Speaker: Julia Grace

Julia loves solving challenging engineering problems at scale, growing businesses, and leading teams. She’s currently a Senior Director of Product Engineering at Slack focused on building network effects into Slack through shared channels. Prior to joining product engineering she built the infrastructure team at Slack, growing it from from 10 to 100 engineers in 3 offices in 2 years. She excels in high velocity environments especially during hyper growth: Slack engineering headcount grew from 100 to over 600 during her 3.5 years there.   She advises early and mid-stage startups, having extensive experience not only raising venture capital funding (including from top tier investors such as Andreessen Horowitz), and sold her previous company, Tindie, where she was the co-founder and CTO. She has also founded and sat on several advisory boards for startups and as well as large, multi-billion dollar non-profits. She holds a BS with Honors and MS in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina where her research focused on operating systems, including building a distributed system that allowed peer-to-peer data sharing from internet browser caches in low connectivity. She is an avid athlete and former collegiate rower, always trying to squeeze a run in (including chasing her young daughter)!