Browse experts
Becky L.
💡 Product
I’m a mixed race design leader & strategist. I was born in New York City’s Chinatown and spent most of my childhood on the Jersey Shore. I can’t be away from the ocean for too long and jump in to mark moments of transition, no matter the season.
I’ve spent my entire career finding the right intersection of creativity, learning, and supporting my almost-but-not-quite bi-coastal lifestyle.
I love postcards, Little Free Libraries, and my cattle dog mix, Luna.
I've tiptoed around teaching professionally for my whole life, from teaching SAT prep classes in college, to being a volunteer ESL teacher in NYC, to spending a year at a university in Brazil as an English Teaching Assistant. Ultimately, I like being able to form meaningful relationships with my students and have learning go both ways, which usually means small group or 1:1 relationships with other adults or near peers.
I've volunteered with Braven for over a year as a Leadership Coach for their Accelerator program at San Jose State University, leading 8 students through a course that included career coaching and a design thinking capstone challenge. My team won the challenge, but it wasn't about winning ;) Afterward, I became a Professional Mentor, working 1:1 with students to help them find a job.
I’ve also deeply benefitted from mentoring and coaching in my own professional career. It’s helped me get over humps of insecurity, little and big, and lean into opportunities I wouldn’t have dreamed of before.
I try to overindex on supporting students who wouldn't otherwise have mentorship support, whether they're first-generation college students, BIPOC, or don't have a degree.
In my job as a Senior Director at IDEO, I regularly mentor and guide more junior designers and design teams on client work, and more informally through ERGs and programs like Color by Design, an apprenticeship for BIPOC Design Researchers.
Emily G.
📈 Marketing, sales, & business
Professionally, I began my career as an educator after I got my Masters. I really loved the idea of my students finding their own voice and driving their own learning. I tried to use technology as a way to allow students to dive into what they loved to learn about in the way they loved to learn it.
I moved from New York to San Francisco in 2015 and joined a company called AltSchool in its early stages. They were personalizing learning for students using innovative technology and I learned first hand what being involved in a startup meant. I felt like I was at “Startup University”- I learned about office culture, work relationships, being part of a team, how to make a slide deck, and more. I also learned about how teams connect and interact and how being a collaborative partner and connective tissue within an organization holds so much value.
Over the past 5 years or so I moved out of K12 education/edtech and into early childhood/parenting technology. I have two of my own children (4 and 2) and know first hand just how much information parents need about parenting. Through my work at Higher Ground Education/Guidepost Montessori as well as Lovevery, I have helped organizations reimagine their place in the world of parenting startups and rethink how parents access content related to parenting.
I have launched new digital products and services for families and understand the cross functional nuances that go into building something from scratch. I am a user-first driven creator and always think about the experience of the person using the product.
Personally, I love cooking and all things food-related. I also am an ex-theater major and to listen to Broadway show tunes and sing to myself in the car. My kids think I’m nuts. I promise I won’t burst into song on our call!! I look forward to connecting with you and learning more together!
Percy B.
⭐️ Freelance / consulting work
In previous mentoring experiences, I've guided other creatives (brand and product designers) through navigating an in-house design role; I've also offered advice around freelance and recharging from work.
Twenty excites me because I'm able to give back to the generation beyond me, and in a sense be able to give back to my past 20-odd-year-old self. And at least in unprecedented times, trying to alleviate some of the stress navigating through those uncertainties.
Nikhil K.
💸 Personal finance
Why am I here?
I've had the pleasure of having mentors in my life who helped me through some of the most challenging times. Im here to do the same for others.
Im currently at Apple building computer vision algorithms for the cameras hundreds of millions of people use. I love it and the life I’ve built. The least I can do is give a helping hand.
Katia T.
🔥 MBA
My name is Katia and I am the Head of Product at Mighty, a platform that empowers the next generation through creativity and the skills of entrepreneurship. I’ve been a part of the NYC tech scene for 7 years now as a product manager and project lead. Over time I’ve discovered that I have a knack for nurturing happy, cross-functional teams and am obsessed with building playful consumer products that help individuals believe in themselves and realize their potential. Eventually, I’d like to launch a company of my own.
So why am I here? I see mentoring as a skill and a give and take. I get mentored and like to mentor as way of improving my capabilities and a way passing it forward. But also, I enjoy human connections more than anything else. I can’t wait to partner together to help you navigate a defining decade and this beautiful thing called life.
Katie K.
🔥 MBA
Hey hey! I’m Katie, the founder & ceo of twenty! Up to this point, I’ve been building twenty behind the scenes, but I got FOMO… so now I’m here to join the party 🙂 Can’t wait to meet many of you in person - I’ve heard so much about you!!
To give a more “formal” introduction…
But here’s my real talk, just for twenty:
With all this in mind, I can’t wait to meet you. Thank you for being here 🫶
Claire J.
💸 Personal finance
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.
💡 Product
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.
Viren S.
I'm a serial entrepreneur who is building my 4th startup. I dropped out of my undergrad to build my last company. I'm excited to be a mentor on Twenty because I love helping others and I'm super passionate about this space - my first startup was a mentorship platform :)
Jake F.
My career path has been challenging, unexpected, and rewarding. I’ve served as a founder, a consultant, an advisor, and a Board of Directors member. I’ve founded both an unsuccessful business venture and a successful non-profit, worked in massive multi-national corporations and early- and growth-stage VC-backed startups. I've been laid off, low-balled, and have had to navigate toxic workplace politics. I chose an untraditional path for post-graduate education, learned what fuels me professionally, and have both slogged away doing menial admin tasks and been in the room with some of the most powerful people in my industry. And I’m still figuring out what I want to do when I "grow up".
A bit about my background, I graduated with a degree in marketing and global management, thinking I would go into the hospitality industry as a brand manager. It turns out I didn't actually like marketing in practice. So, with no educational background in healthcare or technology, I was thrown into the deep end of health tech when I became an implementations consultant working on the front lines in hospitals right next to doctors and nurses. I took everything that came my way as a learning experience and was promoted quickly until I got to an executive level IT strategy consulting role at a large corporation. The career plateau that came next was one of the largest struggles I had to face in my young career, and I think that a lot of people in their early- to mid-twenties may be experiencing this. I decided to pursue my education and, while still working full-time, got a masters degree from Penn School of Medicine in Healthcare Innovation. During this degree program, I moved to a venture-backed startup which doubled in size in my first year there. Dealing with the realities of what this meant not just for the business but for the job I was doing was another massive challenge, and I ended up leaving to start my next adventure. I am currently in the very early stages of building a business, while taking a much-needed break from the working world.
I get a tremendous amount of satisfaction mentoring young people through my university’s post-grad programs, as well as my own family members and other young professionals. I think a big reason for this is that a lot of the “influencers” giving advice are impractical for a professional environment (corporate and startup), and interviews with successful people such as Fortune 500 CEOs rarely give insight into actionable steps for young people to take in their careers. My approach is to be transparent and honest, and lean on my own experience to give examples of how you might want to (or not want to) approach certain topics. I hope to be able to create a space for college students and early career professionals to feel comfortable in uncertainty and in exploring their interests.
I also have a great network who are looking for bright folks to help bring new perspectives, and I’m always happy to make the connection.
Amelia W.
When I scroll through Instagram or LinkedIn, it can be easy to fill in the gaps with stories about other people: “Their career has been smooth sailing!”; “Their relationship looks so easy”; “How are all of my friends somehow in Italy right now?!” However, when we create space for authentic and genuine conversations, we quickly uncover that all of us are having imperfect and sometimes frustrating moments in our personal and professional lives; leveraging some combination of skills, luck, and privilege to navigate our careers and personal lives; and simply doing our best to grow and succeed in a challenging world.
When I left Teach for America as a transitioning teacher, I felt unsure how to land a job at a top startup or how to apply my leadership skills in a new industry. Through the support of mentors and networking, I was able to land a great role in Customer Success at a really exciting EdTech start up. After my successful transition into EdTech, I found that many teachers were eager to do the same, and I started offering pro bono mentoring sessions to provide advice on how to navigate the transition and set yourself up for success. After supporting 20+ mentees, I have learned that sometimes the most impactful tool a mentor can offer is to believe in the mentee and just nudge them along the path they are already building for themselves.
I am eager to help early career leaders (especially young women) harness their greatness, see their potential, and take bold steps toward the life they want to create. Mentors have been critical to my personal and professional growth, and I am eager to pay it forward.
.png)
Jackie H.
Hey! My name is Jackie Y. HU, born and raised in the city of Shanghai and had my first college dropout experience in Shanghai (ask me more!). At the age of 19, I moved to the U.S. with my parents and started college at UC Berkeley.
I wandered quite a bit in college and explored different aspects of college life before committing to taking Economics and East Asian Studies as my majors. I still remember how my college advisor wanted to dissuade me from doing two majors by saying ‘unless the other major is the first thing you want to do waking up Sunday morning’😅.
I still can’t wake up on Sunday mornings, BUT I am so happy that I wasn’t discouraged! Taking the East Asian Studies major and becoming involved in writing and conscious critical thinking really lifted me up spiritually, and that level of motivation made everything fall into places.
I LOVED social science and humanity so much so I decided to attend Oxford University for a master program that focused on contemporary China. The reason why I picked a UK school instead of a U.S. school (which is supposedly the strongest in the field) is that I just … loved a vegetarian buffet place in London so would want to always go back! Sadly by the time I attended Oxford, the restaurant was permanently closed down due to rising rent and I literally cried for 3 days and lost the sense of purpose going there.
At Oxford, I focused my research on a youth community in mainland China and did an interesting virtual ethnographic study about it (ask me more!).
I now work as a Data Science Manager at a dating company, leveraging data to spread love. I feel so loved by having the privilege to working with a group of super authentic, logical, reasonable, and open-minded people. My company has a very unique culture of bringing everyone close together while working and it exemplifies so many American ideals that attracted me to move to this country at the first place. I feel very proud of my work and fulfilled, and I am ready to invest in my mentees and to give back to the community that cultivated me!
At Twenty, being able to give authentic talk excites me! I love being explorative, real, and grounded with my mentees instead of coming to be prescriptive or pedagogical. Being authentic also helps us to learn from EACH OTHER — this would be a great opportunity for me to grow so I am looking forward to our conversations!! 😃
Christal W.
I’m a little bit of everything. From solo backpacking to permaculture farming (during the pandemic) to raising VC $ & running a startup to consulting to social impact… I’m happy to talk about it all. What strings across it all is my values & why I do what I do:
Life is not just about achievement & busy-ness. Life also isn’t about living for other people & their perceptions of you. That’s why I think it’s super important to know what is important to you and build a life that celebrates that. F everyone else 😇
Julia O.
Hi there! I’m Julia, a mid-westerner who has spent my adult life in CA (Stanford for 4 years + 3 years in SF) and Austin, TX (past 2 years). I’m a former innovation consultant at a Management Consulting firm, and recently took 6 months away from the career hamster wheel to travel, read a lot, noodle on ideas, and spend time with family and friends. My next adventure is in the land of startups, where I recently joined a small 12-person team working to help athletes achieve their performance nutrition goals. While my whole career has been in the product space, I’ve jumped around a bit between design, innovation, and Product Management roles.
Outside of work, I stay busy with my 2-year old dog, Hazel, lots of outdoor adventures, racket sports, and exploring the live music and taco scene in Austin.
Why am I here? Mentoring is something that gives me a ton of energy, and I am where I am today because of my “village” of career mentors, close friends, family, and therapists helping me navigate my 20s. “The Defining Decade” is an accurate name for your 20’s - it’s when we start to build our careers, figure out our passions, and cultivate meaningful relationships. I believe each person needs that village of support to help them navigate this tricky decade and I would be honored to be part of someone’s circle of mentorship.
Kevin V.
I have a strong interest in driving value for visionary leaders and ambitious, mission driven organizations seeking to make a meaningful impact. Given the various industries and companies I’ve been a part of, I like to think I have a diverse and grounded perspective. At my core is the unwavering belief in servant leadership - placing the needs and well-being of others at the forefront of my actions.
I started my career in investment banking, both on the equity research and M&A side. Then I spent some time doing venture capital and private equity. Currently, exploring the “operator” side of me at a beverage company called Guayaki Yerba Mate and have done a few stints at startups (with Chief of Staff and finance-related responsibilities). On a personal note, I moved to Los Angeles from Texas (grew up in Austin, TX, went to college at Texas A&M, and lived in Houston for a few years) at the beginning of 2019. I am currently engaged and have a puppy Golden Retriever named Goose. When I’m not going on long walks and exploring new places with my fiancee, Tara, and Goose, you’ll catch me playing pickleball or golfing. On his lazier days, Kevin loves to watch any sports events on TV (and sometimes catches himself watching reality TV shows with Tara).
Shivani M.
I'm a design strategist and management consultant with a background in sociology. I started my career as an entrepreneur and switched to corporate consulting. I’m now on track to start my own consultancy! I’m action-oriented and a big picture thinker. I love learning from real situations and hence, I’m an opportunist. I actively seek out ways to help others and grow myself at the same time!
