Celebrating AAPI Women
Celebrate API Heritage Month in San Francisco with a panel of amazing AAPI Women in Venture Capital, Deep Tech and Corporate America.
Join GlobalSF Women, The Philippine Consulate in San Francisco and Dynamico in honoring the women who have fueled the growth of our economies and the strength of every company they start or work for. Thanks to the generous support of United Airlines and ShortStory.
Meet Our Speakers and Moderator
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Papia Gambelin
MANAGING DIRECTOR,UNITED AIRLINES
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Carina Ruiz Singh
MANAGING PARTNER, DELOITTE
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Christina Laskowski
CHAIRWOMAN, STAC - SILICON VALLEY
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Sue Xu
MANAGING PARTNER, AMINO CAPITAL
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Helen Fu Thomas
CO-FOUNDER, ANYQUEST AI
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Special Guest: Isabella Sun
FOUNDER, SHORT STORY
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Moderator: Darlene Chiu Bryant
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, GLOBALSF
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Papia Gambelin
Papia Gambelin is a nationally recognized executive in business, community, and government leadership. A master connector between people, ideas, and causes, she is widely respected for her work. Prior to joining United Airlines to manage west coast government relations, Mrs. Gambelin was president of Platinum Advisors’ Silicon Valley division where she led political strategy and public affairs initiatives for respected Fortune 100 brands. Her work with emerging and well established companies in a variety of industries including energy, education, transportation, development, and environmental has created opportunity for businesses to grow revenues and champion diversity. With her strong versatile and technical knowledge, she has developed political strategies, brokered partnerships between private firms and nonprofit associations, advised public agencies on communications plans, and represented developers and companies to gain approval of land use projects from local and state governments.
In 2009, the Silicon Valley Business Journal named Mrs. Gambelin among the 40 most influential people in the region under the age of 40, and in 2014, the YMCA of Silicon Valley honored her with the organization’s Trailblazer Award. Her participation on boards throughout the Bay Area aligns with Mrs. Gambelin’s passion to serve diverse communities and create healthy, prosperous places to live and work. She is a Senior Fellow of the American Leadership Forum of Silicon Valley, and a member of the Exceptional Women Awardees Foundation.
In 2021, Mrs. Gambelin was named a Power Player by Silicon Valley Magazine in the publication’s most prestigious annual issue. She and her husband, Darrin, live on the beautiful Silicon Valley peninsula, and are the proud parents of two boys and two dogs.
Carina Ruiz Singh
Carina is the Silicon Valley Managing Partner and leads Advisory’s Telecom, Media and Entertainment Sector in the US. She has 25 years of experience in treasury strategy & design, finance, banking, and consulting. She leads large-scale treasury transformation initiatives that have enabled clients to restructure their treasury organizations and realize transactional and structural benefits.
She has advised clients of all sizes – from $1b unicorns to over $100b clients in the design, structure, and implementation of their respective treasury groups. This includes modeling the business case for streamlining initiatives as well as determining end-to-end process flows to support efficient structures. She has reorganized treasury groups with global coverage and implemented these in the Americas, Europe, and Asia with consideration for the impact of the model to tax, legal, accounts payable, IT and accounting.
Carina has led multiple divestitures in the TMT space requiring the re-design and implementation of the treasury functions of the split businesses. This required the stand-up of over 600 bank accounts across 60 jurisdictions, covering all the facets of the treasury organization, including enablement of payments capabilities ranging from checks, ACHs, to wire transfers. The engagements included the development of a strategic expansion of treasury’s responsibilities, a gap analysis of current resources to end-state requirements, an assessment of treasury system options to support the end-state design, and the end-state process flows to outline transactional and data movements across various stakeholders.
Prior to joining Deloitte & Touche LLP, Ms. Ruiz held various positions in a global financial services institution. She has served in a regional financial control capacity in Asia as well as a brokered products trader in Manila, Philippines. She is a licensed CPA in California.
Christina Laskowski
Christina Laskowski is a senior strategy, transformation and change professional. Prior to its acquisition by Broadcom, she served as a Change Leader at VMware, Inc. where she was responsible for leading change on priority Go to Market, Sales Operations, SaaS transformation and M&A integration initiatives. Previously, Christina was a senior strategy and change management consultant to Fortune 500 clients. Prior, she was Senior Vice President at FBR Capital Markets, TMT Investment Banking. She launched her strategy and finance career in equity research at Hambrecht & Quist.
Christina is also an active non-profit leader providing strategy advisory services. As President of STAC Silicon Valley, she developed and implemented a monetization pathway for the Philippine Department of Science & Technology's R&D investments which resulted in the Philippines' startup ecosystem taking form in 2011, $350 million in venture capital to find its way to the Philippines by 2015, and the country securing a meaningful role in the ASEAN startup ecosystem.
In the Fall of 2023, Christina returned as an adjunct professor in the MS Entrepreneurship and Innovation program (Entrepreneurial Strategy and Planning) at the University of San Francisco. She continues to advise innovation-driven startups and during the pandemic, helped launch LiVeritas Biosciences, a biotech startup focused on accelerating the drug development process.
Sue Xu
Dr. Sue Xu is a Managing Partner at Amino Capital and joined the firm in 2012, with investment theme of data moat, network effect and domain agnostic. She has successful investments from inception to unicorn in Generative AI, Consumer, SaaS and Frontier tech.
She was founding CEO of CandyHouse and CyteSi, both Stanford lab spin-offs. Since 2012, she has involved with more than 300 investments mostly in seed and Series A, with around 20 unicorns and over 35 companies with valuation higher than $100M, including Chime, Rippling, Grail(acquired by Illumina), Webflow, Weee, DFINITY, Replit, Oasis Labs, OmiseGo, Turing, Wyze, GetAccept, Guesty, Instawork, Wetravel, StarRocks, Karbon Card, Unbabel, and WriteSonic.
Dr. Sue Xu began her early stage entrepreneurship when she was the founding scientist of GlycoMira (also involved in undergrad and PhD laboratory spin-offs). She has three patents and over 20 journal publications, and previously was a medical school researcher at Stanford University
Helen Fu Thomas
Helen is the co-founder of AnyQuest, an enterprise AI middleware company that provides low-code tools and a middleware platform for building AI assistants and agents that use AI as a service. With over 25 years of experience in artificial intelligence, EdTech, edutainment, consumer electronics, robotics, gaming, D2C, B2B, and SaaS, she is a builder, enabler, and strategist who leads with vision and innovation.
Prior to AnyQuest, Helen was the CEO of DMAI, a global general artificial intelligence company, where she successfully commercialized cognitive AI technology and launched Animal Island Learning Adventure (AILA) Virtual Preschool Learning System, an AI Tutor, which was elected as the best tablet for toddlers by Popular Science. She also partnered with UCLA to develop and pilot My AI Assistant (MAIA) in K-12 classrooms. Helen has a passion for creating impactful and scalable solutions that lift humanity with AI.