Browse experts
Abby R.
💸 Personal finance
Hi Twenty Mentees! I’m stoked to be able to get to know you and hopefully provide some help as you navigate ✨ whatever life is throwing at you ✨. I’ve had the privilege of having some excellent mentors in both my professional and personal life and am thrilled to be able to pay some of that forward within the Twenty Community!
More on my background / where I’m coming from:
If anything in my background resonates with you, I’d be thrilled to chat more and learn about how I can help you. Finding mentors that I jive with has been so important to my personal and professional journey, and it’d be an honor to be one of yours!
Courtnay B.
🔥 MBA
Hi! I am a native Texan but have lived in many parts of the USA, including Nashville, Atlanta, SF, and now Boston, but I’ll be in Seattle interning at Microsoft this summer in HR. After college I worked as a management consultant for 4 years at McKinsey & Company, where I worked in multiple industries and functions searching for my passion. I finally found it in my last two years at McKinsey by working on the Women in the Workplace report and working with our Chief People Officer on the firm’s important people priorities. After that, I decided to go to business school to decide if I wanted to pivot into the HR space rather than stay in consulting.
I’ve been mentoring others since college in various topics, and love sharing my knowledge and experiences to help others be their best!
Personally, I love to be active (hiking, Barry’s, Pilates), to cook, and to spend time with friends and family. Looking forward to meeting you!
Sophia S.
💻 Startups
Past experience mentoring and teaching others:
Some episodes about career from my podcast: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/17wmAOLcS2H48YbpbBayPM?si=dabe9964b2e84e22
Grant A.
💍 Getting married
I’m Grant - a proud Houstonian currently living in Boston while attending MIT Sloan. I went to UVA and studied Systems Engineering. I spent the first 4 years of my career at BCG, starting as a Summer Associate and finishing up as a Project Leader. Have done a ton of work in Digital, Oil & Gas and Social Impact. Outside of case work, I was also able to work in my “magic time” with the Houston Food Bank and EMERGE on special one-off consulting projects.
More importantly, I have the most amazing wife Sarah and the best “good boys” (dogs) in the world and could talk to you for hours about any one of them 🙂 We love going on long walks, trying new restaurants and breweries, and watching just a little too much reality TV.
Miriam S.
🩺 Healthcare
I'm an engineer turned business student continuing to explore which career path might be right for me at this moment in time. I'm a firm believer in pushing yourself to be independently capable while also respecting the value of healthy relationships and supportive communities.
Sara G.
I’m Sara - a UX research lead passionate about helping people cultivate fulfillment, joy and growth in their careers. My own career path has been a windy road, and that’s one of the reasons I love supporting others on their journeys. I started out my career as a Hiring Rotation Associate at Google. After about 6 months of realizing this role was the wrong fit for me, I made an internal transfer and became the first user researcher at Google Health. While I was at Google Health, I had the opportunity to work on some fascinating projects that included optimizing the user experience of an anxiety disorder self-assessment tool, making it easier for users to find affordable care on Google Search, building an AI-powered skin diagnostic tool, and internationalizing a diabetic retinopathy detection device. After about 4 years, my UX team had grown from a team of 3 to a team of ~70 and I was ready to make a change. I’ve always been inspired by democratizing access to world class education, and this led me to Coursera where I now lead a team of researchers who work on advancing access to education worldwide. My favorite part of my current role is getting to be a manager to an incredible team of people: I love coaching my team to achieve audacious goals, watching people grow, and building strong and sustaining relationships. In my free time, I spend my time doing things that bring me joy: soaking in the sun at the beach or in the park, boxing, hosting and cooking for friends, spending time with my partner Ziad and dog Ziggy, and traveling and experiencing different cultures. A perfect Saturday for me would be reading a great book on the beach, and then spending the evening relaxing on my porch with some friends, Ziad and Ziggy and a nice glass of wine :)
Why am I here?
My own twenties were rocky and exhilarating – it was a raw time full of some really incredible highs and some serious lows. Even though I had a dream job at Google Health pretty early in my career, I struggled with a lot of things many people do in their twenties: feeling insecure, managing anxiety and depression, uncertainty about my purpose, dealing with challenging work relationships, etc. I was incredibly lucky to have some generous people who were later in their careers give me support and guidance during this time. I love paying that energy forward - and I get tremendous fulfillment out of the relationships I build with my mentees. If I can be a part of your journey, please don’t hesitate to reach out 🙂
James E.
⚽️ Sports
I’m an Arizona native with roots from Mexico. I currently live in San Francisco and have been here for the last 5 years. Moved to the bay to work with startups and never seemed to leave.
I attended the University of Arizona where I ran track and field collegiately. After graduating, I had the opportunity to pursue running after college and competed for the Mexican National team. After falling short of making the Olympic team, I decided to hang up the spikes and moved to San Francisco.
Since I’ve been in the bay, I’ve worked for 3 companies, Rubrik, Databricks and now Lacework. I specialize in enterprise software sales, which has been equally rewarding as it’s been challenging. But my experience working for some of the fastest growing startups has been amazing.
Outside of work, I enjoy cooking and traveling. Love to try new recipes that inspire my creativity. The one thing I do focus on is having a work-life balance. Figuring out what I like to do outside of work has helped me become a more well rounded professional.
I’m very excited to become a mentor because I believe success is a culmination of the people you surround yourself with and if I can have can impact even just one person in a meaningful way, I’ll feel like I’ve done my job.
Will C.
🎤 Public speaking
Hey there! I’m a Raleigh, NC native who’s spent my career in the Talent space at multiple startups and scaleups. I graduated from William Peace University in Raleigh, but am a die-hard NC State sports fan (Go Pack!). I’m a new home-owner alongside my Fiancée and our cat, Poppy, and am getting married in September 2023!
I started my career in 2017 in the contract recruiting space. I learned the basics of corporate life, and also found that my passion was to work in-house for startups and build high-performing teams in the SaaS space. This led me to my first Startup role….
I joined Pendo in early 2020 (What a time!) and was responsible for growing our Product, Engineering, Design, and UX Research orgs alongside our Chief Product Officer and CEO. This is where I learned to navigate the politics that come with working in a high growth org, as well as how to partner with executive stakeholders on a regular basis. I was lucky enough to meet my first mentor (My direct manager at the time), and see firsthand the impact they can have on your career trajectory.
After Pendo I was recruited to join Twilio and lead a global team of recruiters focused on hiring Principal level product IC’s and product leadership. Here is where I learned what working at scale looked like. With over 10k employees, it take an entirely different skillset to navigate an organization of this size. Being able to influence decision makers, as well as ensuring your work has visibility across multiple levels is essential.
Early this year (2023), I joined OnFrontiers as our Head of Talent Acquisition. We’re a small org with around 30 employees around the globe, and this comes with an entirely new set of challenges and objectives. Organizing your day, setting clear productivity benchmarks, and holding yourself accountable is key.
I’m passionate about making sure everyone who’s in the early stages of their career has access to mentorship. In the age of remote work, this has become even more of a challenge day-to-day. I aim on building long lasting relationships with Mentees and providing transparent feedback on your topics of choice.
Claire J.
I’m Claire, a software designer and strategic planner. I’ve dipped my toes in many industries and skills with my main constant being my own high bar for building design driven and ethically-sound products in each of my work experiences.
I originally grew up in Houston, the fourth largest city in the US, with a highly medically-focused Argentinian-Jewish family. While studying pre-Med at Stanford and shadowing a few physicians, I found myself much more interested in the efficacy and beauty of their medical devices rather than the practice of talking to, diagnosing, and treating patients. That served as my wake up call to try out some engineering classes. Long story short, I loved them and ended up declaring Mechanical Engineering: Product Design as my major.
Having worked on a range of physical and digital products at Stanford related to the medical field; I decided to explore my ability to move and learn quickly by joining Accenture’s digital consulting practice after college. Fast forward 3 years, 6 industries, and 4 live products later, I felt I had acquired enough skills during my time at Accenture to lead design at a startup. That led me to a 10 person virtual fashion startup called Forma Technologies (recently acquired by Snap) for a brief 6 months until I realized I wanted to work at a medium sized company and have the ability to critique and collaborate with other designers again. I then landed my current position at Silicon Valley Bank where I was designer no. 5 to join our rapidly growing team of almost 45 designers now. I’ve now been at SVB almost 2 years and look forward to continued work building internal and external tools for our Global Fund Banking and Corporate Finance sectors.
In my personal life, I spend most my free time either playing and caring for my Aussie puppy named Gio 🐶, at Austin Bouldering Project (ABP), running, learning about climate change mitigation, painting, and hanging with loved ones! I also love to cook and bake and try new recipes (particularly on a Yotam Ottolenghi kick recently).
I’ve been mentoring via my Stanford, Accenture, and Brown networks both informally and more formally for a couple years. I particularly like working with passionate students and early/mid career employees to guide them to find what fulfills their purpose or ikigai in life and work. Understanding the concept of ikigai (japanese term for “reason for being”) and putting it in practice in my life played a significant role in my early twenties and the concept continues to keep me grounded and navigating my life in the right direction for me.
Devika P.
Hi! My name is Devika, and I'm a designer and public health researcher, originally from New Jersey, recently living in San Francisco, and now a medical student at Penn State University, College of Medicine.
I studied product design engineering before pivoting to focus my career on healthcare disparities research (via a Master’s degree in Community Health and Prevention Research). For the past five years, I was the Design Manager, and then Design Director at The Better Lab, an academic research laboratory that utilizes human-centered design to address vexing healthcare challenges facing disadvantaged patient populations in San Francisco and beyond.
Sam S.
Throughout my career, I've passionately dedicated myself to mentoring and teaching, recognizing the transformative impact it can have on individuals and communities. Through my Teach for America Experience and through my engagement with The Last Mile, I've nurtured the growth of students from diverse backgrounds, guiding them in harnessing design and technology for their future paths. With IDEO, my role as a Design Lead has enabled me to mentor professionals by integrating inclusive and human-centered design principles into learning experiences and leading initiatives like Disarming Whiteness to foster diversity and equity.
I am also an ICF-certified coach, and I have a career and life coaching practice called Alvita Coaching. My coaching practice has three primary offers: Vision & Vitality Coaching, Career Catalyst Coaching, and Next Gen Leadership Coaching (a career coaching program designed for 18-24-year-olds).
What excites me about twenty is that it is a service that I so desperately wished existed when I was in my twenties. The platform’s recognition that professional growth is inextricably linked to personal development resonates deeply with my holistic approach to mentorship. I am eager to be part of a community that doesn’t shy away from the tough, intricate discussions that pave the way for authentic growth and learning.
Joe G.
I’m Joe, a product manager who has background as an engineer, researcher and designer. I started my career in research, transitioned into consulting and transitioned these skills into product roles at various technology startups.
So far in my professional career, I’ve developed skills that span across product development from strategy, UX research, design and engineering. Having started my career in consulting and then transitioning to high-growth startups, I’ve worked internationally in 4 markets (Indonesia, Turkey, Amsterdam, and the UK) and 6 industries. From these experiences, I’ve strived to work on building meaningful products and experiences while helping create sustainable organizations and impact in local communities.
Aside from a tactical product skillset, my experiences have allowed me to develop as a people manager and leader. I’ve worked at organizations that offer B2B and B2C solutions, across all stages of maturity from seed funding to post-IPO fortune 500 organizations. I’m happy to discuss the nuances to my experiences and how to navigate these environments and advocate for personal growth throughout.
In addition, I currently advise entrepreneurs through my own agency services and as part of the Alter Global network. Outside of work, I love being active physically, socially, and mentally. I love exploring the ocean - while working at a YC startup in Indonesia, I recently received my master diver certification. Additionally, I have competed in various lengths of Triathlons keeping me busy with training on a weekly basis. I try to stay active in my local communities, serving as a KIPP mentor to low-income high school students.
Nikhil R.
Hey friends - my name is Nikhil and I'm so excited to be a mentor here at Twenty. I've explored quite a few non-traditional paths in my life from music, to medicine/global health, to social entrepreneurship, to public policy. I'm excited to share what I've learned to help you navigate your own journey!
Daniela V.
My name is Daniela and I grew up in San Diego surrounded by a love for the ocean, soccer and any outdoor activity! I moved to the Bay Area to attend Stanford University where I got my undergraduate degree in Product Design and my master’s in Learning, Design and Technology at the school of Education.I have experience working as a product designer, UX researcher and UX/UI designer at different sized companies. I am currently working on an EdTech startup focusing on social-emotional learning and early education. Happy to speak about any and all experiences! I love speaking to and learning from new people and love helping people learn from experiences I have had, mistakes I have made and from moments I have learned from.Creative brainstorming is my passion and being able to help people think creatively through their life is one of my favorite things to do!
Harry S.
Who am I? I'm Harry, currently based in Seattle. My journey has led me to the role of Chief of Staff at Quantive, where I've had the privilege to work on scaling operations, driving strategy, and supporting investment activities among other responsibilities. On the side, I’ve started a newsletter focused on my passion for exploring business strategies and investments in the soccer world.
Why am I here? Mentoring holds a special place in my heart because of its transformative power. I believe in the value of good guidance and how it can steer us closer to our aspirations. I would not be where I am today without a mentor who helped me entirely rethink how I was approaching my career. Out of all the skills, degrees, and jobs you can have, I firmly believe it's the people and networks you build that can propel you into a life and career you've always wanted. That’s why I’m here—to offer you the insights I’ve gathered on my own journey and hopefully make your path a little easier to navigate. I'd like to give back to others what my mentor gave to me and help those who are facing the same challenges or questions I had.
Sohan M.
Heylo! I’m Sohan Mone. My mission is to deliver infrastructure that expands access and unlocks society’s potential - let’s just say, we have a lot of work that needs doing! I’m a structural engineer by trade and I specialize in rail bridges (high-speed rail, monorail, LRT, and metro-rail). 🚆My background is in seismic engineering and structural dynamics, but I’ve since joined a design-build contractor that focuses on big infrastructure.Today, I can say that I’m a key player in winning lucrative government contracts valued in the billions! I also dabble in scripting and data science as it relates to my role, and have done some freelance work as well.I LOVE what I do… but it wasn’t always this way! Getting to this mindset was a struggle.I believe the 20’s are a time where it’s okay to fail. These years are about exploration, discovery and taking measured risks! It’s about finding out what’s meaningful to you!If you’re not sure what you want to do, or are just feeling unfulfilled - I’ve been there, and I’m all ears!!
