Startup Jobs 101

Ben Boyd currently serves as the Chief Technology Officer of USATestprep, a learning platform that engages and challenges students of all levels. Easy-to-use data helps teachers gauge where students are struggling and where they’re succeeding. More than 6,000 schools and 100,000 educators look to their state-aligned resources to assess, engage, and move students to the next level — all in one place.

Prior to his current role, Mr. Boyd served as the CTO of Avaaz, an online platform for internet organizing with a strong social mission. The community campaigns in 17 languages, allowing thousands of individual efforts, however small, to be rapidly combined into a powerful collective force. Mr. Boyd also spent more than six years at Discovery Communications, where he worked as both a web and mobile developer. He has experience establishing new cross-functional workflows and reporting structures to optimize use of existing technologies and processes for a newly restructured digital organization and has hired talent to fill a variety of roles in the engineering, product, and project management organizations. Mr. Boyd holds Bachelor’s degrees from the University of Georgia in Computer Science and Political Science.

Maya Carmeli is the co-founder and CEO of Cally, a team insights platform that provides visibility into team dynamics and guided recommendations directly to teams. By marrying academic research on team and organizational psychology with advances in machine learning, she helps teams create their greatest work. In addition, Ms. Carmeli is the Strategic Growth Manager at RedRoute, a voice technology company founded out of Cornell University on a mission to enhance the user experience with phone support. RedRoute’s “Alexa for customer service” provides organizations an intuitive, innovative, and cost-effective method of serving customers when and how they want, from the transportation to medical to e-commerce industries.
Ms. Carmeli holds a Bachelor’s in HR and Labor Relations from Rutgers University and a Master’s from Cornell’s ILR School. She has a background working in human resources and team consulting, specifically in large companies where she realized that traditional HR is broken.

Paulette Jencks has spent years growing revenue for startups in the parent-focused space. At Kidstir, a children’s cooking company, Ms. Jencks helped launch and grow the business into a thriving e-commerce subscription box company. At Weldon, a parent coaching and wellness startup, she led partnerships where she created and executed the go-to-market strategy for the enterprise client business. Prior to working with startups, Ms. Jencks worked in healthcare consulting with big pharma, specialty pharma, and insurance companies. Her projects were focused across digital marketing, change management, and strategy. Ms. Jencks currently works as an independent consultant focusing on business development and marketing for startups. She holds a Master’s Degree from Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management and a B.A. from Bowdoin College.

Val Mack is a web3 software engineer and smart contract developer. She is currently building infrastructure for a free and open-source peer-to-peer data management protocol called Ceramic Network, spearheaded by the NYC startup 3Box Labs.

For six years, Ms. Mack has spent nights and weekends working as an independent consultant and writing software for startups predominantly in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space. She also competes in hackathons to engage with the community and experiment with new technologies in the industry.

Ms. Mack is a mentor for the Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator and Gitcoin Kernel and a 500 Startups Bootcamp graduate, and she was previously a volunteer organizer for SF Cryptocurrency Developers, Women Who Code Blockchain SF, and the MIT Bitcoin Club. Ms. Mack holds Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees in Information Science from Cornell University.