Board

Freada Kapor Klein is the board chair the Level Playing Field Institute and an entrepreneur, activist and pioneer in the field of organizational culture and diversity. As founder of LPFI and co-founder of the SMASH Academy, Freada is a nationally recognized authority on issues of bias, harassment, and diversity. She co-founded the first organization in the US to focus on sexual harassment in 1976. She received her Ph.D. in social policy and research in 1984. As a Founding Partner at Kapor Capital, Freada invests in seed stage tech startups that create positive social impact by closing gaps of access, opportunity or outcome for low income communities and communities of color. 

Freada is also a founding member the Commission, a group of leading executives in entertainment and independent experts in Hollywood dedicating to fighting gender inequality. Freada is on the Advisory Trustee of the U.C. Berkeley Foundation and is a founding team member at Project Include, a community of women in Silicon Valley working to provide practical, effective diversity and inclusion recommendations for tech companies. She is also the author of Giving Notice, which details the human and financial cost of hidden bias in the workplace.

Maria Echaveste, J.D. is a co-founder and partner of the Nueva Vista Group (NVG), a government relations firm. Ms. Echaveste is also a Researcher and Lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley’s Boalt School of Law and Goldman Graduate School of Public Policy. Prior to NVC, she served as Assistant to the President and Deputy Chief of Staff for President Clinton from May 1998 through January 2001 and as Director of the Office of Public Liaison at the White House from February 1997 to May 1998. As Deputy Chief of Staff, she managed policy initiatives and developed legislative and communications strategies for the White House regarding various policy issues including immigration, education, civil rights, bankruptcy, trade, Latin America, AIDS and Africa, New Markets (federal effort to attract investment in under served communities) and many other issues.

Prior to working in the White House, she served as the Administrator of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, from June 1993 to early 1997. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from Stanford University and her J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.

Ross Fubini is a Vice President of Engineering at SuccessFactors (NASDAQ: SFSF). He arrived at SuccessFactors after his venture backed company, CubeTree, was acquired in June of 2010. Ross was the Co-Founder and Board Member of Cubetree, an enterprise collaboration suite that integrates social networking features like profiles and microblogging with tools like wikis, blogs etc. Prior to CubeTree, Ross was Senior Director of Engineering at Symantec.

Benjamin Jealous is a partner at Kapor Capital and former president and CEO of the NAACP. He stepped down from his post at the end of 2013. Ben has been a leader of successful state and local movements to ban the death penalty, outlaw racial profiling, defend voting rights, secure marriage equality, and free multiple wrongfully incarcerated people. Under his leadership, the NAACP grew to be the largest civil rights organization online and on mobile, experienced its first multi-year membership growth in 20 years, and became the largest community-based nonpartisan voter registration operation in the country.

Prior to leading the NAACP, he spent 15 years serving as a journalist and community organizer. While at Mississippi’s Jackson Advocate newspaper, his investigations were credited with exposing corruption at a state penitentiary and proving the innocence of a black farmer who was being framed for arson. A Rhodes Scholar, he has been named to the 40 under 40 lists of both Forbes and Time magazines. He is #1 on TheRoot.com’s 2013 list of black leaders under 45. Jealous serves as an advisor for multiple tech startups that work to close gaps, particularly in the areas of financial inclusion, justice tech, and low wage work. He serves as a board member at Pigeonly and a board advisor at PayNearMe.

Mitch Kapor is a pioneer of the personal computing industry and long-time startup investor.  He founded Lotus Development Corporation and designed Lotus 1-2-3, the “killer application” which made the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980s. He is the co-founder of The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which protects freedom and privacy on the Internet and served as the founding Chair of Mozilla, creator of the Firefox web browser.

His successful early investments in the Internet sector, and in streaming media and virtual reality earned him a reputation for seeing around corners. Along with his wife Freada Kapor Klein, for the past decade at Kapor Capital Mitch has developed a vision and practice of investing in tech startups which close gaps of access, opportunity or outcome for low-income communities and communities of color and on founders from underrepresented groups.

Through the work of the Kapor Center, Mitch and Freada take a comprehensive approach to removing barriers in education and the workplace for all and fixing the leaks at every stage of the tech pipeline. “Genius,” Mitch likes to say, “is evenly distributed by Zip Code, but opportunity is not.”

Chris Martin is currently serving as an advisor to tech companies, both big and small. Prior to focusing on advisory work, Chris ran engineering at Pandora, where he led the effort to build the initial product starting in 2004 and continued with the company through the middle of 2017. When he started at Pandora there was a technology team of 5 and when he left he was responsible for over 500 engineers, scientists and various other roles supporting the product. Through that time Pandora grew from zero active users to over 80 million monthly unique visitors, and to well over $1B in annual revenue, he grew both the team and the technology to support that growth. Previous to Pandora Chris had various engineering leadership roles at Quintus, Kenamea and QRS/Inovis.

He’s always had an interest in helping others and served as a Alameda County CASA volunteer for 10 years shortly after he graduated from college. He’s also served in different volunteer leadership positions at Berkeley Unified School District and has a passion for education.

Chris has a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Ellen Pao is the CEO at Project Include. Pao is a long-time entrepreneur and angel investor, and a more recent activist. She was the interim CEO at reddit, where she notably implemented changes to the site and company to address harassment. She previously ran its mobile, growth, and business development efforts. Ellen has written and spoken extensively about diversity and inclusion in tech, and is one of the co-founders of Project Include, an Oakland non-profit providing practical, effective diversity and inclusion recommendations for tech startups. Prior to reddit, Ellen helped build startups for seven years as a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, where she served on the boards of Flipboard, Datameer and Lehigh, and worked closely with RPX and Jive. She started her tech career in business development roles at early-stage startups Tellme Networks and Danger Research, and at WebTV and BEA Systems.

Before moving into tech, Ellen practiced corporate law in New York and Hong Kong for Cravath, Swaine & Moore. She received an MBA from Harvard Business School, a JD from Harvard Law School, and a BSE in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University, where she also received a certificate in public policy. Ellen is an Aspen Institute Henry Crown Fellow.

Duane Valz J.D. is presently a VP & General Counsel at Zymergen, Inc., overseeing a variety of matters impacting the company’s business and strategic corporate development. He has counseled a wide variety of emerging growth, public and privately held companies on intellectual property and technology matters. Duane received both his Bachelor’s and Juris Doctor degrees from U.C. Berkeley. He has advised a number of leading non-profit organizations in a director capacity.

Steven Wolfe Pereira serves as the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Encantos Media Studios, PBC (“Encantos”).

Named by Adweek as one of the “50 Most Indispensable Executives in Marketing, Media and Tech, “and with more than two decades of experience growing brands at the intersection of technology, entertainment, advertising, media and marketing, Mr. Wolfe Pereira is committed to building purpose-driven businesses and helping people discover their superpowers to ignite their true potential. Before joining Encantos, Mr. Wolfe Pereira was the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Quantcast, the leading AI-driven audience insights and measurement company. Previously, he also served as the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Neustar and at Datalogix. Mr. Wolfe Pereira has also held executive roles at Publicis Groupe, Univision and Akamai Technologies.

A passionate supporter of women and diversity initiatives as well as STEAM education, he also serves on the board of directors of the Ad Council, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF).
He earned a B.A. from Tufts University, was a Fulbright Scholar and completed the Greater Boston Executive MBA Program at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.