Melissa Santarcangelo

Melissa joined Google in July 2019 as the Head of Sales Leadership Recruiting for Google
Cloud, building out the foundation of Google Cloud’s industry sales and solutions leadership organizations
that has differentiated Google in the Cloud space. Today, Melissa is a member of Google Cloud’s
in-house executive recruiting team, which focuses primarily on hiring Google’s most senior, customer
and partner-facing leaders. She serves as the Executive Recruiting Practice Lead and Center of
Excellence Lead for Cloud.

Prior to Google, Melissa spent a majority of her career within the financial services industry. Most
recently as the Director and Head of Executive Recruiting and Board Search at USAA, Melissa built a
robust internal executive recruiting team that attracted a record number of top senior leaders to the
organization during a time of regulatory and culture change. Melisa began her career in Talent Acquisition for Hudson Global Resources in 2005 in Auckland, New Zealand; and in 2007 relocated to San Diego, California to lead Technical and Executive Recruiting at LPL Financial; the largest independent broker-dealer in the United States.

Melissa received a Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) in Management and HR from Loyola Marymount University and has a Master’s Degree in International Relations from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, where she served as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar with a platform of Youth in Service to Others. Melissa serves as a member of the HOLA (LatinX community) at Google and part of the Google Austin Culture Club.

Dan Goodgame

Dan Goodgame is Texas Monthly’s editor in chief. A Pulitzer Prize finalist and best-selling author, Goodgame joined TM in early 2019, after serving as a vice president at Rackspace, a cloud computing company based in San Antonio. Before that, Goodgame was editor in chief of Fortune Small Business magazine, whose subscribers were more than a million owners of entrepreneurial companies. He earlier worked for Time magazine as White House correspondent, Washington bureau chief, and assistant managing editor. He is coauthor of the book Marching in Place, about the first President Bush. Goodgame previously worked for the Miami Herald, including as a correspondent in the Middle East, covering the Israel-Lebanon and Iran-Iraq wars. A native of Pascagoula, Mississippi, Goodgame earned a bachelor’s degree at Ole Miss and an master’s in international relations at Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar.

Vanice Hayes

Vanice Hayes is the Chief Culture, Diversity and Inclusion Officer at Dell.

Jeannie Steele

Jeannie Steele is the Head of Global Talent Acquisition at AMD.

Kim Colbeck

Kim Colbeck is the VP of HR for Maximus, Inc.’s US Health and Human Services business.  In this role, she oversees the Human Resources function for over 10,000 employees all over the US. Currently, she has a team of 50 HR employees reporting to her across the country, working on recruitment and retention for over 1200 state and local governments contracts.  She has been in HR for over 30 years and besides government contracting, she has also worked in a Fortune 500 Oil company for over 10 of those years.  She holds certifications as an SPHR (Senior Professional in Human Resources) from HRCI and a SCP (Senior Certified Professional) from SHRM.  She lived in Scotland for several years, is married and has two grown children.  An important part of her personal ethos is giving back and she has served on the Maximus Charitable Foundations Board of Directors, and has mentored many young professionals in their careers.

Alton L Scott

Sayar Lonial

Sayar Lonial is the Associate Dean for Communications and Public Affairs at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, in Brooklyn. In that capacity he leads a team tasked with internal & external communications, press relations, and community outreach while maintaining a wide variety of public-private partnerships to further the school’s multifaceted mission.

In addition to his communications role at Tandon, he also serves as the Interim Executive Director of the NYC Media Lab, whose mission is to amplify media innovation and build a pipeline between companies and academia, while at the same time ensuring that all of these technologies are available to as diverse a community as possible.  Lonial’s other current titles include Chair of the DUMBO BID Board of Directors, Secretary of the MetroTech BID, Executive Board member of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, and Board Representative to the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership. He is the former Chair of  Brooklyn’s Community Board 6. Previously, Lonial served as the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation’s Director of Planning & Development, ensuring community input into the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan after the September 11, 2001 attacks, overseeing such initiatives as the rehabilitation and creation of more than 30 new parks and open spaces and the creation and preservation of some 3,000 affordable housing units in Lower Manhattan. In addition to State and Federal government experience, Sayar also served as Deputy Chief of Staff in Council District 1, Manhattan. Prior to his work at the Council, he served on the Master Planning team for Brooklyn Bridge Park.

Lonial hails from Louisville, Kentucky, and currently resides in Brooklyn.

Kathryn Lundstrom

Kathryn Lundstrom is the sustainability editor at Adweek, where she leads coverage of advertising and marketing news through a climate lens. That includes everything from calling out greenwashing campaigns and analyzing sustainability reports and sorting through the role of the chief sustainability officer to identifying trends in how brands talk about climate issues. Before joining Adweek in 2019, she wrote about politics for The Daily Donut, analyzed policy at the Texas Capitol and checked facts at Sports Illustrated. She holds a bachelor’s degree in international relations from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a master’s in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin and a master of global policy studies from the LBJ School of Public Affairs.

Paul Kim

Paul Kim is the Head of Global Onboarding at Expedia Group.

Jon Greenawalt

Jon Greenawalt is the SVP of Customer Transformation at 15Five, and is accountable for the growth, expansion and delivery of the Transform education and coaching practice for leadership and management development, a key component of the company’s holistic, continuous performance management solution.

Jon is a people and culture expert, executive and strategic advisor with over 25 years of global, cross-industry experience working with management teams to build culture, values, leaders, and teams through progressive people strategies that accelerate and support business performance and organizational growth.

He is also the former Chief People Officer at SharkNinja, innovators of the popular Shark and Ninja household appliance brands, where he redesigned the global HR team to deliver the human capital strategy for IPO readiness. He modernized the function, helped re-positioned the global workforce for scale, created the Talent Development team, and was the chief architect and facilitator of the company’s core leadership development and team performance programs.

Jon received his MBA from the Duke University Fuqua School of Business, and his BA from the University of Pennsylvania.

Israel Gutierrez

As Vice President of Talent Acquisition, Israel oversees the recruiting team and larger recruiting strategy efforts at Axios, a news and media company based in D.C. Prior to Axios, Israel has been recruiting in the media and ad tech space for over a decade. Serving as Director of Talent Acquisition at The New York Times, leading Tech, Data and Marketing recruiting efforts and a team of 30+ recruiters. He also led recruiting at Dotdash (now Dotdash Meredith), leading a team of five across all business functions. Israel also served on the board for Latino Tech, a non profit in New York City focused on facilitating networking opportunities for underrepresented talent and big tech. After living in NYC for 14 years, he now resides back home in Texas.

Jeremy Schiff

Jeremy Schiff earned an undergraduate in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 2005 and a PhD in Applied Machine Learning in 2009 from The University of California, Berkeley. In 2006, Jeremy co-founded FotoFlexer.com, an online photo editing company that powered companies including MySpace and Photobucket. In 2009, Jeremy joined Ness Computing as VP of Product and Machine Learning, which was sold to OpenTable in 2014. While working at OpenTable, Jeremy saw first-hand the opportunity to transform the way that recruiting works through machine learning and automation, and founded RecruitBot in 2017 to spearhead the mission to automate recruiting

Vijay Swaminathan

Vijay Swaminathan is the Co-Founder & CEO of Draup, an AI-Driven Reskilling and Talent Intelligence Platform. Vijay has extensive experience in the areas of Product Ideation, Concept to Productization, and Platform enablement. He brings a wealth of expertise in the areas of Data Analytics, Operations Research, and Strategic Management. He has developed numerous quantitative models and heuristics related to global talent, business analytics, and strategic business initiatives.

Vijay is also the co-founder of Zinnov (a leading research & advisory firm) and TalentNeuron (acquired by CEB a Gartner Company (NYSE:IT)). Prior to co-founding Zinnov and TalentNeuron, Vijay held senior positions at Hewitt Associates and KPMG Consulting. He is passionate about translating business ideas into tangible Intellectual Property.

Chad Lafferty

Chad Lafferty leads the international growth and expansion of Attuned, with the mission to make work more meaningful for people around the world. Prior to Attuned, Chad was Managing Director of Wahl+Case, a technology recruitment firm in Japan, one of the most difficult recruitment markets in the world. These combined experiences give him insights into why people join, stay, and leave companies. He is a graduate of the University of Oklahoma and holds a degree in Journalism.

Peniel Joseph

Peniel Joseph is the Associate Dean, LBJ School of Public Affairs & Author of The Third Reconstruction at The University of Texas at Austin.

Will Anderson

Will Anderson is the Managing Editor at Austin Business Journal.

Mike Clark-Madison

Mike Clark-Madison is the News Editor at The Austin Chronicle.

Tom Miller

Emmy award-winning journalist Tom Miller anchors KXAN News Today. Tom joined KXAN in 2018, before being named to his current role in 2020.

During his time in Austin, Tom’s coverage has included the devastating Highland Lake floods where Tom walked side by side with homeowners whose homes were sitting in feet of water. Tom was also a key contributor to KXAN’s award-winning save our student’s series, which focused on improving the mental health of students. Within days of being named morning anchor, Tom field anchored outside Austin City Hall as local leaders announced the coronavirus had made its way to Central Texas.

Prior to KXAN, Tom worked in Sacramento where he covered some of the most destructive wildfires in California history. He later won Emmy and AP awards for his breaking news coverage, along with a Regional Edward R. Murrow Award in the Excellence in Innovation category.

Lynne Marie Finn

Lynne Marie Finn is the CEO of Broadleaf Results, a global workforce solutions company and member of the Aleron Group of companies. Broadleaf is a WBENC-certified WBE (Women’s Business Enterprise) that delivers total talent management solutions to Fortune 500 through mid-size companies to significantly improve the way businesses source and utilize talent.

A fierce advocate for advancing women in business, Lynne has served on the Board of Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC) where she has been honored as a Business Star and Woman of Distinction, and Women Impacting Public Policy (WIPP) and Women’s Business Enterprise Council of New York (WBEC-NY.)  She is a member of the Committee of 200 (C200)—an invitation-only international women’s business organization and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York appointed Lynne to its Regional Advisory Board.  Locally, she serves on the Boards of the Burchfield Penney Art Center and the Buffalo Niagara Partnership.

In 2021, Lynne was recognized as the “Businesswoman of the Year” by Buffalo Business First and has been a five-time honoree on its annual Power 200 Women list. Industry related awards include: Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA) Global Power 150 Women in Staffing, Influential Women in RPO Award by Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association (RPOA), and a Provider Superstar by HRO Today.

Lynne earned her Juris Doctor from the Georgetown University Law Center, where she was the Executive Editor of Law and Policy in International Business Journal, her Bachelor’s degree from SUNY Buffalo and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Prior to joining Broadleaf, Lynne served as General Counsel for Aleron (formerly Superior Group), as an Assistant District Attorney for Erie County and was in private practice, specializing in corporate and employment law. Lynne is regularly featured in publications like Forbes and Business First.

David Shapiro

David currently leads a growing team of AEs at Hibob. He has spent 20+ years in the technology space with experience that spans across infrastructure, software and SaaS.  David has held various sales and sales leadership roles at fast growing companies like Dell, Softchoice, Avalara and now at HiBob. He has spent his career running sales organizations, building winning cultures, developing talent, and driving results. David resides in Houston with his wife and daughter.

Paul Agustin

Paul Agustin is the Director of Solutions Engineering at Betterworks. A highly motivated, passionate, dedicated, and enthusiastic professional with a proven record of over 15 years of achievement in Performance Management solutions, customer success, technical support, and educational training. Paul applies his unique knowledge and expertise to help organizations transform their businesses through Modern Performance Enablement. Prior to Betterworks, he held customer success and training roles at Microsoft, Yammer, and 3M.

Rob Catalano

Rob is WorkTango’s co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer and has spent the last 18 years building HR Technology and advisory companies. Rob was on the founding team at Achievers, where he spent 10+ years growing the organization and his passion for improving the employee experience led him to co-founding WorkTango in 2015 to help companies collect and act on authentic employee feedback. He was named one of the 100 Top Global Employee Engagement Influencers each year between 2017 and 2020 and has had the privilege of speaking to HR leaders in over 40 cities.  He is an avid hockey and volleyball player, traveler, used to play guitar in a metal band, and in his own terms a ‘pointaholic’ – he collects loyalty points for everything and anything! You can reach him at rob@worktango.com or @RobCatalano on twitter.

Evan Smith

Evan Smith is the CEO & co-founder at The Texas Tribune.

Kristy McCann Flynn

Kristy has 15 years of experience as a Strategic Human Resource Leader, Change Manager and Organizational Development Expert. She has served in senior leadership positions throughout her career – most notably with Pearson Education and Constant Contact. Kristy brings a big picture perspective and a hands-on, tactical approach to her leadership that she is now bringing to life with GoCoach (where she is the CEO & Co- Founder).Kristy’s goal is to help and educate companies to meet their ultimate goals by empowering their employees to take ownership of their career.

Kazique Jelani Prince

Kazique Jelani Prince is the Global Director of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging at NI.

Trey Yost

Trey is an executive leader at Benevity, a leading technology provider of employee engagement, community investment, and DEI solutions. As a market leader and B-Corp, Benevity continues to lead the way on democratizing giving and helping companies understand how purpose drives profit. The key to this is Benevity’s focus on inclusivity where it recently outranked the sector for demonstrating this in its work.

Trey is responsible for growth and expansion at Benevity.  He leads a large and geographically dispersed team, guided by his passion for team culture and a strong belief that the beating heart of success lies within people.  He is a champion for diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging and serves as an ally and executive sponsor for Benevity’s Black Employee Network (BEN) employee resource group.   For the past eight years, Trey has rallied friends, family and colleagues in support of Heroes for Children, a Texas-based nonprofit advocating and providing financial and social assistance to families with children battling cancer.  Trey is a husband, father of two kids and dog dad to a golden doodle. As an avid triathlete, he has competed in more than 100 triathlons.