Google for Startups Accelerator: Women Founders 2021

Devan Batavia

General Partner,
Enjoy the Work  

Devan loves the early stage journey, particularly uncovering the magical intersection between what the market wants and how to sell it. There are so many open questions, different stakeholders, shifting variables – it’s like a game of chess where the right moves lead to rising revenues and happy customers.

For the last 10+ years, Devan has built and led go-to-market teams for 3 organizations, Jive which went public in 2011, Origami Logic was acquired by Intuit, and TripActions, still a public company valued at over $5B USD. B Building startups has fed Devan’s ambitions for years. He joined Enjoy The Work so that he could impact not ju just one startup, but rather a portfolio of them across the globe.

Lesley Ross

General Partner,
Enjoy The Work

Lesley has worked in tech for 14 years as an operator in growth and analytics roles. She founded Quantified Ardor in 2016 to support growing startups around the world on data-driven decision-making. She has also spent the last 7 years as a startup advisor (including as a mentor for Google For Startups since 2016) while holding multiple COO positions for startups at various stages.

Leslie Fine

General Partner,
Enjoy The Work

Leslie’s career as a startup founder and product leader began after earning her PhD in Game Theory and Behavioral Economics from Caltech. In 2008, she founded her first startup, Crowdcast, and successfully exited the company in 2012. Following Crowdcast, Leslie helped lead three more startups: Spigit (SVP Product), tenXer (Head of Product), and Swerve (Founder, CEO). After her four startup experiences, she ventured into the enterprise world and joined Salesforce (VP Product), where she helped ship the company’s first AI product. But it was through her involvement in Salesforce’s M&A process that she ultimately realized she wanted to return to startup life.

Rick Hartwig

General Partner, Enjoy the Work 

With more than 20 years as a technology product development and marketing executive, Rick has helped grow companies from seed stage to series F. He led multiple companies through acquisition as a VP or CMO, and has worked with numerous CEOs to successfully raise $100M+ in funding. Later, as he moved into consulting and advising, he sought to become an even better company advisor and leadership coach. He became certified with both the College of Executive Coaching and International Coaching Federation as part of this effort.

Mike Lewis

General Partner, Enjoy the Work 

Over the last 20 years Mike has founded and successfully exited three startups. First was Qloud, a B2C on-demand music streaming service that grew to over 10M monthly unique visitors. Next was Kapost, a B2B SaaS company that grew to over $13M in revenue and 100+ employees. The most recent was Onward, a ride-sharing service for seniors that partnered with hospitals and medical facilities.

Alongside those experiences, Mike also experienced hyper-growth at Airbnb. From 2015 to 2019, he served as Head of Product for Airbnb for Work and Airbnb Luxe. While there, bookings grew from zero to over $1B in 2.5 years.

Although each company created value in different ways, he grew to appreciate the things that stay consistent. Building a high functioning team, shipping good product, honing a sales motion, raising capital, etc. Now he’s giving back and paying it forward as a General Partner at Enjoy The Work, and grateful to work with founders bringing the next generation of technology to market.

Madison Wright

Associate, Real Adventures 

Madison is an Associate at Real Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm based out of Toronto and Montreal. At Real Ventures, Madison is focused on supporting incredible Canadian entrepreneurs as they build world-class companies. Prior to joining Real, Madison worked in management consulting, helping to build out the firm's technology & innovation Consulting practice.

Matthew Leibowitz

General Partner,
Plaza Ventures

Matthew is a seasoned growth-stage technology investor and career VC, having originated, managed and completed dozens of transactions. During his tenure at B.E.S.T. Funds, Matthew oversaw dozens of growth-tech finance investments with consistent double-digit returns and co-created multiple funds.

Michelle McBane

Managing Director, 
StandUp Ventures

Michelle McBane is passionate about working with amazing technology entrepreneurs. As the Managing Director of StandUp Ventures, she leads investments in early-stage technology companies led or co-led by women founders. Michelle is a skilled business professional with over 25 years of combined operational and venture capital experience. Her background includes 20 years of venture capital investing in early-stage companies as well as sales and marketing roles in both engineering and scientific industries. Notable investments include Maple, Figure1, Sampler, Nudge Rewards, tealbook, Bridgit, Coconut Software and Profound Medical. Past exits include Cytochroma (acquired by OPKO), Forbius (acquired by BMS), Rubikloud (acquired by Kinaxis), Rank (acquired by Arctic Wolf) and Locationary (acquired by Apple). Prior to StandUp, Michelle was a venture investor with MaRS IAF, VG Partners and Primaxis Technology Ventures.

She is active in the technology community and volunteers with several organizations in the community including the Biomedical Zone at Ryerson, a volunteer with the Next 36, Techstars and CIX.

Sanjana Basu

Investor,
Radical Ventures

Sanjana Basu is an Investor at Radical Ventures. Radical Ventures is a $325 Million Series A fund investing in bold entrepreneurs developing and applying artificial intelligence to invent the future. Sanjana enjoys supporting founders who are on a mission to use deeply disruptive technology to address the many opportunities that lie ahead of us. Prior to Radical, Sanjana worked at the venture and incubation arm of the Tata Group, the $100B Indian conglomerate based out of Mumbai, India. Before, she was an Investment Banker at Barclays. She completed her MBA from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Bangalore and her undergraduate degree in Economics & International Relations from Tufts University in Boston, US.  

Steven Woods

Partner & CTO, 
Inovia Capital Partners

Steven has worked in software development, academic and industrial research and technical leadership for more than 30 years. As co-founder of three software and services companies based in the USA (Quack.com, Kinitos, NeoEdge Networks), he built strong, high-performing teams of product and technical experts based in both Silicon Valley and the Waterloo-Toronto tech corridor. One of these companies - Quack.com - pioneered the world's first interactive voice assistant and was acquired by Netscape/America Online in 2000.

Steven served at Google from 2008 to 2021 - building and leading a world-class engineering and product capability in Canada - growing a range of multidisciplinary engineering and development teams and leadership from 20 to over 1,300.

Steven holds a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Saskatchewan and a Masters and PhD in Computer Science (Mathematics) from the University of Waterloo. Among numerous awards, Steven received the prestigious JW Graham Medal in Computing and Innovation from the University of Waterloo in 2010 and was recognized with a Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award from the University of Saskatchewan in 2021. 

Additional Investor Mentors

Reach out to Jason Scott (jasonscott@google.com) to schedule office hours with the below Additional Investor Mentors. 

John Brennan

President and Managing Partner,
JWB Advisory Partners

John Brennan is the President and Managing Partner of JWB Advisory Partners serving as an advisor to CEOs, Boards of Directors, and private equity investors across the technology, consumer, digital health, and life sciences industries. John’s experience includes having served as President and Chief Operating Officer of a venture-financed informatics company and Senior Vice President of a Private-equity financed CRO as well as President and Managing Director and Senior Vice President and Managing Director of two global management consultancies.

Leslie Jamison

EVP,
Klick Ventures

As the EVP of Klick Ventures, Leslie leverages her expertise in business, marketing, science, and human insights to identify and de-risk venture opportunities and grow them into successful businesses within healthcare that improve the lives of patients. Previously, Leslie built and led the Brand Strategy Team at Klick Health, drawing upon a 25-year proven track record in building successful brands that create meaningful connections with customers. As part of her mandate, she established a center of excellence in brand development that helped fuel the agency’s hypergrowth. Prior to joining Klick, she served as the Managing Director & Partner of an independent insights-driven brand consultancy that was sold to a global marketing communication network of companies She has an MBA from IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland and a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical Engineering from Queen’s University. In 2019, she was recognized with a PM360 ELITE Award for strategic excellence in the healthcare industry.

Manish Patel

General Partner,
Highland Caital Partners

Manish Patel is a student of human behavior. As a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley he likes to invest at the intersection of technology, business, and the human experience. He is a General Partner for HCP - a US based venture capital firm. Prior to investing, Manish was an early employee at Google where we worked on the product team helping create several of the company's foundational products. An accomplished inventor holding more than a dozen patents, Patel has taught in the School of Engineering at Stanford since 2015 and also served as a Fellow at Creative Destruction Lab at the University of Toronto since 2018. Previously, he was an Advisory Board Member for the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab. He holds a Bachelor of Art in Economics and a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from Stanford University.

Rich Scudellari

Managing Partner,
Penny Jar Capitol

Rich Scudellari is Managing Partner at Penny Jar Capital. Penny Jar Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm investing in exceptional founders and industry-defining technology companies. As differentiated capital, Penny Jar leverages its unique ecosystem to help companies address their most pressing needs. Anchored by 2x NBA MVP Stephen Curry, Penny Jar's capital base is made up of entrepreneurs, operators, strategic service providers and institutional investors.

Carlos Timoteo

Google Developer Expert

Carlos is a Machine Learning Engineer at Pythian. He attains Cloud Architect and Data Engineer Google Professional certifications, and is an AI/ML consultant for startups in Ottawa. He has architected, implemented, and tuned many relational transaction systems for startups and large companies like Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. In academia, Carlos is MSc in Computational Intelligence and spoken in International Conferences in the past. Nowadays, he builds and deploys ML system in production on Google Cloud Platform for large retailers and gaming companies on the Americas. He is actively organizing GDG Cloud Ottawa meetups and events like Cloud DevFest and Cloud Study Jam in Southeastern Canada.

Denis Nekliudov

Google Developer Expert

Denis is an engineer at Lyft. His expertise includes the development of mobile apps for social, financial, transportation and advertisement fields. He's worked on a huge variety of mobile projects across UI, UX, software architecture and many more. He enjoys public speaking and loves sharing his experiences through conferences, courses, blog posts, forums and open source projects. Denis co-host and editor in chief of Android Dev Podcast. When he's not working or creating some cool open source stuff, he enjoys cycling, swimming, boxing, playing tennis and traveling all over the world.

Etienne Caron

Google Developer Expert

Etienne is a software developer who's worked on all tiers (server, web, mobile, and embedded) of large scale software platforms. He is currently a freelance software development consultant. Etienne has been an active member of the Android developer community in Montreal since 2010 and regularly devotes his time to mentoring startups, developers and students in the mobile space. Mentoring has included various subjects, such as client-server architecture, Android design patterns, continuous integration, software development methodologies and general software design. He also gives regular talks on Android-related topics.

Faisal Abid

Google Developer Expert

As an Entrepreneur, Faisal put on many hats during the day to get the job done. His goal is to apply technology to all facets of life and find problems worth solving. In Faisal’s free time, he is a Google Developer Expert and gives workshops and talks on Machine Learning, Flutter, Kubernetes and more.

Gant Laborde

Google Developer Expert

Gant is a software consultant, adjunct professor, published author, and award-winning speaker. He enjoys volunteering at events and maintaining his title as an "open sourcerer". Currently active in React Native and Machine Learning tech.

Hemanth HM

Google Developer Expert

Computer polyglot, FOSS philosopher! 🤓 Loves The WEB & CLI. Ambidextrous, native Bangalorean! Currently living in CA. Blog's about programming. FOSS on GitHub. Authored 300+ node modules with 22M downloads a month! Google Developer Expert for Web && Payments. TC39 delegate, working on JavaScript feature proposals. DuckDuckGo community leader. Member of Node.js Foundation. Google Launchpad Accelerator mentor. Hosts TC39er.us podcast. Curates JSfeatures.in Co-Hosts ReadSpecWith.us.

Jeremy Glassenberg

Google Developer Expert

Jeremy is an experienced Product leader of over 13 years with a specialty in managing developer platforms and APIs at successful startups like Box and Tradeshift. He managed and expanded developer platforms to communities of tens of thousands of developers, and led high profile integrations promoted by Salesforce and Google. To support the community, Jeremy mentors startup accelerators such as Alchemist, Acceleprise, and Techstars in Platform and API strategy. He has also given talks at API and Product Management conferences, and interviews for Product and Platform blogs. He is also the Lead Instructor at Product School and the author of Product School's latest core curriculum.

Jeremy Wilken

Google Developer Expert

Jeremy has been passionate about the web since it began, and more recently the ability to enhance experiences through voice. He has worked at companies like VMware, ebay, and Teradata as an application solution architect and UX/UI professional. Angular is a major focus for Jeremy, having used it since it was first introduced, as well as the Google Assistant platform for which he builds actions and hardware to support. He speaks about Angular and the Assistant and the web at conferences and events and also provides customized training. He is the author of Angular in Action and Ionic in Action, and is involved in a number of open source projects and meetups. 

John Hanley

Google Developer Expert

John is a software engineer and cloud architect with over three decades of experience. He helped develop Unix, SCSI, Disk Arrays, Paragon, Norton Ghost, and Storage Manager as lead software architect and major software contributor. Today he designs cloud systems with a heavy focus on security and networking and writes enterprise class backend software. Authentication and Identity Systems are his favorite.

Lynn Langit

Google Developer Expert

Lynn is a Cloud Architect and Developer. She is working on bioinformatics (genomic) pipelines - often serverless. Lynn is also an author of 30 data and cloud courses on LinkedIn Learning.

Mark Scheel

Google Developer Expert

Mark Scheel is president of the software consultancy Digital Construction Inc. in Denver, Colorado, which has been solving difficult problems for clients for more than twenty years. He was the Android Platform Lead at a successful Denver area app company, with a medical consumer app that reached 7 million Android downloads from the Google Play store. Mark studied Computer Science at the Johns Hopkins University and holds a Masters in Computer Science and a Masters in Business Administration with a focus in entrepreneurship from the University of Colorado.

Mike Wolfson

Google Developer Expert

Mike is a senior-level Android\Java developer with a proven history of success and a long list of accomplishments. He's also a great developer, an excellent communicator and leader, and has a comprehensive knowledge of the full life-cycle of mobile-focused development and design. Mike's a passionate coder too, with an eye for simplicity – and a love for writing beautiful, pragmatic, code.

Mustafa Ali

Google Developer Expert

Mustafa has been building for Android since its early days. He has worked on apps ranging from banking and contactless payments to messaging and video streaming for large brands with millions of users. He is passionate about building complex products for large audiences and building and scaling engineering teams. At Shopify, Mustafa leads the Payments and Hardware engineering team that builds modern payment terminals and software that process transactions worth billions of dollars each year in over 150 countries.

Rabimba Karanjai

Google Developer Expert

Rabimba Karanjai is a graduate student at Rice University pursuing his PhD in Computer Science. He is a technology enthusiast, loves to contribute his time in opensource technologies and believes in the open web. He works with Mozilla Research team in WebVR as part of his research work and would love to chat with you regarding Web VR/AR/MR or Security.

Ryan Harter

Google Developer Expert

Ryan is a multi-skilled engineer who loves making awesome apps for Android. He spends a lot of time in the Android source, and shares what he finds with everyone through blog posts, speaking engagements, and just helping out other developers and working on open source software. When he's not coding, you'll find him travelling the world, skateboarding, biking or playing music.

Uday Kumar

Google Developer Expert

Uday is an experienced Product leader with over 20 years of Product Strategy and Management experience, leading digital and platform product teams. His experience spans non-profits, startups, consulting, and banking/card sectors. Uday has led teams that developed distance learning platforms, procurement systems, and demand planning systems. Currently at Capital One, he leads the card authorization platform teams that are building modern, cloud-native decisioning systems that process millions of transactions worth billions of dollars each day.

Victor Trac

Google Developer Expert

Victor has been building the "cloud" ever since starting his own dial-up BBS system in middle school. Since then, he's gone on to build software, cloud infrastructure, and even data-centers at organizations as diverse as early stage startup companies to the US DoD. As an advocate of Linux and Open Source Software, he routinely contributes to open source, gives talks at conferences and community meetups, as well as helps organize GDG Cloud Austin. He also helped start the Texas Linux Fest, Texas' largest community-run conference dedicated to Linux and OSS. Victor has a B.S. Electrical Engineering from Clemson University and is President of Cloudkite.io, a Google Cloud Platform Partner, founded in 2015. He is also a GCP certified Professional Cloud Architect and a Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA).