oakland-startup
(3)
Scott McKinley
Scott McKinley is the founder and CEO of Truthset, an Oakland-based data validation company that scores the accuracy of consumer data used across advertising and marketing. A former captain of the 1988 US Olympic Road Cycling Team who walked away from the sport as doping spread, he spent roughly two decades in ad tech and martech - including a stretch as an EVP at Nielsen and CEO of IDify - before starting Truthset in 2019 to bring transparency and accountability to an industry he felt was full of unchecked claims about data.
Janna Colucci
Janna Colucci is the CEO and co-founder of Bundle, an Oakland-based software platform that drags construction materials procurement out of the paper-and-phone-call era. After watching a construction crew print out her emails and write responses by hand while building Delos' wellness-focused NYC headquarters, she teamed up with Stanford Business School classmate Edison Ding to build a digital buying platform for small and mid-sized residential builders that promises purchasing at 10x speed and 10-20% cost savings. A Dartmouth grad and Stanford MBA who cut her teeth in green building and co-created the mindfulMATERIALS sustainability standard, she raised a $4M seed round in 2023 and runs the company on a Lao Tzu leadership philosophy.
Sarah Chou
Sarah Chou is the co-founder and CEO of Informed K12, an Oakland-based software company that helps school districts trade paper forms and manual approvals for digital workflow automation. A former district administrator who ran an $8M professional development program in Providence, she met co-founder Qian Wang at Stanford's Graduate School of Education in 2012. After their first idea (a teacher-collaboration tool called Chalk) failed, they noticed that the real pain in schools wasn't a lack of ideas but a mountain of paperwork. Informed K12 now serves hundreds of districts with a team of 70+ people, most of whom come from education or social-sector backgrounds.