
He studied machines, discovered theater, and found his calling translating complex software into human stakes. After three decades in enterprise technology, his favorite operating system is still a good story.

Across Blackboard, Rosetta Stone, Wiley and now Tovuti, Shari Hofer has made a career of turning sprawling systems into clearer journeys for customers - and more coherent work for the people behind them.

The longtime Google executive has moved from explaining digital change to owning its outcome - building a global commerce operation where creativity, finance and customer experience must all agree on what growth means.

The Nerdio CMO built his career by crossing borders most marketers defend: psychology and data, brand and pipeline, patience and speed. His practical lesson is simple - make the business memorable, then make the memory pay rent.

Before she ran AliveCor, Priya Abani wrote validation tools for microprocessors and helped Alexa escape the Echo. Her career is a study in one portable skill: making complicated technology useful to ordinary people.

She began in audit, learned biotech from the inside, and became the operator companies call when science must survive contact with money, markets and momentum.

An engineer by training and a marketer by practice, Elena Otero learned to make global brands feel local. Her second act moves the same discipline from the supermarket shelf to the boardroom.

From Cape Flats protests to Oxford, Wall Street and the biotech boardroom, Suliman kept asking one question: how can one decision reach more people?

After helping television, publishing, music, and philanthropy find their next audience, Alison Moore is taking on a more intimate design problem: how senior women build power together when the old career ladder no longer fits.

From mathematics to M&A to the boardroom, Sheila Hooda has made a profession of seeing around corners - and asking the calm question before everyone else needs the urgent answer.

Across 26 years at Lilly and seven as Neurocrine's chief medical officer, Eiry Roberts learned that drug development is less a straight line than a chain of judgment calls. Her next chapter puts that operating memory to work in the boardroom.

From cosmetics to power tools to the spice rack, Tabata Gomez has carried one operating idea across categories: get close to the consumer, give teams a clear vision, and move while the moment is still alive.

She spent nine years helping build NGM, then left for science compelling enough to begin again. At Lycia Therapeutics, Aetna Trombley has made patience, partnerships and protein clearance into an operating strategy.

Mala Anand is Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Experience Officer at Microsoft, leading the Customer Experience & Success division. A 25-year technology veteran who immigrated from Mumbai at 17 on a Rotary Youth Exchange Scholarship, she has shaped enterprise software at Cisco, SAP, and Microsoft, driving AI-powered transformations that measurably improve how customers get support. She is also executive sponsor of Women at Microsoft and an independent board director at Agilent Technologies.

He wrote his first programs as a teenager, then spent 25 years explaining machines to the people who buy them. Now he markets the buildings where the AI boom actually lives.

An engineer by training and an accidental marketer by her own account, Esi Eggleston Bracey has spent 35 years finding the people brands overlook - then turning that attention into products, growth, representation, and durable change.

Her career began with a rugby conversation in an airport lounge. Two decades later, the Moderna marketing chief still treats curiosity, range and access to information as operating tools.

She joined a cybersecurity startup nobody had heard of, gave it three words to stand on, and helped carry it to one of the biggest IPOs the industry has seen. Two decades in, Johanna Flower still believes the brand is the long game.

From a British Columbia raspberry farm to the C-suite of a cloud software company, Mandy Dhaliwal has built a career around one deceptively hard task: making complicated change feel clear, useful and human.

After three decades turning complex science into operating companies, Alicia Secor has taken on a new translation problem: helping Paratus turn lessons from evolution into a disciplined pipeline of medicines.
Shirley Romig is a consumer, technology and operations executive with more than two decades of experience across the full company lifecycle. She is Chief Operating Officer at Techstars, the global pre-seed accelerator, after joining as Chief Accelerator Investment Officer in late 2023. Before that she co-founded and ran Mixo, a video platform for global food creators, and held senior operating roles at Lyft, Equinox, SapientRazorfish and Saks/Hudson's Bay, where she led omnichannel transformation. She sits on the boards of Lovesac and Mama's Creations.
Simon Biddiscombe is a British-born technology executive and chartered accountant who has spent more than two decades in senior finance and leadership roles across Silicon Valley. He is Executive Vice Chairman and a board member of MicroVision, the Redmond-based laser beam scanning and lidar company, a role he took in September 2025. He is best known for leading enterprise security firm MobileIron as CEO through its 2020 sale to Ivanti, and earlier for rising from CFO to CEO at semiconductor networking company QLogic. His career began at PricewaterhouseCoopers and includes CFO stints at Mindspeed Technologies and Wyle Electronics, plus an Executive Partner role at private equity firm Thomas H. Lee Partners.
Jill Beraud is an American consumer brand executive who has spent more than three decades building and running some of the best-known names in retail, beauty, luxury and beverages. She began in brand management at Procter & Gamble, ran her own New York advertising agency, then spent 13 years at Limited Brands, where as Chief Marketing Officer of Victoria's Secret she helped grow the label into a multi-billion-dollar business and also led marketing across Bath & Body Works, Express, Henri Bendel, C.O. Bigelow and Limited Stores. In December 2008 PepsiCo created the role of worldwide Chief Marketing Officer for her, reporting to Indra Nooyi; there she pushed the company away from Super Bowl spending and into the $20 million Pepsi Refresh Project, and later ran the Starbucks and Lipton joint ventures. She went on to serve as CEO of Living Proof, EVP of Global Retail Operations at Tiffany & Co., and CEO of the luxury jewelry house IPPOLITA, before co-founding the plant-based functional beverage company Sh'nnong. Fast Company named her one of its 100 Most Creative People in Business in 2013. She has sat on the board of Levi Strauss & Co. since 2013, was re-elected in April 2026, chairs the Fashion for Good board, and has served on the World of Children Board of Governors since 2009.
Martine Reardon is an American marketing executive best known for a 32-year career at Macy's, where she rose from the special events department to become Chief Marketing Officer from 2012 to 2016. She led a 1,300-person marketing organization spanning advertising, brand, social, mobile and digital media, and she presided over cultural institutions like the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and the Fourth of July fireworks. Her teams collected Emmys, Clios, Effies and Reggie awards. After Macy's she joined the National Retail Federation as Chief Marketing Officer and later strategic advisor on content and retail strategy, and she has served on corporate and nonprofit boards including Empire Company / Sobeys and the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Illinois.
Elizabeth Czerepak is a life sciences finance executive with more than three decades in big pharma, venture capital, and public biotech. She is Chief Financial Officer and VP of Corporate Development at Mirror Biologics, a clinical-stage immunotherapy company in Wesley Chapel, Florida, where she also served as acting CEO from July 2024 to May 2025. Over her career she has helped raise hundreds of millions of dollars, taken companies public through IPOs and SPAC mergers, and worked on landmark pharma transactions including the search that led to BASF Pharma's sale to Abbott. She sits on the boards of Delcath Systems and TransCode Therapeutics.
May Haim Kotlarsky is CEO, General Counsel and Board Director at The Brief (formerly Creatopy), a Romania-and-California based AI marketing platform. A lawyer by training with an LLB from Hebrew University and an LLM from Georgetown Law, she spent years leading privacy and monetization AI legal work at Meta, GitHub, and Rakuten Viki before moving into the operator seat at The Brief in July 2025.
Patricia 'Patty' Obermaier is Executive Vice President and Chief Growth Officer at Acentra Health, where she leads business development, marketing, and product management for a technology and health solutions company serving government and commercial clients. A biology graduate of MIT with a Darden MBA, she spent the bulk of her career at Microsoft - most recently as Chief Growth Officer for Global Health and Life Sciences overseeing a $12 billion portfolio and helping integrate the $20 billion Nuance acquisition. Before that she doubled Microsoft's U.S. Health and Life Sciences business from $3 billion to $6 billion, founded the consultancy Resigility, and spent five-plus years as a senior executive at IQVIA. She sits on the boards of ASGN Incorporated and Applied Information Sciences and was named to Fierce Healthcare's 2021 Women of Influence.
Alexandra Mysoor is the co-founder and CEO of Alix, an AI-powered estate settlement platform built to guide families through the 600-900 hours of paperwork that follow a death. After 20 years launching and scaling consumer brands and running her own global manufacturing and investment firm, Mysoor Industries, she started Alix in 2022 when settling a best friend's mother's estate consumed 900 hours of her life. Alix raised a $20M Series A in July 2025 from Acrew Capital, Charles Schwab and Edward Jones Ventures. She also sits on the board of Security National Financial Corporation.
Peter DiLaura is the CEO and Board Director of Helicore Biopharma, a San Mateo biotech building long-acting antibody-peptide conjugates that go after obesity by neutralizing the GIP hormone in the bloodstream rather than blocking its receptor. With nearly three decades of company-building behind him - CEO roles at Initial Therapeutics and Second Genome, business and strategy chief at Sonoma Biotherapeutics, and time as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Third Rock Ventures - he is the operator brought in to turn a $65M Series A and a clinic-ready antibody into medicines that aim for quarterly dosing and better-quality weight loss.
Adrienne Lofton is the Global Vice President of Product & Integrated Consumer Marketing for Google's Platforms & Devices Division, where she leads end-to-end marketing for the Pixel ecosystem and drives activation across Android, Chromebook, Chrome Browser, Google Play, and Google Health & Home. A Howard University graduate and Kellogg MBA, she built her career on brand authenticity — from multicultural marketing at Target, to CMO of Dockers at Levi's, to Senior VP of Global Brand Marketing at Under Armour, to VP Head of North America Marketing at Nike. An Ad Age Brand Genius award winner, Adweek Most Powerful Women in Sports honoree, and board director at Alaska Air Group, Lofton is one of the most recognized voices at the intersection of sports, culture, and consumer marketing.