Rising to the Occasion
We launched the Board Xcelerate program in February, to create a more inclusive center of power in the boardroom, moving away from the narrow and time-consuming approach of sourcing board search candidates through immediate networks. Boardroom diversity matters for several reasons: diverse teams are just smarter (it’s a proven fact!); today’s complex corporate risks and opportunities require varied expertise; and diverse teams challenge conformity and breed the radical innovation required to keep pace with change. To date, we’ve placed 24 underrepresented executives on boards of private tech companies, and we’re just getting started.
As community builders, we hold ourselves accountable to the same growth goals we put forth to our industry. Our culture and values drive our growth — to be the change and bring ALL in. We know change starts at the top and progress for a few is not progress. At All Raise, we’re putting the walk behind our talk to be more inclusive of founders and operators — moving beyond our founding roots as investors — and to expand representation, via geography, skills that are critical to scaling our success, and via gender, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. While there is more work to be done as we continue to thoughtfully expand our board, we’re thrilled to announce the powerful, dynamic, and influential voices joining the All Raise Board of Directors sourced through our own Board Xcelerate!
“It’s important to expand the All Raise board now because having diverse voices, contrasting backgrounds, and different strengths in the boardroom makes organizations stronger.” — Jenny Lefcourt, All Raise Founder and Freestyle General Partner
Finance executive and business transformation leader, Jessica Ross, joins us from Salesforce. With superior growth leadership for a Fortune 500 company and her integral role in Stitch Fix’s IPO, we’re honored to be the first board seat of her career. Global marketing champion, Deirdre Findlay, runs the global consumer marketing efforts for Condé Nast. She brings to the table key experience launching international brands and products like Stitch Fix and Google Home. Startup advisor and former co-founder/CEO, Sarah Nahm, knows what it takes to design, develop, and execute success for a startup. She welcomes every opportunity to build improvement from scratch.
While All Raise’s roots began in the VC community, we recognize that founders and operators are the true heroes of the tech industry, envisioning the future and willing it into existence. We’ve intentionally built our community, knowing maximum impact will be achieved via a coalition across the VC, founder, and operator communities; and integral to that is having that same representation at the board level.
“Sarah, Deirdre, and Jessica are world class founders and operators, each successful in their own right but with very different paths. Sarah came from design and product at Google and was cofounder & CEO of Lever. Deirdre has a marketing background across tech, media, and consumer, from Google Hardware to Olaplex to Conde Nast. Jessica grew up in finance at Deloitte, StitchFix, and Salesforce. That diversity of perspectives will help us better understand our customer, broaden our community, and design programs that make a bigger impact.” — Jess Lee, All Raise Founder and Sequoia Partner
Adding Sarah, Dierdre and Jessica is an important first step in our BoD buildout, but we’re not finished. We do our best work as a community and expanding our BoD is no different — we want to build with you in public. To best serve the community we’re building towards, our board must represent the future. Specifically, we are building towards the spectrum of diverse voices — functional, experience as founders, operators and investors, age , ethnic, sexual orientation, and geographic as key focal points. Our board, community, and peers are helping us on this journey. Jenny Lefcourt sums it up perfectly, “All Raise was (and still is) missing key perspectives and experience and we know all too well that those “misses” enable blindspots. We are thrilled to add some critical voices to the mix and still have more to add in order to accomplish all we have set out to do.”
Raise change with us.
All Raise Board in Conversation (Q&A)
The newly expanded All Raise Board of Directors got together and chatted about the companies they wish were in their portfolio, VCs they admire, All Raise’s mission, and the disruptive forces required to affect industry-wide change. Read on to see what they had to say.
More About the New All Raise Directors
Jessica Ross, EVP Finance and Chief Transformation Officer, Salesforce
Jessica Ross is a finance and business transformation executive with over 20 years of cross-industry experience spanning consumer business, healthcare and technology. A “finance leader by trade and change leader by heart”, Jessica’s career has been characterized by a deep commitment to leadership, strategy, transformation and growth.
In her role as EVP Finance and Chief Transformation Officer, Jessica is responsible for developing and delivering the global Finance organization’s vision and roadmap for scale and growth, Finance M&A, as well as driving operations excellence for the company through global shared services. She leads with her values as the executive sponsor of BOLDforce, the Black employee resource group, working to build community and empower future leaders.
Prior to joining Salesforce, she served as VP Controller, at Stitch Fix, where she was instrumental in the November 2017 IPO and the company’s transition to a publicly traded company. Jessica has more than 20 years of progressive leadership experience, including 12 years of public accounting at Arthur Andersen and Deloitte, and executive finance roles at Kaiser Permanente and Gymboree.
Jessica lives by her values of family, integrity and impact. She is themother of two children and is passionate about developing young women, professionals and youth to reach their full potential.
Deirdre Findlay, Global Chief Marketing Officer, Condé Nast
Deirdre Findlay oversees all consumer marketing efforts globally for Condé Nast, focusing on driving consumer revenue, brand development, audience insights and growth, digital strategy and increasing subscription and memberships.
Deirdre was previously the Chief Marketing Officer at Stitch Fix, where she oversaw the launch of the company’s first integrated brand campaign, and launched the brand in the U.K. Prior to Stitch Fix, she spent five years at Google in a number of roles, including Senior Director of Global Hardware Marketing for Google Home, Chromecast and Wifi. In this role, Deirdre launched Google Home with an innovative campaign that quickly immersed Google Home in the cultural zeitgeist globally. Prior to Google, Deirdre held several leadership positions at eBay and Digitas, and worked with clients including Kaiser Permanente, Whirlpool Corporation, Miller Brewing, Nokia and Allstate Insurance Company.
She is a member of the Board of Advisors for the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, the Effie Worldwide Board, and the Board of the Sonos, Inc. Deirdre has been honored with Adweek’s Brand Genius Award and named among the Advertising Age Women to Watch in 2019 and Forbes 50 Game Changing Marketing Leaders.
Sarah Nahm, Co-Founder, Lever & Startup Advisor
Sarah is a startup founder, technology executive, proud female CEO, and self-proclaimed generalist. Over the years, she’s threaded together product, design, sales, marketing, customer success, support, and communications.
Sarah co-founded Lever in 2012 because she was deeply interested in the future of work. She built a simple, modern hiring platform and embraced the broader mission to connect human potential to meaningful work. Sarah became CEO in 2014 and served for seven years. During this time, she built Lever’s go-to-market strategy, raised three rounds of capital, and scaled the organization through several stages of growth.
Sarah’s journey to where she is today began with design. She had this realization that if the world were going to move forward, real people were going to have to make it happen, and she could be one of those people. She’s always chosen to walk the path where she can’t yet imagine the destination. An avid learner, Sarah’s made every life and career decision so far by putting herself in situations where she doesn’t have the answers.
