Femigrants Foundation

In 2006, I stepped onto the Yale campus as a new international student on full scholarship, lacking a few things:

- No U.S. bank account.
- No social security number.
- No financial safety net. 
- No family or friends in the U.S.
- Not even a pillow.

Now, it’s 2024.

- Yale degree
- Stanford PhD
- Silicon Valley tech experience
- Coaching & training successful U.S. executives, many of whom are also immigrants.

Being an immigrant isn’t just a "status."

It's a strong signal of "relentless resourcefulness" and a broad worldview.

It's an honor now to serve as a Board Member at the Femigrants Foundation.

Board Member

Sharp Blue Insights

▪ Left Meta (Facebook) to start my consulting company
▪ Working with impact-oriented teams & executives (coaching, training, and consulting)
▪ Certified as a high performance coach, in addition to my PhD in psychology at Stanford

What my clients say: 

"Her diverse background spans psychology, technology and startups, artificial intelligence, fintech, big-tech, and her valuable worldview as an immigrant. I highly recommend Ezgi as an executive coach and thinking partner for anyone in high-performance environments who upholds a high standard of excellence and ambition. I am very grateful for her dedication and for giving me the privilege of working with her."

"I had the pleasure of working with Ezgi Akcinar recently, and my experience was nothing short of amazing. Ezgi is a phenomenal personal and professional development coach who truly understands the needs of high-functioning executives.
[...]
I highly recommend Ezgi to any executive looking to elevate their performance and achieve greater balance and fulfillment in their lives. She is a true asset to anyone seeking personal growth and professional excellence."

Founder & CEO

Facebook

▪ Led innovation & 0-to-1 product research with Facebook’s highest-revenue generating Ads clients, leading to a highly successful product launch with multi-million dollar weekly ad usage adoption immediately at product launch
▪ Proposed & led the Stanford d.School Design Thinking process with 8 different cross-functional teams, including the Product Design, Content Strategy, Product Management & Engineering, which resulted in building a brand new, high-value ads measurement product from scratch
▪ Received a "Greatly Exceeds Expectations" performance rating with a 200% bonus and merit increase

User Experience Researcher 

NETGEAR

▪ Worked closely with Netgear, Arlo & Meural Executive teams to conduct foundational research & helped define the product strategy
▪ Led the hardware and software user research for Arlo smart home products prior to IPO (NYSE: ARLO) & for the Meural digital art vertical by aligning the Product, Design, Engineering, and Marketing teams around the customer voice. At IPO, Arlo had 2.2 million users & 67 million daily video streams.
▪ Built an NPI (new product introduction) user research framework
▪ Received a merit increase for high performance

Lead User Researcher

San Francisco Bay Area

▪ Worked at Silicon Valley startups that were backed by Y Combinator, Andreessen Horowitz and other prominent investors. In addition to conducting user and product research, used statistics, R, and SQL with a hypothesis-driven approach to elucidate the mechanisms behind the changes in key metrics.

Silicon Valley Startups

Stanford University

▪ Led international research studies (data collected online, in the lab and the field in multiple countries); designed surveys & experiments
▪ Managed and mentored teams of junior researchers for several years
▪ Designed large-scale online studies in collaboration with prominent Stanford researchers, and reduced the GPA gap between disadvantaged and advantaged Stanford undergraduate students by 47%

Lead Researcher, Instructor, Research Manager 

“When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.” -Rumi

What I do:

↗︎ I give high-energy & to-the-point keynote speeches.

↗︎ I run joyful & evidence-driven workshops. 

↗︎ I work with select clients as a coach.

↗︎ I dedicate heart, time, and effort to social impact projects.

Background:

→ My Northstar is serving others with compassion & competence.

→ Coming from a disadvantaged background, I care deeply about high performance. 

→ Extensive experience working with Silicon Valley startups (pre-seed to pre-IPO & post-acquisition)

→ Ex-Meta: Led innovation & 0-to-1 product research with Meta's highest-revenue generating Ads clients, leading to a highly successful product launch with multi-million dollar weekly ad usage adoption immediately at product launch

→ Stanford Ph.D. in Psychology, Yale B.S.

→ Cyclist, coffee lover, sci-fi fan

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