Our Board & Leadership Councils
JOSH SILVERMAN
MAURYA COUVARES
ELIZABETH PISACRETA
DR. JOHN DAVIS
CARYN EFFRON
DAHNI-EL GILES
STEPHANIE J. HULL
DAVID KALT
SCOTT MEYER
LAUREN STATES
JOHN KODUMAL
SHAWNTEE REED
JOSH SILVERMAN
National Board
Josh’s two decades of leadership experience include growing consumer technology companies and scaling global marketplaces. He currently serves as Etsy’s Chief Executive Officer, leading the company as it builds a platform that empowers creative entrepreneurs around the world. He is also a member of Etsy’s board of directors. He previously served as President of Consumer Products and Services at American Express, CEO of Skype, and CEO of shopping.com, and he held various executive roles at eBay. Earlier in his career, Josh co-founded Evite, Inc. where he also served as the company’s CEO. He is currently on the board of directors of Shake Shack. Josh has a deep commitment to community and civic engagement. He was a seed investor in Code Nation, where he has served as Chairman since 2013. Mr. Silverman holds a BA (Magna Cum Laude) in Public Policy from Brown University, and an MBA from Stanford, where he was class Co-President and an Arjay Miller Scholar.
MAURYA COUVARES
National Board
Maurya Couvares is National Director at Laureus USA and the Co-founder and former CEO of Code Nation, a national nonprofit that equips students in under-resourced schools with the fundamental coding skills and professional experiences that together create access to careers in technology. For her work with Code Nation, Maurya has been honored as an IgniteGood/Huffington Post Millennial Impact Fellow, an Ashoka Emerging Innovator, a Catalyst by the City of New York, a NY Business Journal Woman of Influence and was named as one of seven millennials “too busy changing the world to take selfies.” In 2006, she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from BC, graduating cum laude with a major in Philosophy and a minor in American Studies. While an undergraduate at BC, she spent a year abroad in England at Oxford University, Mansfield College where she studied philosophy and politics as part of a visiting student program. Maurya is also an All American triathlete and has competed with Team USA at the triathlon world championships.
ELIZABETH PISACRETA
National Board
Dr. Elizabeth Davidson Pisacreta (Liz) is the co-founder of Code Nation and has previously served as its Chief Education Officer, responsible for overseeing program implementation, volunteer training, and curriculum development. In addition to serving as Code Nation’s Secretary of the Board, Liz is currently the Associate Director for Policy and Research at Ithaka S+R, where she leads the American Talent Initiative, a collaboration between Ithaka S+R, the Aspen Institute’s College Excellence Program, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and 131 top colleges and universities, each committed to enrolling and graduating more low- and moderate-income students. Previously, Liz served as the deputy chief strategic officer in the Division of Talent, Labor, and Innovation at the New York City Department of Education, where she oversaw policy, communications, and implementation of NYC’s teacher evaluation and development system for more than 75,000 teachers and 1.1 million students. Liz also has experience consulting with various educational organizations on data strategy and analysis, and teacher and school evaluation design and implementation. Liz began her professional career teaching high school math in Philadelphia’s public schools. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of Georgia, a master’s degree in Urban Education from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D. in Economics and Education from Columbia University.
DR. JOHN DAVIS
Bay Area Council
John is an engineer and manager at Google where he focuses on identifying and mitigating privacy risks, designing anonymization strategies, and studying biometric systems. Public facing services that John has worked on include Google’s anonymization approach for sharing Covid search related data to public health officials and designing a privacy resilient Covid testing service (via the Google subsidiary, Verily). Prior to joining Google, John worked at IBM Research and the RAND Corporation, among other companies. John holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from UC Berkeley and a bachelor’s degree from Howard University. John has been a long time volunteer in mathematics at the high school level and, when not Googling or tutoring, John enjoys hitting the ski slopes, road biking and trying to re-learn the piano.
CARYN EFFRON
National Board
Caryn Effron is a senior managing director with Ackman Ziff Real Estate and has over 20 years of experience in commercial real estate finance. In 2008 she founded GoGirl Finance, an online community geared towards empowering women in all stages of life to become financially confident and knowledgeable through the development of financial literacy skills. Caryn is also an experienced angel investor, an advisor to 37Angels and has particular interest in edtech and women’s entrepreneurship. In addition, Caryn is on the board of Say Yes to Education – a non-profit education foundation committed to increasing high school and college graduation rates for inner-city youth throughout the country; a member of the board of Games For Change – a non-profit which facilitates the creation and distribution of social impact games that serve as critical tools in humanitarian and educational efforts; and a member of the board of Code Nation – a non-profit which empowers students to be creators of technology by offering computer programming classes in under resourced high schools, and summer internship opportunities where they apply their coding skills. Caryn received her BA from The University of Michigan and MBA from New York University.
DAHNI-EL GILES
National Board
Dahni-El is passionate about climate action as well as creating opportunities for young people. He co-founded DonorsChoose.org, an online charity making it easy for anyone to support public school students and classrooms with donations exceeding $1 billion. Via UpRhizer, Dahni-El provides thought partnership, strategy, and public speaking services about the climate crisis and climate action. Currently, Dahni-El also serves as Legal Counsel at Sila Nanotechnologies, an applied battery materials company. Born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, Dahni-El is a graduate of Harvard University, Georgetown University Law Center, a Coro Fellow in Public Affairs, an Oliver Scholar alumnus, and a Bleeker Fellow. Serving on the Code Nation board since 2013, he also served on the Board of Trustees at St. Paul’s School in Concord, NH from 2016 to 2022, and serves on the Board of Directors for the Ecological Citizen’s Project.
STEPHANIE J. HULL
National Board
Dr. Stephanie J. Hull earned her bachelor’s degree in French Literature at Wellesley College and her master’s and doctoral degrees at Harvard University in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. Her dissertation focused on the cinematic adaptation of Enlightenment literature and culture. She began her academic career as an assistant professor in the Department of French and Italian at Dartmouth College, becoming Assistant Dean of the College after serving in that capacity for an interim year in her fourth year and discovering an affinity for administration. As a dean in the First-Year Office, Dr. Hull also taught as an adjunct assistant professor in the Women’s Studies Department and directed the Integrated Academic Support program, which provided tutoring to first-generation students and underrepresented minority students in English, math and physics. After six years at Dartmouth, Dr. Hull went on to serve for five years as the Assistant to the President and Secretary of the College at Mount Holyoke College, where she also taught as an adjunct in the French Department. For the next eight years, she was Head of the Brearley School, a girls’ K–12 college preparatory school in New York City, where she led a highly successful capital campaign and long-range planning process and oversaw the introduction of a number of new initiatives, including a partnership with a nearby public charter girls’ middle school and a summer travel/study program with trips to India, China and Vermont. A Massachusetts native, Dr. Hull resides in Princeton and also has a home in Easton, Connecticut. She is currently studying Mandarin and oil painting; her hobbies include dressage, mystery novels, and collecting and restoring vintage Vespa scooters.
DAVID KALT
National Board
David has spent his career building software and technology businesses. His passions lie at the intersection of music, coding, and finance. David is deeply committed to spreading the joy and benefits of coding to under-served communities. Most recently, David was the founder and CEO of Reverb.com, the leading global marketplace for musicians. Reverb was sold to Etsy in 2019. Prior to Reverb, David was co-founder and CEO of optionsXpress; an early fintech company focused on making options trading easy for retail investors. David took optionsXpress public in 2005 and the company was sold to Charles Schwab in 2010. David started his first software company in the mid-’90s called ClientBASE. ClientBASE was eventually sold to The Sabre Group. Mr. Kalt received his BS in Political Science from The University of Michigan and MS in Computer Science from Depaul University.
SCOTT MEYER
National Board
Scott is an accomplished CEO, entrepreneur, consultant and board director with a strong track record in public and private companies. Currently, Scott is a Managing Director in PwC’s Deals Strategy group. He consults with private equity firms and their portfolio companies to help drive returns from their data strategy and digital technology efforts. Scott joined PwC after founding his own consulting practice, Glenview James LLC. Scott has over 20 years of operating and entrepreneurship experience. Most recently, he was CEO and founder of Evidon. Scott incubated the business concept as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Warburg Pincus, which backed the company. At Evidon, Scott built the Evidon and Ghostery brands into dominant business-to-business, and business-to-consumer, software solutions. The investment culminated in two separate, all-cash transactions in 2017 worth $57 million, delivering a positive return to shareholders. Prior to Evidon, Scott spent eight years at The New York Times Co. He served as CEO of About.com and general manager of NYTimes.com. Scott started his technology career running Multex’s business-to-consumer division (acquired by Reuters after an IPO). Early in his career, Scott worked in investment banking at Merrill Lynch & Co. and in consulting at The Boston Consulting Group. His pro bono experience includes serving as interim Chief Digital Advisor (pro bono) to Brown University President Christina Paxson, and serving as Chairman of Brown’s Alumni Communications Advisory Council, in addition to his role at Code Nation. Scott holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and and Bachelor of Arts in Public Policy from Brown University.
LAUREN STATES
National Board
Lauren is an experienced technology executive having spent her career at IBM addressing complex business challenges in a broad variety of roles including technology, strategy, transformation, sales, and talent development. Prior to her retirement, she was Vice President, Strategy and Transformation for IBM Software Group, responsible for the sales force strategy for the company’s multibillion-dollar software business. Previously, she was a leader in IBM’s transformation to cloud computing serving as Chief Technology Officer in corporate strategy. She is widely recognized for the development, growth, and mentoring of leaders within IBM and across the business and academic communities. Currently, Ms. States serves as an independent director on the publicly held corporation boards of Clean Harbors, Inc. (NYSE: CLH), Diebold Nixdorf (NYSE: DBD), and Webster Financial Corporation (NYSE: WBS). Across these boards, she serves as a member of the Audit, Risk, Nominating and Corporate Governance, Technology and Environmental, Health and Safety committees. Ms. States has a CERT Certificate in Cybersecurity Oversight, issued by the NACD and Carnegie Mellon University. She also served as a Commissioner on the NACD Blue Ribbon Commission report on “Culture as a Corporate Asset”. Ms. States serves as a Director for Code Nation and as a Trustee for International House, NY. She holds a B.S. in Economics from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, a Certificate in Business Excellence from Columbia University Business School Executive Education, and completed a Fellowship with Harvard University’s Advanced Leadership Initiative in 2015. Lauren was inducted into the Women in Technology International, Women in Science and Technology Hall of Fame in 2014. In 2018, Lauren received the Grace Hoadley Dodge Community Leadership Award from the YWCA of New York City. Women Inc. Magazine named her as one of 2019’s Most Influential Corporate Board Directors.
JOHN KODUMAL
Bay Area Council
John is CTO & Co-Founder of LaunchDarkly, the leading feature management platform. John was a development manager at Atlassian, where he led engineering for the Atlassian Marketplace. Prior to that he was an architect at Coverity, where he worked on static and dynamic analysis algorithms. He has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in programming languages and type systems, and a BS from Harvey Mudd College. He climbs rocks, ice, small boulders, and the occasional building.
SHAWNTEE REED
Bay Area Council
Shawntee is Head of Inclusion and Diversity at Block. In this role, Shawntee oversees a team focused on designing I&D resources and implementing solutions that build an environment where both potential and current employees feel supported and represented. An accomplished executive, change agent and educator, Shawntee’s progressive organizational development and leadership experience spans corporate banking and retail, higher and primary education, financial services, and retail.