Category: Podcasts

Nupur Avantika is Vice President of Digital Learning/Experience at Encora and is based in Pune, India where she helps to ensure seamless customer engagement through ongoing business transformation. She also works closely with the sales leadership in the US, Europe, and APAC to establish predictable and continuous business. With 20+ years of experience in digital learning, another focus area for Nupur is to upscale the company’s capabilities to include the latest trends and technologies in the Digital Learning/Experience domain.

Nupur holds a Master’s in Communication Media for Children from SNDT University, Pune and a Post Graduate Diploma in Digital Business from Emeritus Institute of Management, Singapore, in collaboration with MIT Management Executive Education and Columbia Business School.

Dianela Gamboa is a Senior UX Designer at Encora. Having worked in Marketing for many years prior, she is able to strike the perfect balance in User Experience and understanding business financial goals while always putting the user in the center.

Fermín Chávez is a User Experience Researcher at Encora and has been working in the field for five years. Coming from a technological background, he found a new balance in research by mediating with the more human side of things. He is very interested in the playful, leisurely uses of technology and how we can reframe our world through play.

Sam Fonoimoana is the Founder and CEO of Datajoin – a B2B marketing analytics company that is the go-to solution for connecting first-party data across the MarTech stack through their proprietary “Micro Integrations” enabling marketers to truly segment and personalize to customers. They are trusted by companies such as Cisco, ARM, Adobe and Fidelity.

Sam and his wife Sabrina have a blessed life with 3 beautiful daughters and 4 wonderful sons. All 4 of their sons have been diagnosed with autism. When Sam is not at his computer, he can be found with his family at the park, rec center, restaurant, or on a road trip!

Sam received his MBA in Finance from Brigham Young University.

Sandra Vazquez is a UX and CX leader with more than 10 years of experience helping software companies improve the user experience of their products. With an entrepreneurial background, she guides companies on how to build engaging products and impact market adoption.In her role as Head of User Experience, Sandra works with clients from all around the world to discover their users’ perspectives and translate them into actionable design solutions that ultimately drive growth.She has a bachelor’s degree in Management Information Systems from the University of Arizona.

Dianela Gamboa is a Senior UX Designer at Encora. Having worked in Marketing for many years prior, she is able to strike the perfect balance in User Experience and understanding business financial goals while always putting the user in the center.

Fermín Chávez is a User Experience Researcher at Encora and has been working in the field for five years. Coming from a technological background, he found a new balance in research by mediating with the more human side of things. He is very interested in the playful, leisurely uses of technology and how we can reframe our world through play.

Sharmin Ali is an entrepreneur, author and engineer by profession with more than 12 years of sales experience. She has authored two books. The first one, Y.O.U, has been announced a best-seller by the New Indian Express & the Oxford bookstores. Her second book, titled How I was forced to become a staunch RACIST has been recently published. After exiting from her first startup, Art-Right-Is productions, she has ventured into an Artificial Intelligence based startup, Instoried.

Mike Lee is President and Co-Founder of Fundica – a funding search engine licensed to some of the largest financial institutions in North America. The Fundica solution enables a financial institution or other entrepreneur-support organization to help businesses easily identify and apply for the most relevant government funding, capture valuable firmographics, clearly promote inclusion, and truly become that one-stop funding destination. Mike has worked in the area of R&D tax credits and government funding, in the mergers and acquisitions group at BCE, as well as in the strategy group at KPMG Consulting, and at the start of his career with technology companies as an engineer.

Mike holds a B.A.Sc. in Engineering from the University of Waterloo, an MBA from the University of British Columbia and the CFA designation. He was selected as one of 25 emerging entrepreneurs by the Bronfman Foundation and Entrepreneur of the Year by CFO Canada.

Are you an entrepreneur or business owner who is looking for government funding? Give Fundica a try today by going to https://www.norcalsbdc.org/fundica/

Art Chan

Senior Partner Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services. With over 25 years experience in the technology industry, Art has worked at a number of Fortune 500 companies as well as having founded and operated an applied data analytics company for over a decade. He’s worked at Opsware/Loudcloud (acquired by HP), one of the first companies to offer Software as a Service computing with an Infrastructure as a Service model. At AWS, he works with APN Partners, helping guide and develop their technical practice. For fun, Art is a marathon runner and a 6x Ironman triathlon finisher.

Isac Souza

Isac Souza, a DevOps and Cloud Innovation Leader at Encora, is a seasoned software developer with more than 12 years of experience working in high performance teams, participating in the design, development and operation of complex software solutions running on both on-premises and cloud infrastructures. He has deep knowledge on software development, distributed systems architecture and infrastructure. In the last five years he has focused on implementing best practices for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery in public and private clouds, improving the quality, scalability and availability of products.

Vyacheslav Zholudev, Co-founder and CTO at Sumsub, a customer-focused platform for identity verification and AML/KYC compliance.

Vyacheslav brings unparalleled technical and entrepreneurial acumen to help Sumsub’s development team reach complex goals effectively. His efforts are the reason why Sumsub has 99.996% uptime. Vyacheslav holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Jacobs University (Germany), with experience working as a solution architect at ResearchGate.

He is an expert in privacy protection, ID verification trends, cases of digital frauds and international regulatory compliance regarding personal data.

Art Chan

Senior Partner Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services. With over 25 years experience in the technology industry, Art has worked at a number of Fortune 500 companies as well as having founded and operated an applied data analytics company for over a decade. He’s worked at Opsware/Loudcloud (acquired by HP), one of the first companies to offer Software as a Service computing with an Infrastructure as a Service model. At AWS, he works with APN Partners, helping guide and develop their technical practice. For fun, Art is a marathon runner and a 6x Ironman triathlon finisher.

Poorvi Nigotiya

Poorvi is a passionate problem solver, an Agile methodologist and an Engineering Manager at Encora, based out of Ahmedabad, India. She is responsible for Product Engineering and is actively involved in project delivery and process improvement. With more than 12 years of experience in the IT industry, she has led the development of enterprise application in various domains including E-commerce, Fintech and Energy. Her expertise lies in back-end system designing.

Poorvi holds a bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from JSSATE, Noida, India. She is an associate level AWS Certified and as a cloud practitioner she has designed cloud-based architecture for various applications.

Art Chan

Senior Partner Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services. With over 25 years experience in the technology industry, Art has worked at a number of Fortune 500 companies as well as having founded and operated an applied data analytics company for over a decade. He’s worked at Opsware/Loudcloud (acquired by HP), one of the first companies to offer Software as a Service computing with an Infrastructure as a Service model. At AWS, he works with APN Partners, helping guide and develop their technical practice. For fun, Art is a marathon runner and a 6x Ironman triathlon finisher.

Gustavo Romero

Principal DevOps Engineer at Encora. Gustavo is a seasoned Lead Cloud / DevOps engineer with a focus on AWS, Azure Cloud and security compliance over the last 10 years. A true AWS champion, he has earned every associate & professional level AWS certification, and also holds several Microsoft Azure Certifications. His broad client experiences include migration of on-premises applications to the Cloud, implementation of CI/CD processes within Cloud environments, container orchestration, creation of “Infrastructure As Code” templates for infrastructure deployments, implementation of SOC 2 Type 2/ISO 27001 security protocols for SaaS applications, and broad deployment of automation strategies to drive scalable impacts for clients. He has a BSc in Systems Engineering from Universidad Catolica Boliviana, as well a MSc in IT Security from Escuela Militar de Ingenieria.

Sterling Douglass is the Co-Founder & CEO of Chowly, a leading restaurant technology company helping restaurants streamline their POS integrations to expand and maintain a diverse set of off-premise capabilities. He has extensive experience as an entrepreneur, leading start-ups and building solutions for long-standing unsolved problems.

Sterling began his career in data analytics as an actuary in management consulting. His experience in data and client relationships, coupled with his passion for entrepreneurship in the hospitality industry, led him to establish Chowly.

When running into problems getting his mobile ordering app off the ground in 2014, Sterling set out to solve the broader challenge he and many other apps faced: POS Integration. Realizing the bigger players like Grubhub and DoorDash were struggling to streamline their processes, he started Chowly in 2015 to make it easier for small and mid-sized restaurants to leverage the best-in-class technologies they needed to succeed. “We realized this wasn’t just broken for us; it was holding the entire restaurant industry back.”

Today restaurants use Chowly’s integration system to increase revenue, improve operational flow, and save on labor costs. Annually Chowly processes over $2 billion in orders for its 12,000+ restaurant partners.

Daniëlle is the VP of Finance of Paddle, a payments infrastructure for SaaS business.

Born in the Netherlands, she went on vacation to Aruba with her parents and never went back. She later moved to the US to live and complete her university. She completed two degrees simultaneously: a bachelor’s in International Community Development and a bachelor’s in Business Administration.

After university, Daniëlle spent 8 years working in the US Hospitality business across the Americas (North, Central, South & Caribbean). She then relocated to the Netherlands to join Booking.com where she held several senior regional and global roles over 4 years, leading numerous innovation and automation projects. Wanting to dive deeper into the tech company space, she stepped into her first start/scale-up, Messagebird.com, as the Head of Finance Operations. At Messagebird she set up and built the operations role, scaled the company globally, and led several company acquisition integrations.

How is conversational AI transforming the customer experience?

Jaya Kishore Reddy Gollareddy is building technology at Yellow AI, a leading conversation AI platform for enterprises to automate customer experience. He is a tech entrepreneur with over 13 years of experience in distributed systems, design thinking, and rapid prototyping in various industries including enterprise cloud, e-commerce, and SaaS.

Joe Baffone leads the overall business development, strategy, and culture of Annexus Health. Prior to co-founding Annexus Health, Joe spent 7 years as a principal at onPoint Oncology, where he concepted, built, implemented, and monetized cancer access solutions. Earlier, Joe spent 20+ years working in life sciences.

A majority of his time was dedicated to the business of oncology, where he established strategies and led teams dedicated to contracting, pricing, reimbursement, payer, and access functions, as well as establishing and maintaining strategic relationships with key oncology organizations.

Art Chan

Senior Partner Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services. With over 25 years experience in the technology industry, Art has worked at a number of Fortune 500 companies as well as having founded and operated an applied data analytics company for over a decade. He’s worked at Opsware/Loudcloud (acquired by HP), one of the first companies to offer Software as a Service computing with an Infrastructure as a Service model. At AWS, he works with APN Partners, helping guide and develop their technical practice. For fun, Art is a marathon runner and a 6x Ironman triathlon finisher.

Josue Murillo Leon

Senior DevOps Engineer @ Encora. He is one of the co-leaders of Encora’s Cloud Services Technology Practice. Josue has extensive experience leading teams, from multi-disciplinary Agile teams to DevOps-only teams.

Josue’s expertise is in the AWS Cloud platform, with over 5 years of experience creating Cloud solutions across a wide variety of client contexts. He has experience designing and implementing Cloud-ready solutions, migrating applications to the Cloud, optimizing Cloud architectures, improving disaster recovery and data backup strategies, and implementing CI/CD solutions for the Cloud, using a combination of Cloud-only and hybrid solutions.

Susan Jeffers is a serial entrepreneur and digital marketing veteran with over a decade of experience founding and advising many consumer startups and fashion brands. She has deep passion for creating innovative and scalable products with a focus on UI/UX design. Her strength lies in bridging the gap between business and technology, while creating solutions on how to best leverage them to align expectations and attain business goals.

Susan has been part of the founding team for two retail startups responsible for digital marketing and consumer experience, one of which was acquired by theFind.​