Imma
Calvo

Imma Calvo's LinkedIn profile says "Vice President of Sales, US Commerce, Google Customer Solutions." What it doesn't say is that she got there by studying political science in Barcelona, then somehow ended up selling online ads in Dublin at the dawn of the internet, then spent a decade in California, then moved her family to New York, all while building one of the more unusual careers inside one of the world's most-scrutinized companies.

She joined Google in August 2007 - the year the iPhone launched, the year before the financial crisis, the year when Google was still figuring out what it was. Seventeen-plus years later, she's running the team that helps American brands actually make money through Google's advertising and commerce tools. That's not a straight line. It's a series of well-placed bets on where the world was going next.

The early years inside Google placed her in the EMEA region, where she managed agency relationships for Austria, Germany, and Switzerland - markets where precision and relationship-building aren't optional. That trilingual geography taught her something about the gap between global platforms and local commercial realities, a gap she'd spend the next decade helping brands close.

Move the clock forward to her years as Head of Industry for Retail at Google, and you're watching someone with a front-row seat to every seismic shift that hit physical retail: the mobile moment, the Amazon effect, the blurring of online and in-store. Her job wasn't to predict the future - it was to help brands survive it by building smarter acquisition and retention strategies using Google's tools. That's the kind of institutional knowledge you can't replicate in a one-year VP stint.

From retail, she moved into apps. As Industry Director, Apps, her argument was clean and direct: brands that treat app installs as a conversion metric are thinking too small. Apps are relationship infrastructure. She believed - and still argues - that the brands that win aren't the ones with the most downloads. They're the ones that use mobile to create ongoing value instead of one-time transactions. That philosophy now runs through everything she does in commerce.

Before Google, there was USIT - a travel company where Imma served as Head of Products. The travel industry's entire business model in the early 2000s was getting dismantled by the internet in real time. Being inside that disruption, not just reading about it, shaped how she'd think about technology ever after.

She grew up in Barcelona, where she earned a degree in Political Sciences from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona between 1994 and 1998. Political science trains you in how power moves, how institutions adapt, and how competing interests get resolved. Those aren't bad skills for someone who'd spend two decades inside one of the world's most powerful platforms, helping it justify its value to thousands of businesses.

She speaks Spanish and Catalan natively, and has worked across enough markets - Barcelona, Dublin, the UK, DACH, California, New York - that "international" isn't a line on her resume. It's the operating mode.

At Google Customer Solutions, her current mandate is the full US commerce picture - helping mid-size brands build performance-driven media strategies across acquisition and retention. The landscape she's navigating in 2025 is substantially different from the one she joined in 2007: AI is reshaping search, shopping behavior is fragmenting across surfaces, and Google itself is evolving from "where people search" into "where commerce happens."

She was speaking at Columbia Business School's BRITE Conference in April 2025 - a venue where brand, technology, and innovation converge - as VP of Sales, US Commerce. The conference puts her in conversation with CMOs, founders, and researchers asking the same question: what does a brand's relationship with consumers actually look like in 2025?

Her answer, honed over years leading retail and app verticals, keeps circling back to the same idea: seamlessness. Not efficiency for its own sake, but the elimination of friction between a consumer's intent and their ability to act on it. Google Maps, Google Pay, Google Shopping, Gemini-powered search - the infrastructure she's selling into has never been more capable. The brands that close that gap fastest are the ones she's betting on.

In 2021, Imma served as a mentor with the We Are Family Foundation's Three Dot Dash program - an initiative connecting global youth leaders with experienced professionals. She's also appeared as a speaker and panelist at Tech Up For Women, a platform focused on women's advancement in technology, including at IFA Berlin.

Her commitment to mentoring isn't peripheral. She's described being transformed by mentors in her own career, and the way she talks about it suggests she sees the development of talent - particularly women in tech - as directly connected to the health of the industry she works in.

She's also been vocal about the startup ecosystem in Barcelona and Europe, actively connecting and mentoring new players in that space. From New York, she maintains those ties - another example of a career that doesn't fit neatly inside a single geography or org chart.

Outside the office: skiing, mountain biking, hiking. She moved from California to New York with her husband and two sons, who are passionate soccer players when they're not deep in Minecraft. The California decade left its mark - she still gravitates toward trails and mountains when she gets the chance.

Most tech executives tell the story of a career through companies: the startup, the pivot, the acquisition, the new thing. Imma Calvo tells the story of a career through markets. Travel to internet advertising. Small online sales to agency strategy. Agency to retail. Retail to mobile. Mobile to commerce. Every chapter happened inside the same building - or, more accurately, across Google's global campus network - but each one required a different lens on the same underlying question: how do brands build relationships with people who have unlimited choices?

That kind of tenure is rare in tech and rarer still in sales leadership, where the churn rate rivals professional sports. Staying at one company for 18 years isn't inertia - it's a signal that the work kept getting harder and more interesting. Google in 2007 was a search engine with a growing ads business. Google in 2025 is an AI company with a commerce infrastructure layered across maps, pay, shopping, search, and a browser used by billions. The job of explaining that to mid-size American businesses and helping them actually use it - that's Imma's current mandate, and it's a fundamentally different job than anything she was doing a decade ago.

She's spoken about being drawn to ambiguity - not as an abstract leadership virtue but as a description of the actual conditions she prefers. Every major vertical she's run at Google was, at the time, still being defined. The retail vertical in the mobile era was ambiguous. The apps vertical - where the key question was whether installs were a metric or a strategy - was ambiguous. The current commerce picture, with AI rewriting how search works and how people shop, is extraordinarily ambiguous. She keeps walking toward the fog.

For brands trying to navigate that same fog - figuring out where the customer is, what Google's tools actually do for them, and how to measure it - having someone with her depth of institutional knowledge running the sales team is a different kind of resource than a VP who arrived twelve months ago. She knows where all the bodies are buried, which promises have been kept, which products needed three iterations to become useful. That's the actual value of an 18-year career at a platform company: not seniority, but map knowledge.