DanaeSterental
Partner
Danae is a Partner at Westbound. She is an educator, culture designer and executive coach and the founder of HereWe, a firm that helps startup- and growth-stage leaders make their company cultures explicit, aligned and equitable.
A UC Berkeley and Stanford GSB alumna, Danae has managed Google’s employment brand globally (including releasing Google’s workforce demographic data for the first time in 2014), worked as an Organizational Designer at IDEO, and lectures with Stanford faculty on courses like “Entrepreneurship from Diverse Perspectives”, “Equity by Design: Building Diverse & Inclusive Organization”, and “The Psychology of Startup Teams”. Danae is originally from Venezuela and her experience as an immigrant is at the core of how she approaches her work.
Creating a truly inclusive culture is not something that happens in one big moment or as part of one initiative. Inclusion (and exclusion) happens day-to-day: It happens when we solicit perspectives from those who have been quiet in meetings, when we create criteria before making decisions, when we ask others to give us feedback proactively… This kind of intention and commitment to equity and inclusion is what we work on and expect of each other (and of our portfolio companies) at Westbound.
