Mission College is a public community college in Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley, part of the West Valley-Mission Community College District. Founded in 1975, it offers associate degrees, university-transfer pathways, career and technical certificates, ESL and noncredit courses to a diverse, largely working-adult student body. Through its Mission Promise program it offers free tuition to district residents and wraps students in support services - food, childcare, mental-health counseling and more - to remove the barriers that keep people from finishing.
Dr. Alicia Garcia-Cisneros is a Doctor of Nursing Practice, Nurse Executive, and Certified Caritas Coach serving as Chief Nurse Executive at Valley State Prison within California Correctional Health Care Services (CCHCS). Born to Hispanic migrant agricultural workers, she climbed from Certified Nursing Assistant to the highest levels of nursing leadership over two decades, championing caring science, peer support programs, and staff wellness inside California's correctional health system.
Cecilia Aviles, MBA, BSN, RN, is the Chief Executive Officer of LifeLong Medical Care, a Federally Qualified Health Center serving over 55,000 patients across Contra Costa and Alameda Counties in the East Bay. A native San Franciscan who started her career as a trauma nurse, she brings more than 20 years of healthcare leadership experience — including 11 years at Sutter Health and earlier stints at Kaiser Permanente, UCSF, KPMG, and McKesson — to lead one of the Bay Area's most vital safety-net providers. A Carol Emmott Fellow and recognized among the Bay Area's top Hispanic nurses, she is committed to making healthcare accessible, equitable, and affordable for underserved communities.
Clipboard Health (now branded as Clipboard) is a San Francisco-based two-sided marketplace that matches nurses, CNAs, and allied healthcare professionals with shifts at understaffed hospitals, nursing homes, and post-acute facilities. Founded in 2016 by Wei Deng, the company has grown into a healthcare unicorn with a 1,600-person team and a network of more than a million qualified professionals.
Lennie Sliwinski is the co-founder and CEO of Trusted Health (Trusted, Inc.), a San Francisco-based healthcare technology company he launched in 2017. Inspired by watching his mother navigate the chaos of nursing staffing, he built the leading labor marketplace and workforce management platform for healthcare professionals, growing the platform to over half a million nurse profiles and partnerships with hospitals in all 50 states. With $234M raised across three funding rounds, Trusted went from digitizing the travel nursing placement process to launching Works - a full enterprise workforce OS for health systems. Before Trusted, Sliwinski cut his teeth as a Cornell-trained lawyer who never practiced law, a performance marketer at Adlucent, and Director of Marketing at Hired in San Francisco.

Ryan Johnson is the Co-Founder and CEO of Float Health, a San Francisco-based healthtech company he founded in 2021 that connects specialty pharmacies and patients with vetted nurses for on-demand home infusion therapy. A former ER nurse with over 20 years of bedside and leadership experience across pre-hospital, rescue, and hospital settings, Ryan built Float after watching his own father depend on specialty infusions - care he could administer at home himself. Float graduated from Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch and has raised $15 million in total funding, including a $10 million Series A led by Canvas Ventures in March 2024. The platform has completed over 86,000 home medication visits for clients including Optum, CVS, and Option Care Health.
Wei Deng is the CEO and founder of Clipboard Health, a San Francisco-based healthcare labor marketplace that connects nurses and other healthcare professionals with open shifts at facilities like nursing homes and hospitals. Founded in 2016 and backed by Sequoia Capital and IVP, the company achieved unicorn status at a $1.3B valuation after raising $94M in total funding. A Yale College and Yale Law School graduate, Deng pivoted through six to eight business models before discovering that flexible, on-demand shift matching was the key to solving healthcare staffing shortages. Known for her relentless persistence — she pitched facilities seven months pregnant — Deng built Clipboard Health into a platform serving over 5,000 facilities across the United States.

Hippocratic AI builds safety-focused generative AI agents for non-diagnostic, patient-facing clinical work - voice-based agents that handle care coordination, chronic disease check-ins, medication adherence, and patient education. Its Polaris constellation architecture coordinates dozens of specialized LLMs to keep conversations clinically safe, with humans escalating where needed.
Zennya Health is a Philippine-based on-demand home healthcare platform that dispatches nurses, doctors, and wellness professionals directly to patients' homes, offices, and hotels. Founded in 2015 and powered by AI-guided care protocols, Zennya has completed over 600,000 service visits across Metro Manila and Metro Cebu, making professional medical care as easy to book as a rideshare.