Meet our office hour mentors
Adam Yellin
Senior Account Executive, Google
Adam joined Google in 2015 after a decade of work at various startups in the adtech space. As a business lead in the Healthcare vertical, Adam helps Google's largest consumer health advertisers grow their businesses with Google's advertising products, including Search, Display and YouTube. Adam maintains his pulse on the startup ecosystem as a venture partner at NextGen Venture Partners and as an active angel investor.
Adva Levin
Conversational Designer, Google
Adva is a Senior Conversation Designer at Google Research. She is also the founder of Pretzel Labs, an award winning voice production studio that specializes in educational and entertaining voice apps for kids and families. She's been recognized by voicebot.ai as a top product and design leader in voice, and frequently teaches and speaks about different creative elements of voice design.
Almond Au
Customer Engineering Manager, Google Cloud
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 for the past 3 years. 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.
Amit Kumar
Technical Solutions Consultant, GCP Cloud Conversational AI
Amit is a Technical Solutions Consultant at Google Cloud - currently helping Google's enterprise customers successfully adopt Google conversational AI technologies. He also supports the Conversational AI incubator team for Google Cloud.
Angelica Willis
Software Engineer (AI Researcher), Google
Angelica Willis is a software engineer at Google who has a passion for leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) to advance the quality and longevity of human life. Her core work involves developing AI-driven healthcare solutions to help doctors make better decisions, and her previous career adventures include machine learning research at Apple, NASA, and Bank of America, as well as running an AI research consulting firm. Angelica is a long-time advisor to VC firms and startups looking to solve interesting problems using data. Angelica received a master's degree in Computer Science, with a focus in Artificial Intelligence, and in Human-Computer Interaction, from Stanford University and an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from North Carolina A&T State University.
Brooke Simon Krebs
NA Channels PA Lead Cloud (GCP), 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. She has also volunteered as a business advisor to entrepreneurs in need of HR and talent-related support. Brooke has direct experience building and leading high-performing teams, and has been recognized for her Inclusive Leadership and Innovation.
Carmella Vong
Program Manager, Growth Lab
Carmella works on the Google Ads team advising high value lead generation companies on their digital marketing strategy. She created the Growth Lab, a digital marketing training designed to help startups create and reach their marketing goals using Google products, and has helped roll out the program to startups all over the world. She's especially passionate about growth marketing, storytelling, and innovation for social good.
Charleen Kao
Account Executive, Google Ads
Charleen is an Account Executive at Google, advising B2B Mid-Market customers on their digital marketing & growth strategy. As a business lead in the B2B space, Charleen leads a team helping Google’s fastest growing customers grow their businesses with Google’s advertising products/solutions. Charleen remains incredibly passionate about the startup ecosystem and driving meaningful growth, innovation and impact.
Dinesh Chahlia
Engineering Manager & Trusted Advisor for GFS, Google
Engineer leader with Google Shopping and Trusted Startup Advisor for GFS. Worked with over 50 startup founders over the last year and advised them on Vision, Roadmap, Product Market Fit, OKRs, Pitching and Fundraising.
Imtiaz Jaffer
Director, Global Strategic Initiatives, Google
Imtiaz has been involved with startups throughout his career, either through helping scale up those he worked for, investing in startups and/or advising founders. He holds investments in a broad set of companies including Autonomic (acquired by Ford), Helpful (acquired by Shopify), Odaia.ai, Vouchr, Dream Payments, Sheertex, Hyperloop and many others. he serves as an advisor to early stage startups and is passionate about supporting innovation at home, in Canada
Julia Potanina
Conversational AI Program Manager
Julia is a PhD in Linguistics and a Team Lead for a group of Conversational Architects and Program Managers at Google Cloud Professional Services. She has experience building Conversational AI teams and virtual agents from ground up and launching transformational projects for contact centers and for Google Assistant (Verizon, Telus, Optus, and Starbucks are only a few examples of projects in her portfolio).
Navid Khajouei
Technical Program Manager, Google
Navid Khajouei has an EE degree and 20+ years of hardware development and manufacturing background where for the last 8 years of it, He has managed programs as a TPM. After completing his Master in Data Science (Northwestern University), He transitioned to Google Assistant leading quality initiatives. He also has years of experience managing vendors and contractors both local and internationally. He joined the AI for Good initiative as an AI mentor in 2019 and prior to this he was advising two startups.
Pavel Sirotin
Cloud AI Incubator Manager
Pavel was a founding member of Speaktoit (Assistant.ai) and API.AI (now Dialogflow) and remains passionate about helping machines understand people better. He currently runs the Cloud AI Incubator team for Google Cloud.
Sam Witteveen
Developer Expert, Google
Sam is a Google Developer Expert for Machine Learning (2017-present), and has extensive experience in startups and mobile applications, having built and grown 2 B2C startups to more than a million users. He is heavily focused on helping developers and companies create smarter applications with Machine Learning and is especially passionate about Deep Learning and AI in the fields of natural language and conversational agents. Sam has given talks across the world on creating products with Deep Learning including at TensorFlow World(USA), Naver D2 Startup Factory (Korea) and PyCon events.
Sylvain Dubois
Principal Architect - Semiconductor Business Transformation, Google
Passionate about translating complex solutions in a simple and crisp message. Sylvain wore multiple hats in early-stage startups such as identifying product & market fit, building go-to-market and business development strategy, fundraising ($150 million raised in his previous deep tech startup). Joined YCombinator Startup School in 2020. Currently advising early-stage startups. Currently leveraging his 20 years experience in semiconductor by working on transforming chip design and manufacturing businesses with Google Cloud and AI/ML.