele
Software Engineering Manager, Google
Prior to joining Google, Jay founded two startups that were both sold to BlackBerry (Plazmic - 2001, and Viigo - 2010). Since joining Google in 2019, he has been leading a team focused on Gmail backend infrastructure.
James van Kessel
Cloud Customer Engineer, Google Cloud Canada
James has helped a number of large complex enterprises onboard to Google Cloud, guiding decisions of security, networking and operations and keeping an eye to effective project management. He has a background in on-prem infrastructure and Canadian Telco ISPs, but has been a dedicated cloud professional for over 3 years and as a hobby, he is a mobile/web-app developer working with Node.js, Express and Angular, maintaining a training tool for the Karate Dojo he is a member of.
Jamie Gargatsougias
Head of Brand Strategy, Google
Jamie leads YouTube Brand Strategy for Canada, advising top brands how to get the most out of the platform by building great creative, media and measurement strategies (aka, ads you want to watch!). Before Google, Jamie spent almost a decade as a brand marketer at P&G, leading marketing for Pantene, Olay, CoverGirl and Duracell.
Jenn Pretti
UX Lead, Entertainment at Nest, Nest Design at Google
Jennifer Pretti is an experienced UX designer and leader, with a career spanning over 20 years. She has worked with a range of organizations, from startups to Fortune 500 companies, and across wearable, web, mobile, and desktop product design for both consumer and enterprise solutions. She is now the UX Lead, Entertainment at Nest at Google. This will be Jennifer's third time as a guest speaker for the Google for Startups Accelerator program.
Jennifer Smith
Director Product Management, Google Cloud
Jennifer is an engaging executive with deep expertise in bringing technology products and services to market. Her career has spanned technologies from satellites to laser projectors to AdTech software and markets from entertainment to military. She is a builder of high-performance teams in high growth, rapidly changing environments and is passionate about advocating for STEM career choices among women!
Jon Rotchtin
Senior Account Manager, Google
Jon has 8+ years of marketing experience in the financial services sector. He has spent the last 2.5 years helping the Canadian banks grow their business in the US. He was also a mentor for the inaugural Google Accelerator cohort. Feel free to ask him about brand strategy and growth marketing tactics.
Joe Capka
SWE: Software Engineering Manager, Google
Leader of engineering teams; experience with agile transformations; startups, scale-ups and multinationals.
Lahiru Maramba
SWE, Google
Lahiru is a software engineer with a strong background in design, prototyping, and Human Computer Interaction. Lahiru has startup co-founder experience. He also has experience working at early stage startups on MVPs. Lahiru holds a Masters degree in HCI from Queen's University, Kingston, Canada.
Matheus Almeida
Partner Technology Manager, YouTube
Matheus has a CS background and has been working in tech/entertainment for almost 12 years now; with roles in gaming, music and YouTube. In this time, he has been a SWE, PO and more recently Partnership Manager and Consultor.
Megan Cackett
HF/UX Researcher, Google
Megan has over 8 years of design strategy and research experience in a variety of industries including, architecture, aerospace, virtual and augmented reality, and technology; both in startups and corporate settings. She is currently supporting the Google Hardware team as a Human-Factors/UX Researcher. Her primary expertise is in identifying growth or efficiency opportunities for products, spaces, and processes using human factors principles and design research methods.
Mike Walker
AI/ML & Analytics Specialist, Google Cloud
With over 25 years of software and IT experience including: development, architecture, and dev/ops, Mike is able to help startups in a variety of ways. His current role of Machine Learning & Analytics Specialist for Google Cloud focuses on helping companies of all sizes adopt the best tools and practices for powering their business with data. Mike has worked in multiple startups and has many years of experience helping them leverage technology while balancing the often limited resources available to a startup .
Nick Begley
Senior Software Developer, Tech Lead, Google
Nick is passionate about innovation, software engineering, and business. He is a Tech Lead and a full-stack developer for web, server, and mobile, and has founded multiple profitable small businesses.
Nicole Vournazos
Program Manager, Google
Nicole has been at Google for about seven years as a program manager -- working across multiple teams across Cloud Sales, Cloud Engineering, and Core Engineering. She is currently finishing up her graduate degree at the University of Oxford, studying Software and Systems Security. She enjoys helping startups grow and reach the next steps in their adventure.
Pallavi Baljekar
Software Engineer, Google
Pallavi Baljekar is a Software Engineer in the Document AI for Industries team working on machine learning models for Document Processing. Previously she has been part of the Google Translate and Brain Research teams working on various Speech and NLP projects in research. She received her PhD from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Language Technologies.
Priya Verma
Senior Account Manager, Google
Priya has spent the last 6 years at Google helping Canadian Retailers on their digital transformation journey and recently pivoted her skill sets to support Canadian startups, including Shopify. She also leads the external communities pillar for the Black Googler Network, supports nonprofits focused on racial justice, and creating opportunities to provide mentorship for BIPOC youth. Priya is deeply committed to supporting racial equity and weaving inclusion into everything she does.
Riley Nelko
Senior Account Executive, Google
Riley has been with Google for 8-years, and has worked in a variety of business development, strategy, analytics and sales roles. He currently leads Google's digital acceleration program for large enterprise partners in Canada. In 2016, Riley worked on Google's product & engineering team for Android & Google Play in Europe, South Korea and Japan. Prior to joining Google, Riley was a consultant in Accenture's global strategy group. He focused on Corporate Strategy & M&A advisory across a number of industries. Riley graduated from Western's Richard Ivey School of Business.
Saba Nowroozi
UX Designer, Google
Saba is a UX designer at Google working on Stadia. Prior to joining Google she worked as a UX designer/consultant in enterprise, learning, energy, insurtech, and fintech sectors. She was a previous mentor with Google for Startups Accelerator and has expertise in UX design, UX research, and working in small design teams.
Sam Legge
Product Manager, Google
Currently a Product Manager working on augmented reality interfaces & experiences. Creativity first, details second. Outside of work, Sam is planning his next outdoor adventure or pursuing his passion for puns.
Shauheen Zahirazami
Machine Learning Engineering Manager, Google
Shauheen got his MSc and PhD in control engineering in Montreal, Canada. He then worked for a few startups in Internet of Things and Predictive Analytics before joining Microsoft and working in AI Platforms. Shauheen has been working at Google since 2019 as engineering manager for Cloud ML Accelerators.
Shyam Sheth
Product Manager, Google
Pragmatic approach to solving complex multi-year interdisciplinary problems that require navigating product, engineering, regulatory, privacy, legal, and PR concerns. 20 years of experience ranging from writing the first help desk manual for 2G launch in Canada (1997) to designing USSD Gateways to starting a company building mobile risk management solutions for the DoD to leading anti-malvertising efforts at Google. International exposure from working in Silicon Valley, India, and Canada and also working on projects that have taken me from Uganda to Rome.
Tim Cruickshank
Senior UX Designer, Google
Tim is currently leading UX design for the developer experience of Google Stadia. Originally from Sydney Australia, Tim worked with startups and Fortune 500s to bring their digital products to life. He is passionate about UX strategy and product ideation.
Vicky Tait
gTech Testing and Insights Manager
Vicky is a long-time Googler -- 13 years and counting -- with a background in psychology. She has been managing teams across a few different organizations for the last seven years, and spends her free work hours coaching, designing new people processes, and improving how Google's does performance reviews.
Walter Hermsen
Product Manager, Google
Walter has experience in high technology consumer and business-to-business environments globally and is now at Google, building ambient computing experiences. At North, one of the biggest startups in Canada, Walter lead the product management, UX, ID and Research teams to create Focals by North, smart eyewear that will fundamentally change the way we interact with computers. North was acquired by Google in 2020. Before this, he worked at TomTom as VP Product Management, UXR and Data Science for the Sports and Consumer Navigation businesses in the Netherlands and various product roles at Philips Electronics in Netherlands, Austria and Singapore.