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Executive Kinections, Half Moon Bay, CA, USA

Gold Stevie Award Winner 2012, Click to Enter The 2014 American Business Awards

Company: Executive Kinections, Half Moon Bay, CA, USA
Company Description: Executive Kinections is a consultancy that offers strategy, planning, facilitation and organization development expertise to top leadership. Still in its infancy at just 1.5 years in business, Executive Kinections already counts Cisco, Riverbed Technologies, UCSF, MentorNet, and Loggly as clients.
Nomination Category: Individual Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Women Helping Women – Business

Nomination Title: Coco Brown, Founder and CEO

Describe for the judges the nominated individual's activities and accomplishments that provided support and assistance to other women since the beginning of July last year (up to 525 words):

Coco has been actively supporting women for over ten years. She co-founded and runs PowerChicks, a “women in executive leadership” dinner group. Coco invests her own time and money to organize and run the group, and members rotate funding of events. There are over 150 members, with 20-40 at any given quarterly dinner. PowerChicks, introduced in 2013, grew out of a “Women in IT Leadership” dinner group Coco started in 2004. It has expanded beyond IT to any C-suite role and all industries.

Late in 2013 PowerChicks dinners were augmented with the addition of a LinkedIn Group, helping it to experience notable growth beyond the San Francisco Bay Area. Participants come from organizations such as Intuit, Oracle, Chevron, esurance, Upstream, Summit Public Schools, Autodesk, UC Berkeley, Adobe, Hummer Winblad, Golden Seeds, UC Santa Clara, Proteus Biomedical, Celestica, Wells Fargo, Stanford, etc. PowerChicks has become very important to its members. Even having reached incredible levels of achievement and notoriety, these women talk of how much this group helps to strengthen their confidence and resolve as a female leader. It has also help them find ways to support other women; often this is a topic of discussion over dinner with invited guests from local non-profits helping women.

Coco’s deep connections with and support of women in the San Francisco Bay Area is well known. A couple of testaments to this are the following. Unbeknownst to Coco her women leadership dinners were mentioned by both Cindy Reese, SVP of Global Operations for Oracle and Amy Stansbury, CIO of the Gap during Oracle World in 2013 where these two women were leading a panel discussion on the value of having a support structure. The discussion was part of Oracle’s Women Leadership (OWL) track at the conference. Cindy mentioned Coco’s dinners and how incredibly valuable she found them to be, and Amy chimed in that she too had been to one and had the same feeling. Several friends texted Coco from the event to tell her about it. In addition to this recognition, Coco was recently asked to be on the nominating committee of Anita Borg’s most prestigious award, the Technology Leadership Award given out at Grace Hopper in the fall. She was approached by two of the current nominating committee members who both know Coco through her dinners. Finally, Coco was awarded Silicon Valley Women of Influence in 2010 for her dedication and support of the community and her role modeling as a successful female executive in Silicon Valley.

Coco also participates with two non-profit boards, MentorNet and Samasource. MentorNet has helped over 30,000 students in their achievement of STEM degrees; 78% of which are women and underrepresented minorities, 92% of which graduate in a STEM field, compared with about 50% nationally. As expressed in the letter of recommendation from the CEO of MentorNet, Coco has been critical to MentorNet’s ability to thrive into the future. Coco also supports the Board of Samasource as an advisor on the finance committee. Samasource brings digital work to women “trapped” in impoverished or war-torn countries, giving them the opportunity to create meaningful careers regardless of environmental circumstance.

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Provide a brief biography of the nominated individual (up to 125 words):

Coco is an executive with 20+ years experience in Silicon Valley technology companies. In 2013 she founded a consultancy called Executive Kinections. Prior, Coco was a Shareholder and Director of Taos, a 400+ person IT Services business, where she was President and COO from 2007 to 2012.

Coco is an active advocate and supporter of women. She is the Founder and Leader of a Women Leadership Dinner exclusively attended by women CxOs and VPs in top tier companies. She is on the Board of MentorNet and the Finance Committee supporting the Board of SamaSource. Coco is on the nominating committee for the Anita Borg Technology Leadership Award, and was recognized in 2010 as one of the Silicon Valley's Top Women of Influence.