MARKO GARGENTA – CHAIR
FOUNDER AND CEO AT PLUSPLUS
Marko Gargenta is founder and CEO of PlusPlus, a knowledge sharing software company. Prior to PlusPlus, Marko was the Director of Twitter University where he focused on enabling Twitter engineers and engineering managers to be the best in the world at what they do. At Twitter, he created a culture of learning where engineers learn from one another. Prior to Twitter, Marko co-founded and led Marakana, an open source software training company that focused on training engineers at companies such as Intel, Qualcomm, Cisco, Motorola, Department of Defense and others. Marakana was acquired by Twitter in 2013. Marko studied Mathematics and Software Engineering at University of Waterloo, Canada. He’s the author of Learning Android published by O’Reilly Media.
JENNY BLACKBURN
DIRECTOR, TECHNOLOGY PEOPLE & LEADERSHIP, SALESFORCE.COM
Jenny is currently a program director on the embedded learning and development team in Salesforce’s Technology & Products organization. While spending most of her career in tech driven environments, she is a multi-industry, experienced professional who has had success leading content, delivery and evaluation teams and projects to achieve aggressive performance goals in high growth, diverse environments. She is driven by innovation and has spearheaded numerous initiatives in tribal knowledge sharing and reward systems, making measurable impact in building towards a learning organization mindset. She has lead enterprise learning operations management, product development, enterprise learning system implementation, and general program management in globally distributed companies. Jenny’s specialties are enterprise learning strategy, program management, team leadership, process development, change management, and learning technology implementation (business process side).
JAMES DESROSIER
INTERNET OF THINGS TALENT CONSORTIUM LEAD, LEARNING @ CISCO
James is leading global talent development initiative with strategic and channel partners for multitiered Learning@Cisco B2B training organization and growing contingent of global players: GE Digital, Rockwell Automation, Panduit, MIT Sloan School of Management, Pearson Workforce Readiness, Disney HR, IQ Navigator (HRIS SaaS), New York Academy of Sciences, and global training companies FastLane and ANI. He’s also driving organizational design / development, research on trans-disciplinary leadership development, content development strategy, business rules for courseware sharing, learning pathways for certification and badging, curriculum design, e-learning training methods, web strategies, sales positioning and communications, and program implementation. James’ experience spans leadership development, corporate learning and development, customer and sales enablement, executive education, professional development, and accredited higher education. James is currently completing my doctoral dissertation on Creativity Management at the European Graduate School, which is fully accredited by the European Union. He has worked with SMEs in 20 categories to develop ~100 courses and 16 certification programs, and designed/directed executive education, professional development and academics in 22 fields.
AMY HAYES
GLOBAL HEAD OF LEARNING & DEVELOPMENT, FACEBOOK
Amy is a learning and development consultant and coach with over 18 years’ experience helping leaders navigate the challenges they face in their roles. As the Global L&D Leader she has responsibility for making Facebook a great place to learn to lead and for ensuring the company has the leadership capability needed today and in the future. Amy believes that the world needs leadership more than ever…and that being a leader is more challenging now than ever before. She has tremendous respect for those who take on leadership roles and is passionate about being a resource for those who are making a difference in the world. Prior to joining Facebook, Amy spent 14 years with PwC in various HR/L&D leadership roles in Boston, London and New York. Amy has a Bachelor’s degree in Business Management from George Mason University, an MS from Boston University and has recently completed Hudson Institute of Coaching’s program. As a former, “east coaster”, she is a new resident of San Francisco and is enjoying the California sun…..immensely!
THE REV. DENNIS H. HOLTSCHNEIDER, C.M., ED.D.
PRESIDENT OF DEPAUL UNIVERSITY AND CHAIRMAN OF ASCENSION HEALTH
The Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider, C.M., is president of DePaul University, the nation’s largest Catholic university and chairman of Ascension Health, the nation’s largest Catholic and non-profit health system. He also serves on the boards of the American Council on Education (ACE), the Chicago History Museum, and the steering committee of the Illinois Business Immigration Coalition. Fr. Holtschneider became DePaul’s 11th president in 2004 and oversees a $550 million budget, 23,539 students, and 924 full-time faculty on four Chicago campuses as well as online. He joined the board of Ascension Health in 2009 and moved to the parent board of Ascension Health in 2012, where he chaired the audit committee for the $26 billion healthcare organization consisting of the healthcare system and an array of health-related businesses. He is a professor of education at DePaul and a faculty member in the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Management Development Program and the Harvard Seminar for New Presidents, where he teaches strategy and governance. He also is a founder and faculty member at Boston College’s Institute for Administrators in Catholic Higher Education.
ELIZABETH KIM
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF TALENT, IDEO PALO ALTO
At IDEO Palo Alto, their mission is to humanize technology. That means making sure that human emotion, beauty, fears, and dreams inform technology — transforming it from “simply something new” to an experience that transforms the human experience. As the Executive Director of Talent at IDEO-PA, Elizabeth’s job is to find amazing people who can deliver on this audacious mission and to create experiences that challenge, excite, and inspire them to achieve their full creative potential. To do that, Elizabeth and her team and work tirelessly to identify and inspire amazing people, bring them to IDEO, and find amazing experiences that help them learn, grow, flourish. Prior to coming to IDEO, Elizabeth spent 15 years at McKinsey & Company and played a variety of roles including Associate Principal and Senior Learning Expert. Her passion has always been to find ways to help people learn and grow — whether external clients or internal consultants. As a Senior Learning Expert, Elizabeth worked with McKinsey’s senior leaders to develop learning experiences for consultants of all tenures. Some of her favorite examples include mobile learning for consultants serving unfamiliar industries, functional learning for project managers, transformational learning for engagement managers, and teaching senior partners about our expanding service offers. In her personal life, Elizabeth is a mom to three young children and wife to a quantum physicist.
DANNY RYAN
DIRECTOR OF TECHNICAL TRAINING & DEVELOPMENT AT AUTODESK
Danny is the director of Technical Training and development at Autodesk where he focuses on both the horizontal development of engineers as they add new technical skills and vertical development where learners grow their technical leadership skills. Danny is an electronic engineer who has worked in Phlilips (NL), DEC and Cypress Semiconductor before coming to Autodesk. Fueled by his hobbies of improv and standup comedy, he made the transition from engineering and engineering management to learning and development about 10 years ago. Nothing satisfies Danny more than making the seeing people grow while enjoying the process. At Autodesk Danny leads a small team that has implemented several major programs including a 6-week Engineering Bootcamp and has been piloting a virtual leadership development program that brings small teams together in an online gaming environment to develop their skills for building trust, coordinating action and leading teams.
VICTORIA SEVILLA
SENIOR MANAGER, GLOBAL PEOPLE DEVELOPMENT, VMWARE
Victoria Sevilla believes in the power of positive organizational cultures, not only for what they can achieve, but how they make people feel. Her love of learning and development evolved from her experience teaching courses in Interpersonal Communication, Intercultural Communication, Public Speaking, and Critical Thinking in small groups at two San Francisco Bay Area universities: San Jose State University and Santa Clara University. Victoria’s interest for praxis and innovation led her to consult for high tech companies in Silicon Valley, where her passion for the field of learning and development was further fueled. Victoria currently works in leadership development at VMWare, headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, where she creates and facilitates cutting-edge experiential learning programs. These cutting edge programs are based in positive psychology research, yet are practical and focused on real-world application. The goal of these programs is to equip leaders with the skills and mindsets that enable them to build micro-climates of human flourishing within their units. She has published two articles on her work experiences: “Why Some Motivational Strategies Fail and How to Create Inspiration at Work,” which was named one of the top ten articles in 2015 by Fulfillment Daily, and “Everything is Awesome. Why You Can’t Tell Employees they’re doing a Bad Job,” which was featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Victoria is also the recipient of HR.com’s Leadership Excellence award for the Best Global/International Leadership Program.
RAJON TUMBOKON
HEAD OF TECH ACADEMY & SR. LEARNING PARTNER FOR ENGINEERING, LINKEDIN
Rajon manages Tech Academy, LinkedIn’s technical learning program, where engineers can develop themselves on the technologies that connect the world’s professionals to be more productive and successful. Tech Academy’s flagship program, Engineering Bootcamp, transformed LinkedIn’s engineering onboarding experience and helped new engineers increase their first-month productivity by 100%. Rajon is also responsible for delivering talent development programs for engineers, including programs for career development, manager effectiveness, and change management. In addition to his duties at LinkedIn, Rajon founded the Bay Area Learning Design & Technology meetup group, where learning & development professionals can discuss and foster innovative approaches to workplace learning. Prior to LinkedIn, Rajon worked at Google where he developed mobile learning apps for Googlers. Rajon also held key learning & development roles at WebLearning and Johnson & Johnson. Rajon studied computer science at Stevens Institute of Technology and is a husband and father to two young daughters.