BLACK EXCELLENCE LEADERSHIP SERIES

Heather Hiles, Founder & CEO, Imminent Equity

Heather Hiles is a technologist and an entrepreneur. Growing up as a biracial black girl in Los Angeles, she never imagined she’d be recognized by organizations as diverse as Forbes, Vanity Fair, Startout, and Black Women Talk Tech as a pioneer in the arenas of startups and venture capital. For a number of years, Heather held the distinction of being the black female founder to have raised the most venture capital. Hiles has founded several ventures including: Calbright College; Pathbrite; SFWorks; EARN; and Imminent Equity.

Founded by Hiles in 2012, Pathbrite is the largest digital portfolio platform in the market, being used by over 6 million learners and job seekers. Heather has advised numerous business and political leaders, and served on the boards of dozens of companies,; non-profit organizations; and even the San Francisco Unified School District. Heather is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority Inc and lives in Washington DC as well as Oakland California with her wife.  With more than 120,000 followers on her LinkedIn Influencer site, Heather is a thought leader in the areas of technology, talent development, education, and the future of work.

Deron Simmons, Staff Software Architect

Deron Simmons is a staff software architect who owns Intel's applications for diversity and inclusion.

He spends his days building machine learning apps to remove bias from retention, progression, hiring and exits.

From 2017 to 2020, Deron was a software engineering professor at the University of Arizona. He became the youngest member of the SFS board of trustees in June of this year.

Since joining Intel in 2010, Deron has travelled globally integrating software and services for municipalities and he's built over 50 production applications in 20 different software languages.

What's most important to him is mentoring, coaching, training, and inspiring the next generation of developers to close the technology divide.

Michael Seibel, CEO & Partner, Y Combinator

Michael is currently a partner at Y Combinator and CEO of the YC startup accelerator program.

Previously, he was co-founder and CEO of Justin.tv from 2007 - 2011 and co-founder and CEO of Socialcam in 2012. During 2012, Socialcam participated in Y Combinator, raised angel financing and sold to Autodesk Inc. for $60m. In 2014, Justin.tv became Twitch Interactive and under the leadership of Emmett Shear and Kevin Lin sold to Amazon for $970m.

Before getting into tech, Michael spent a year as the finance director for a US Senate campaign and before that he graduated from Yale University with a bachelor's degree in political science. Today he spends the large majority of his free time cooking, reading, traveling and going for long drives. He lives in San Francisco, CA with his amazing wife Sarah and son Jonathan.

Dwana Franklin-Davis, CEO, Reboot Representation

Dwana is the Chief Executive Officer of Reboot Representation. She is a visionary, collaborative and compelling executive leading the Tech Coalition in closing the gender gap in tech by doubling the number of Black, Latinx, and Native American women earning bachelor’s degrees in computing by 2025.

Dwana joined Reboot Representation after 13 years at MasterCard, where she contributed to innovative, leading edge efforts as a senior software engineer and as a project lead before ascending to senior leadership roles. She spent five and a half years in Vice President positions and has brought immense value as a leader, mentor, decision maker, and team member.

Dwana has a true passion for creating diverse environments and efforts because they lead to greater innovation. Dwana holds a Bachelor of Science in Management from Purdue University, a Master’s of Information Management from Washington University in St. Louis, and a Certificate in Project Management from Washington University.

Nick Caldwell, VP of Engineering, Twitter

Nick Caldwell is a VP of Engineering at Twitter with responsibility for all consumer-facing products. Previously he was Chief Product and Engineering at Looker (acquired by Google) and VP of Engineering at Reddit. He also spent 13 years at Microsoft, culminating in a role as General Manager of the Power BI product family. Nick holds a degree in computer science and electrical engineering from MIT and an MBA from UC Berkeley. He's also a board member of /dev/color, a non-profit whose mission is to maximize the impact of Black software engineers. Nick is a native of P.G. County Maryland, but is happy to call San Francisco home.