She didn't inherit her network. She built it, person by person, handshake by handshake, across three of Silicon Valley's most influential companies — and she did it while carrying the flag for Latinas in tech who rarely got to see themselves in those rooms.
Fernanda Baker's story begins in Brazil — educated in International Relations at Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado, then sharpening her edge with an MBA in Environmental Management and Technologies at the prestigious Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo. That combination — global perspective meets engineering school rigour — would become her superpower.
She arrived in Silicon Valley and didn't just adapt. She became essential. At Samsung Next, as Head of Ecosystem for Silicon Valley, she architected a platform connecting Samsung's muscle to the Valley's most ambitious founders. She organised breakfasts, dinners, investor roundtables — and when Covid hit and the world shut down, she pivoted the whole playbook virtually without missing a beat.
Then came UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, adding that blue-chip academic credential to her already battle-tested résumé.
At Zendesk for Startups, she built VC and startup partnership programmes that stretched from San Francisco to Helsinki — literally bringing together 20+ VCs in Finland at Slush and opening Zendesk's London office to the founder community.
Today, as Executive Director at J.P. Morgan Startup Banking, she sits at the nexus of the world's most powerful financial institution and the scrappiest, most ambitious entrepreneurs on earth. That's not a contradiction. That's Fernanda Baker's natural habitat.