Announcing the Women of the Inaugural Female Founder Track Cohort
Over the summer, we realized that women at top schools and companies in the Bay Area had access to great resources, but weren’t starting companies at the same rate as their male peers. Our solution was to launch a 9 session masterclass for women with ideas — providing a great peer group, inspiring founders and mentors who can share advice, and the network to move forward with a product concept they’ve tested.
Three weeks ago, it came to life! In these first few weeks, we’ve been amazed by the stories, backgrounds, and motivations of our inaugural cohort. We’d like to share some of that energy with you and announce our Female Founder Track participants.
Alice Ma: Alice was co-founder and CEO of Archer, a social enterprise that built data analysis software for human rights and corruption investigators. She’s interested in media, governance, and international development — and figuring out how the next generation & technology are going to take part in it. Also an avid fan of puppy photos.
Mikaela Reyes: Mika is a KPCB Product Fellow and was the first PM at Ripcord and Kumu. Her mission is to grow the tech / innovation hubs in Southeast Asian markets (starting with her home, the Philippines), and is exploring that through marketplace models that empower the ‘micro-entrepreneur’ and tech that improves accessibility to necessary resources. She enjoys latin or hiphop dance, writes occasionally on her blog, and loves snacking on almonds.
Mihika Kapoor: Mihika is a Rotational Product Manager at Facebook. She is passionate about design and democratizing access to design education. Mihika graduated from Princeton University, where she majored in Computer Science and minored in Visual Arts. She founded Design Nation, an annual conference that aims to empower the next generation of creative talent. Outside work, she’s a huge fan of photography, travel, throwback music, acai bowls, and making bad puns on Instagram.
Urvi Guglani: Urvi is a Computer Science & Economics double major at UC Berkeley. She is a passionate innovator, driven by the belief that technology is only as good as the good it creates. She lives on the groove between finance and technology- be it reducing global food wastage or questioning whether Lehman crisis could have been avoided or why interest expense is tax exempt. Having grown up in Singapore, London, and Delhi, she loves traveling and learning new languages.
Cherrie Wang: Cherrie has a background in visual arts and computer science. Her industry experience includes data visualization work at NASA, engineering on Google Maps and enterprise software, and most recently, YouTube VR. She has a passion for the interdisciplinary intersection of art / tech, virtual reality, and immersive media experiences, particularly its role in enabling disadvantaged communities.
Alizeh Iqbal: Alizeh is a software developer, writer, and reader. She’s deeply passionate about that tri-state area where software meets healthcare meets attentive design. Her interests include the growing field of synthetic biology, turns (and toss) of phrase, behavioral economics, hip hop, and people. She keeps it tea.
Susan Liu: Susan graduated from Brown last May, where she majored in Computer Science. She explored her interests within government policy, education, technology, and finance in undergrad through her work on fixed income trading at Deutsche Bank; prototyping a math education tool at Microsoft; and various software projects at Neighborly, a municipal government finance startup. She hopes to use this program as a means of continuing to explore these interests. She is currently learning about indexing, information retrieval, and scaling systems as a software engineer on Pinterest’s ads infrastructure group.
Tara Pichumani: Tara graduated from Columbia University in May where she studied Computer Science. She’s interested in improving financial transparency and access through crypto & supply chain, and previously did product for an early stage fintech startup called Predata. Big politics junkie, and worked on analytics during the Hillary 2016 campaign.
Mireille Kamariza: Mireille is a doctoral candidate in the Stanford Biology department with experience in biochemistry, molecular biology, chemical biology, microbiology and global health. Currently, she’s transitioning into the founder life, especially in the space of infectious diseases diagnosis. She’s also an avid fan of exploring the world through food & wine!
Raven Delk: Raven is a recent graduate of Vanderbilt University interested in education, the labor market, and broadening access to economic opportunity. Currently, she is a member of the 2018 cohort of the Strategy and Analytics program at LinkedIn. For fun, Raven enjoys live music, fitness classes, and cooking her favorite southern recipes.
Deirdre Clute: Deirdre is the co-founder of Charitize, a marketplace where individuals offer their time and talents in exchange for donations to causes. She’s passionate about social innovation and the positive change that creative thinking can bring. She’s an ex-collegiate swimmer who still feels more comfortable in the water than on land.
Ellen Rudolph: Ellen studied Product Design Engineering at Stanford, and after graduating, joined Everlane as a Product Manager where she ran the company’s retail technology for the past 2 years. She’s interested in the consumer health and wellness space and thinking about how to leverage technology to make high-quality healthcare more affordable and accessible. In her free time, she enjoys trying out new fitness classes (the Lagree Method is her current favorite!) and reading about habit-building.
Lorel Sim: Lorel is an LA native and Stanford senior double-majoring in International Relations and Data Science Management. A big fan of all things consumer (particularly wellness), she loves working with the things that make the everyday person’s life better.
Angela Gu: Angela is a Strategy Manager at Apple, helping to define future strategy for the company’s retail experience. She is interested in exploring new concepts around retail and communities. She graduated from Dartmouth with a major in Economics and a minor in CS. A Bay Area native, she loves spending time outdoors, traveling, and exploring new cultures.
Kofoworola Agbaje: Kofo is a 2nd year MBA student at The Wharton School majoring in Finance, and Entrepreneurship & Innovation. She recently completed a summer internship at Quona Capital working on African Investments. Having earned an Electrical and Electronic Engineering degree from Imperial College London and working as a software engineering for the Royal Bank of Scotland, she has a deep interest in technology with a special focus on FinTech, EdTech and Consumer Tech.
Neeka Mashouf: Neeka is passionate about using technology to solve global problems and enable opportunity and prosperity for people around the world. She’s a senior at UC Berkeley getting dual degrees in Materials Engineering and Business. Her favorite project has been leading a team to build & race a street-legal, solar-powered vehicle — especially when she raced it on a Formula One track and won 1st place! Neeka is now focused on building an AI tool to replace the years and millions of dollars it takes companies to develop new polymer materials, to accelerate solving challenges like sustainable plastics.
Please give a huge welcome on Twitter or LinkedIn to these incredible women as they start their journeys. If you’re interested in staying up to date with resource guides, or applying to a future cohort, drop your email here and we’ll be in touch!
Big thanks to First Round women Serena Bian and Rei Wang, as well as various DRF partners and alumni for their participation and assistance in getting this program off the ground. We’re excited for a future filled with female founders.
Reach out at shohini@drf.vc to get in touch with any of the participants or for further collaboration.
