The Future Founders Conference is a virtual
event for women who aspire to become
startup founders and want to learn from inspiring, successful entrepreneurial women. Whether you
are curious about launching your own startup or are in the early stages of building one, you’ll walk away with the knowledge to define your own path.
The one-day, virtual event will feature talks and panels with YC partners, our alumnae, and other founding women, followed by open sessions with experts. Speakers will share tactical advice and their honest account of what it’s like to find co-founders, leave corporate jobs, pitch investors, and scale their companies.
Attendance is free, but entry is not guaranteed. You are required to apply to attend. If you are approved to attend, you will receive a confirmation email within 2 weeks of applying.
Jess is an investor at Sequoia Capital. Prior to that, she was co-founder & CEO of fashion app, Polyvore (acquired by Yahoo in 2015) and a product manager for Google Maps. Jess is also a founding member of All Raise, a non-profit dedicated to improving diversity in the tech industry. Jess has a B.S. from Stanford in Computer Science and loves manga, drawing, bacon, and cosplay.
Tracy Young co-founded PlanGrid, construction productivity software, in 2011 with Ralph Gootee, Antoine Hersen, Kenny Stone and Ryan Sutton-Gee. PlanGrid grew from 5 co-founders to 450 people, and helped build over 1m construction projects around the globe before it was acquired by Autodesk in 2018 for $875m. Prior to PlanGrid, Tracy helped build hospitals in the Bay Area.
Anu Hariharan is a Partner with the YC Continuity Fund. Previously, Anu was an investment partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where she worked actively with the management teams of portfolio companies including Airbnb, Instacart, Medium, OfferUp and Udacity. Prior to this, Anu was a Principal at BCG's Private Equity Practice and was a senior software engineer at Qualcomm.
Erika Hairston is the co-founder and CEO of Edlyft, a paid support platform that helps college students and adult learners through CS courses, by pairing them with inclusive mentors, online group tutoring and personalized study tools. Prior to Edlyft, Erika interned as a Software Engineer at Facebook and then became a Product Manager at LinkedIn Learning.
Cadran Cowansage is the CEO & Founder of Elpha, an online community dedicated to accelerating the careers of women in the tech industry. Before founding Elpha, Cadran was a Lead Software Engineer at Y Combinator, and before that a Senior Software Engineer at MongoDB. She holds a Masters in Biomedical Informatics from Columbia University and an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Biology from Colby College.
Rose Afriyie grew up in the Bronx, where she saw the importance of food stamps, earned a master’s in public policy at University of Michigan. She got into technology because she believes writing software is a superpower that people of color and women should have exposure to and mRelief's tech unlocks food benefits for families so they can spend less money on food and more money on realizing other economic opportunities. She is continuing the tradition of Johnnie Tillmon and other Welfare Warriors advocating for families to access food with dignity.
Sonal Chokshi built the editorial operation at a16z, including showrunning the influential a16z Podcast. Before that, she was a senior editor at Wired, where she built the leading expert opinion & ideas section, and was one of the first mainstream media editors to feature nascent tech trends. Prior to that, Sonal led content and community at Xerox PARC for several years. She did her graduate work in developmental and cognitive psychology at Columbia University's school of education (where she also worked on multiple NSF grants around early numeracy and teacher professional development) and undergrad at UCLA.
Kirsty Nathoo was previously an audit manager at PwC based in Cambridge UK, where she audited tech and biotech companies ranging from startups to public companies. She has an MEng in electrical and information sciences from Cambridge, and qualified as a Chartered Accountant with the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales.
Joan DeGennaro is currently the Community Manager of Y Combinator’s Startup School. Before working for YC, Joan held a number of positions at startup companies. She was a director at SHRI, a nonprofit organization building toilets in rural India that convert human waste into energy. Joan went on to work at another YC portfolio company, Deepgram, as their Head of Operations. Most recently, she worked at Oscar Health Insurance on the Network Partnerships team.
Nicole Cadman was previously a lawyer at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe and Akin Gump, where she advised hundreds of companies. She has a BA in international affairs and Spanish literature from George Washington University and JD from Stanford. She is a member of the State Bar of California and the District of Columbia Bar.
This event is for women who are curious about starting a startup or have just started one. It will be particularly useful for women with science, engineering or product management backgrounds, or with specific domain expertise that could turn into a startup.
Whether you are a student, or already in the workforce, this is the best way to learn what startups are really like: from women who've started them!
Courtney is the CEO and founder of Runa (www.runahr.com), which is automating payroll for Latin America. Prior to Runa, Courtney scaled Cabify from $20MM to $1.5Bn valuation, opening up 130 cities across 12 countries across Latin America. Previously Courtney started 2 companies and worked in venture capital at DFJ and Morgenthaler. Courtney holds an MBA from Stanford and a BA from U.C.Berekely. She is the mother of 3 children.
Reshma Khilnani was co-founder and CTO of MedXT, an FDA cleared medical image management software company funded by Y Combinator in 2013, acquired by Box. She has held roles at Facebook and Microsoft, and was co-founder and co-CEO of life insurance lab testing Droplet Health (now Kit.com). She has a BS and MEng from MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Katherine Homuth is the Founder and CEO of Sheertex, the company behind the world's first pair of unbreakable pantyhose. Sheertex scaled from 5 to over 150 employees in less than 18 months and has raised over $44M in financing. Prior to Sheertex Katherine founded and sold two businesses, and she is an active angel investor.
Alyona Medelyan, Ph.D. is the CEO of Thematic, an AI-driven feedback analysis solution. Alyona holds a PhD in Natural Language Processing. Her academic work was cited more than 2500 times. Thematic helps companies like LinkedIn, DoorDash, and ManpowerGroup improve customer and user experience through insights from feedback.
Yin Wu is the founder and CEO of Pulley, a cap table management platform for hypergrowth companies. She sold a previous startup to Microsoft and was one of the youngest principal engineers there working on AI and mobile products. Yin is a Y Combinator alumnus and studied Computer Science at Stanford.
Jackie is a former startup founder and currently works at AWS on their Startup BD team, a group of former startup founders and investors that help startups navigate Amazon. In addition to AWS, she’s a venture product partner at Afore Capital (a pre-seed VC in SF), an active angel investor and startup mentor. Her last startup, Oasys, was incubated out of the Harvard Innovation Lab and raised two rounds of VC funding, and prior to Oasys, she managed Mark Cuban's northeast investment portfolio and managed deal flow.
Stefania Olafsdottir, CEO and Co-Founder of Avo, the next generation analytics governance platform, backed by YC, Heavybit and GGV Capital. Stef is a mathematician and philosopher, turned genetics researcher, turned data scientist, turned founder. She was the founding data person and became Head of Data Science and Growth Lead at QuizUp (100m users, backed by Sequoia and Tencent) where she built and led the data science division and culture – including pioneering company-wide ways to prioritize product innovation.
Lex Rovner is the co-founder and CEO of 64x Bio (YC S18), a biotechnology company building a platform to engineer cells with enhanced properties for advanced biomanufacturing and therapeutics applications. Lex holds a PhD in Molecular Biology from Yale and did her post-doctoral work with George Church at Harvard and the Wyss Institute of Biologically Inspired Engineering.
Cadran Cowansage is the CEO & Founder of Elpha, an online community where women grow their careers in tech. Before founding Elpha, Cadran was a Lead Software Engineer at Y Combinator, and before that a Senior Software Engineer at MongoDB. She holds a Masters in Biomedical Informatics from Columbia University and an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Biology from Colby College.
Joan DeGennaro is the Community Manager for Y Combinator's Startup School. Prior to this role, Joan ran a YC-funded nonprofit building toilets in rural India and then worked at startup companies in roles ranging from organizing early stage operations and growth to maintaining hospital partnerships. She is passionate about connecting early stage founders to community and resources.
Areas of expertise:
Consumer SaaS
Non-technical solo founder
Solving for everyday consumer frictions
Avni Patel Thompson is the founder and CEO of Modern Village (YC W20), whose mission is to lighten the load of everyday parenting through thoughtful, delightful and collaborative technology. She is a third-time founder building technology solutions for today’s parents. Her previous company, Poppy (YC W16), helped connect parents to vetted caregivers when they had gaps in childcare. Prior to taking the entrepreneurial plunge, she spent over a decade building consumer businesses at P&G, adidas, and Starbucks. She has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BSc Chemistry from the University of British Columbia. She lives in Vancouver with her husband and 2 little girls.
