On Wednesday, September 30th, Michelle Travis, author of Dads for Daughters: How Fathers Can Give their Daughters a Better, Brighter, Fairer Future, hosted a panel conversation with Brian Weisfeld, author of The Startup Squad, Anthony Onesto, author of Ella Adventures and Co-Founder Brian Anderson. During the conversation they spoke about the important work that dads can be doing to help open doors in the business world, hold one another accountable, and dive deeper into their own understanding of gender to make this world a more gender equitable space for our children!
Participant Bios:
Anthony Onesto is a leading expert on culture, human resources, and talent. Anthony joined the Suzy Team to help scale and drive its mission and vision around culture, talent, and human resources. Anthony brings a unique approach to Human Resources, using design-thinking principles to build a human-centered organization.
Most recently, Onesto worked as the General Manager for U.S. operations of a global innovation, media and education company called Konrad Group. Prior, Anthony spent time leading the U.S. strategy and operations for SmartUp, a SaaS learning and development startup. He has years of experience in scaling and building culture, human resources, and talent for fast growth technology and innovation companies, including Solidstreaming, Fresh Direct, Zeta Interactive, Big Fuel, and Razorfish.
In 2015 he founded Ella Adventures, a company that produces a comic book and cartoon series called Ella the Engineer. The purpose of the comic is to encourage young girls to pursue interests in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) and Entrepreneurship. He most recently launched The Ella Project, where awesome women in tech are interviewed and profiled. In 2017, he also co-founded an artificially intelligent-powered HR agent called KAE.ai, which is in beta launch. Anthony is the host of New Yawk HR, a podcast show with a contrarian view of Human Resources and Recruiting.
Anthony is a certified consultant in ExO (Exponential Organizations), which is part of Singularity University. He is also a board advisor to well-funded and high growth tech startups like Namely, Rolepoint, Talentrackr, and Makerspace.NYC, who have collectively raised over 100m in venture capital. He is currently writing a book focused on advising companies on how to prepare for GenZ entering the workforce.
Brian Weisfeld has been building businesses his entire life. As a kid, he bought gummy bears and hired his friends to sell them. As a teen, he sorted baseball cards, babysat, and sold mixtapes. As an adult, he helped build well-known, billion-dollar companies including IMAX Corporation and Coupons.com. But after watching his oldest daughter struggle to sell Girl Scout cookies, Brian decided to write a novel series to inspire girls to open their first businesses and to empower them with an entrepreneurial mindset. Brian is the Founder and Chief Squad Officer of The Startup Squad, an initiative dedicated to helping girls reach their potential and follow their dreams, whatever their passions. Brian lives in Silicon Valley with his wife and two daughters.
Visit and learn more about Brian at thestartupsquad.com, on Facebook at @chiefsquadofficer or on Twitter at @weisfeld. You can also learn more about The Startup Squad at @thestartupsquad on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and more!
Michelle Travis is a law professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law. She is an expert on employment discrimination law and serves as the Co-Director of USF’s Labor and Employment Law Program. Her research focuses on sex discrimination, gender stereotypes, work/family conflict, and disability discrimination in the workplace. She teaches courses on employment law and civil litigation, and she has won multiple teaching awards. She has a J.D. from Stanford Law School and a B.A. in psychology from Cornell University. Information on her work as a law professor is available here.
Michelle grew up in Colorado and now lives in the Bay Area with her husband, two daughters, and pet chinchilla. She is a former collegiate gymnast, a novice ballerina, and an avid non-fiction reader.
