Becoming a startup VPE: challenges, stories and actions

Joe is a leader, mentor and coach with over twenty years of experience at every level from engineering contributor to SVP of Engineering. Joe was a key early member of three startups that became successful public companies, and a fourth that was sold for $250M+. He currently coaches founders, CEOs and other leaders in tech to build great products, companies and cultures.

Prashant Pandey is the head of engineering at Asana, a leading work management platform for teams. Before Asana, Prashant started and led the bay area team building Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed NoSQL database service.

Previously, he led engineering for mobile advertising startup Vdopia, and prior to that, worked on storage systems at IBM Research. Prashant has an MS in Computer Science from UIUC, and a BTech(Hons) in Computer Science from BITS, Pilani (India).

Joann Anderson is the VP of Engineering at Scoop Technologies. Previously, she was at Slack where she oversaw the Core Product teams: Internationalization, Backend Foundation, Calls, and QA. Joann honed her skills in streamlining engineering processes to accelerate release delivery at Adobe and Symantec. In her free time, she channels her inner child playing Magna-Tiles with her two kids, is learning Muay Thai, and hopes one day Marie Kondo will come into her life.

Ben is the Head of Engineering at Branch International, a startup providing financial services to millions of customers in emerging markets (India, Mexico, Kenya, Nigeria). At Branch, Ben leads the Engineering & Data Science teams and is closely involved in setting overall company strategy.

Prior to Branch, Ben founded Rep, a startup focused on revolutionizing how customers communicate with businesses via messaging (funded by Accel, First Round, and others) and held senior engineering leadership roles at Google, where he led YouTube's Recommendation and Personalization teams and helped YouTube scale to over 1 billion users.