diversity-equity-inclusion
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Julie Jackson
Julie Jackson is the Co-Chief Executive Officer of Uncommon Schools, a nonprofit network of high-performing public charter schools serving roughly 20,000 students across New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. The first Black Co-CEO in the organization's history, she has spent three decades in education, starting as a Teach For America corps member in Paterson, New Jersey in 1994 and rising from founding teacher and principal to President and now Co-CEO. She oversees all 53 K-12 Uncommon Schools and has trained more than 25,000 teachers and leaders across the United States and abroad. Known for her belief that schools should be places of both joy and rigor, she is a recognized voice on teacher development, college completion, and equity in urban public education.
Chief
Chief is a private membership network built for senior women executives - VPs, C-suite leaders, and the rungs just below. It pairs members into facilitated peer 'Core' groups led by executive coaches, layers on workshops, curated events, and physical clubhouses in major U.S. cities, and aims to close the gap at the top of the corporate ladder by giving women the kind of back-channel network that has long been reserved for men. Founded in 2019, Chief became one of the fastest female-founded U.S. companies to reach a $1 billion valuation.
Braven
Braven is a national nonprofit career accelerator that partners with large public universities and employers to help first-generation, low-income, and underrepresented college students land strong first jobs. Through a semester-long, cohort-based course followed by post-graduation support, Braven equips Fellows with the skills, confidence, experiences, and professional networks they need to translate a college degree into economic mobility. Founded in 2013 by former Teach For America executive Aimée Eubanks Davis, Braven has reached more than 15,000 Fellows across cities including Chicago, Newark, New York, Atlanta, the Bay Area, and beyond.
Natalie Ledbetter
Natalie Ledbetter is a 3x startup People Ops executive, TEDx speaker, and former Operating Partner & Head of People at Boldstart Ventures who scaled Stash from 27 to 350 employees in 2.5 years. A self-described 'third culture kid' who grew up attending school in Jakarta, Indonesia alongside students from 90 countries, she now runs Ledbetter Global Advisory, offering embedded fractional people operations leadership to Series A-B companies. She has partnered with 100+ founders across the startup ecosystem, blending strategic executive thinking with hands-on execution to build high-performance, psychologically safe teams.
Lo Toney
Laurence 'Lo' Toney is the Founding Managing Partner of Plexo Capital, a San Francisco-based institutional VC firm he incubated at GV (Google Ventures) and spun out independently in 2018. Plexo's distinctive 'full stack' model invests across three layers - LP stakes in emerging diverse fund managers, direct investments in companies sourced through those networks, and equity stakes in the GP management entities themselves. After senior operating roles at Nike, eBay, and Zynga (where he ran Zynga Poker to $250M in annual bookings), Toney moved into VC via Comcast Ventures and GV before building Plexo Capital's $42.5M Fund I with backers including Alphabet, Intel Capital, and the Ford Foundation. Named to Forbes BLK 50: Money Masters 2026, he has championed diverse fund managers as alpha generators long before it became conventional wisdom.
Freada Kapor Klein
Freada Kapor Klein, Ph.D. is a founding partner at Kapor Capital, a social-impact venture firm that has invested in 200+ startups founded by underrepresented entrepreneurs while outperforming 75% of peer VC firms by financial returns. Long before #MeToo, she co-founded the first U.S. organization dedicated to combating workplace sexual harassment (1976), earned a Ph.D. studying harassment in federal employment, and built diversity programs at Lotus Development Corporation. She co-founded SMASH (Summer Math and Science Honors Academy), the Level Playing Field Institute, Project Include, and the DAIR Institute, and co-authored 'Closing the Equity Gap' (HarperCollins, 2023). Former NAACP National Board member and Obama Foundation Tech Policy Council member, she has spent five decades dismantling the belief that fairness and financial return are mutually exclusive.