Portia Kibble Smith is the head of Diversity and Inclusion at Karat. Portia is committed to diversity and inclusion in the workplace and has a proven track record of attracting and retaining top talent throughout the country, both majority and minority. Her expertise is in diversity and inclusion, recruitment, sales, consulting, finance, business development and relationship management.  Her previous work experience has been in leadership and sales positions at Xerox, IBM and Sprint.

Portia Kibble Smith is a Kansas City native and a graduate of the University of Kansas, where she earned her Bachelor of Science Degree in Personnel Administration from the School of Business. She is a lifetime member of the National Black MBA Association and is currently a board member at the University of Kansas Alumni Association’s National Board.  She is a former board member at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and Howard University’s Business School in Washington, D.C. She currently resides in Overland Park, KS.

Cat Miller walks upright and has bilateral symmetry and opposable thumbs, which she uses to navigate the technology world as a VPE at Flatiron Health.

Mikaela Smith has spent the last two decades working in tech as a Talent professional with a passion for high growth start-ups and companies. A results oriented executive, she focuses on strategy and execution when building teams and a workforce.  At the core she believes that people are the strategic advantage of any organization, and for that you need core values and attributes that define your people and products. A self proclaimed organizational nerd, she is passionate about helping to execute and build high functioning teams within mission driven companies. Diversity is at the core of this belief, as a product is a sum of its people, and a successful product will be a product that has a global reach and impact.

As a leader, Mikaela has built world class teams globally and has worked in every region in the world. For the last 5 1/2 years, she has been building teams at Slack helping to change the Future of Work. She leads their Global Executive Search & Leadership function and supports a team of talent professionals to bring in the best leadership talent in the market.

Stephanie Alofoje is a seasoned marketing professional with over a decade of experience. Stephanie is currently the Director of Global Employer Brand and Recruitment Marketing at Twilio. Twilio is a developer platform for communications: the Twilio Customer Engagement Platform. Twilio powers communications for more than 190,000 businesses and enables nearly 932 billion human interactions every year.

Stephanie leads a globally-distributed team focused on enabling Talent Acquisition to attract top talent of diverse backgrounds globally through their unique employer brand and recruitment marketing efforts. Stephanie is skilled at crafting narratives, developing multi-channel brand campaigns, and spearheading content creation to build brand awareness, engage candidates, and drive business outcomes. Stephanie is also passionate about diversity and inclusion and has led many initiatives at Twilio to build an inclusive culture to attract and retain top talent of all backgrounds. Prior to Twilio, she worked in marketing roles at Intel and PayPal.

Stephanie is Nigerian American who was born in Chicago but has lived all over the world. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Foreign Affairs and Psychology at the University of Virginia and Master of Business Administration with a concentration in Marketing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Stephanie moved to the Bay Area to break into tech after completing her MBA and is currently thriving in the tech industry. She resides in Oakland, California.

Ivori Johnson(She/Her) is currently a Sr. Manager, Diversity Recruiting Programs at Better. Her role at Better is designed to further develop and scale all efforts to build diverse and inclusive pathways to working at Better. Additionally, she leads the strategy and execution of all D&I programs within Talent Acquisition. Ivori has over 8+ years of DEI recruiting and talent engagement experience within tech at companies like Twitter and Google.

Lydia Dishman is Fast Company’s senior editor for growth and engagement. She has also written for CBS Moneywatch, Fortune, The Guardian, Popular Science, and the New York Times, among others.