Yai Vargas - Founder, The Latinista
Yai Vargas is founder of The Latinista, a national network for Latinas and women of color invested in professional development and career mobility. Today The Latinista offers a series of skill-building, activity driven, hands-on sessions, specifically designed to help identify and sharpen career and business skills required to achieve professional goals. The Latinista has chapters in New York City, Chicago, Los angeles and Miami.
Yai is also a career & diversity strategist where she helps organizations develop engaging programming focused on career and leadership development. With a background in multicultural marketing and communications, Yai is a natural-born community builder and is known as the networking and LinkedIn Ninja.
Yai leads the Financial Women’s Association Emerging Leaders network of New York, has worked to develop money investing workshops for women with Ellevest, featured in MakersMoney, spoken on Yahoo Finance, featured in Forbes for her work in Latina Equal Pay Day and is a member and a brand ambassador for Luminary and The Financial Gym.
Maribel Lara - SVP, Head of Consulting, The Sasha Group
Maribel is SVP, Head of Consulting at The Sasha Group a VaynerX company. The Sasha Group provides educational, consulting and marketing services for companies from $1 to $100 million in revenue. She has been within the Vayner world since 2014. Over that time her role has included reporting to and partnering with CEO and serial entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk to execute initiatives tied to the strategic growth of the agency, launching a Diversity and Inclusion initiative called Vayner Allies and working with Fortune 100 clients to align marketing strategies with business objectives to deliver meaningful results.
Before joining Vayner, Maribel was an Account Director at M80 an agency under the GroupM umbrella. While there, she led work with brands across the Beauty, Retail, and Financial Services industries. She entered the marketing space in 2009 as a solopreneur after completing the full-time honors MBA program from the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College where she used internships and projects to focus on the emerging social media space.
Prior to her work in the corporate sector, Maribel spent the first eight years of her career focused on student development at several colleges and universities. Her last full-time role in education was as the Acting Director of College Activities at Barnard College in New York City.
Maribel is committed to mentorship, a practice she has held onto since her time working in college student services. She is particularly passionate about serving as a support and at times inspiration to Latinx women and other women of color who, like her, may not see examples of success that resemble them and their experiences. She mentors by sharing her personal story, which is one of overcoming poverty and personal loss by keeping love as the central focus in all that she does.
Ramona Ortega - CEO and Co-Founder, My Money My Future and Entrepreneur In Residence, Azlo
Ramona Ortega is the CEO & Founder of My Money My Future and Entrepreneur in Residence with Azlo. Ortega is a money expert and serial entrepreneur with over two decades of leadership in the public and private sectors. Previously she was a corporate securities attorney in New York and spent her early career focused on economic human rights. She is an expert in equity crowdfunding and contributor to TechCrunch and Huffington Post on issues of law, tech and diversity. She has been featured in Forbes, CNN, TechCrunch, American Banker, NPR, Latina Magazine, Cosmopolitan Magazine and La Opinion.
Ortega is a money expert and serial entrepreneur with over two decades of leadership in the public and private sectors. Prior to becoming a tech entrepreneur she was a corporate securities attorney in New York where she worked on complex securities litigation. She spent her early career as a policy and research analyst focused economic justice and human rights and founded a boutique research consulting firm and international non-profit. Ortega is also an Angel investor and expert in equity crowdfunding. She is a contributor to TechCrunch and Huffington Post on issues of law, tech and diversity and is an advisor with Latino Startup Alliance and Black & Brown Founder. Ortega has been featured in Forbes, CNN, TechCrunch, American Banker, NPR, Latina Magazine, Cosmopolitan Magazine and La Opinion.