Ascend NorCal GROWTH
Speaker Bios
Moderators
Win Chang
Technical Director
Oracle
Win Chang is Oracle's North America Government and Education Solution Engineer Director. She began her career as a software engineer, developing financial application solutions at Texas Eastern. In 1990, Win joined Oracle as a technical support manager, providing exceptional customer service. Later, she worked as an Applications Sales Consulting Manager for several years, managing a global Solution Engineers. Win also worked at Siebel Systems and Hyperion before joining LogicalApps as the Customer Experience Vice President with responsibility for several business lines, including consulting services, customer success, education, and customer support. She grew the consulting services portfolio by 200% and received the highest customer experience ratings. In 2008, Oracle acquired LogicalApps; over the last few years, she has held several critical roles at Oracle, including Key Account Director, Customer Success Director, Cloud Accelerator Director, and Cloud Customer Experience Director.
In October 2021, she received the FY21 Government and Education Leadership Award for her commitment to Customer Satisfaction, Employee Satisfaction, Trust, Quality, Leadership, Business Results, and Diversity & Inclusion. Win was the recipient of the Oracle CEO's Cup Award for account management excellence in 2011, 2013, and 2014.
Over the last 12 years, she has served as the Oracle Women's Leadership Redwood Shores community leader, focused on giving back to the community, professional development, and empowering women to lead beyond. This community delivers monthly events to the Oracle Women's Leadership community. Win was honored with the YWCA Silicon Valley 2014 TWIN award, the 2015 Professional Businesswomen of California (PBWC) Industry Leader award, and the 2016 Powerful Women of the Bay award.
Win is the founder and served six years as the chairperson for the Oracle Professional Asian Leadership (OPAL) Employee Resource Group. She currently serves as an executive advisor to OPAL. Today, OPAL has over 27 communities globally with over 5000 members. OPAL is an organization that inspires Oracle employees to leverage the ERG platform to build Asian culture awareness, career development, professional development, cross-company collaboration as well as engagement with the external community.
Win serves as the Member at Large on the Executive Board for the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on raising awareness of the experience of immigrants into America through the Pacific. In 2021, Win joined the board of ASCEND NorCal, a non-profit Pan-Asian organization for business professionals. Lastly, she is an active mentor for Women Unlimited Inc., an organization focused on leadership, education, and networking.
Win was born in China, grew up in Miami, Florida, and now lives in Redwood Shores, California, with her husband, Mike Chang, and children, Nicholas, Madison, and Michael. She is fluent in English, Mandarin, and Cantonese. She also enjoys traveling, cooking, and succulent gardening.
Jordan Kang
Sr. Strategic Project Manager
The Clorox Company
Jordan Kang is a Sr. Strategic Project Manager with the Clorox Company. He has spent the previous 20+ years in the Consumer Foods and Biotech Industries in various Operational Management and Process Excellence management roles. He is also a Board member for Ascend and is involved in various non-profits that provide services to the Korean American and adoptee communities. He attended Emory University for undergrad and the University of South Florida for grad school. He resides in San Francisco with his wife and four children.
Executive Mentors
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Lisah Burhan
VP Investor Relations
The Clorox Company
Lisah Burhan is currently the head of Investor Relations for the Clorox Company. Her career as a senior financial analyst on the company’s Glad business. Lisah has been with Clorox for 18 years, working in various finance roles and businesses. Prior to Clorox, she held various positions at Nestle and PricewaterhouseCoopers in their Southern California locations. Lisah was born in Indonesia and spent her teenage years in Singapore before moving to the US. She received both her undergraduate degree and MBA from the University of Southern California. In her spare time, she likes to travel, hike and discover new food.
Maz Songerwala
Senior VP, Applications Service Excellence
Oracle
Maz Songerwala, Senior Vice President, Applications Service Excellence, OracleMaz Songerwala leads Application Service Excellence at Oracle, which includes the global cloud support organization and customer success. His team is responsible for ensuring that customers are successful across their entire journey with Oracle SaaS and on-premises applications, including implementation, go live, and ongoing value realization. His team’s goal is a seamless and friction-free experience for our customers.
Prior to Oracle, Maz led Customer Experience at Palo Alto Networks. There he helped customers achieve their business outcomes through the adoption of security best practices; ensured an exceptional brand experience via self-service, community engagement, and digital portals; and developed tools and analytics to accelerate feature adoption and manage operational performance.
Earlier, Maz held professional services, operations, business development, strategy, and services delivery roles at Cisco.
Maz holds an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley and degrees in computer science from Columbia University (MS) and Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Australia (BS).
Early Career Mentors
Shirley Bai
Associate Director Enterprise Risk Management
Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco
Shirley serves as an Associate Director of Enterprise Risk Management at Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco. Prior to this, she held several other roles within the organization, including business project manager, counterparty credit analyst, and internal auditor roles. Beyond her professional accomplishments, Shirley is a passionate advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). She has been actively involved in the bank's Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), having founded and co-chaired the Working Parents Network ERG. Today, she continues to support the group as an Advisory Committee Member, working to promote a more inclusive and supportive workplace for all employees.
Jennie Ly
Innovation & Strategy Senior Manager
Moss Adams
Jennie Ly is an Innovation & Strategy Senior Manager and a certified public accountant at Moss Adams, LLP. Jennie pursued Accounting and Management Information Systems at University of the Pacific, and went straight into public accounting providing assurance services for the last 10+ years at Deloitte and Moss Adams. In 2020, Jennie transitioned into Innovation by leading innovation-related projects (data analytics, automation, machine learning) and business transformation initiatives, focusing on solutioning, implementing, and training new technology platforms and applications, and upskilling the workforce. Jennie is also the leader of Moss Adam’s Asian Business Resource Group and a big advocate for renewable skills (don’t leave the firm just yet (being replaceable), find your new passion first and transfer – renewing your skill sets) and work-life balance. Jennie married her high school sweetheart, has 2 children (4 if you count the fur-babies) and loves spending time with her family in Sacramento, CA. Jennie loves tapping into her creative side with arts & craft projects or playing video games with her family, seeing smiles from friends eating her delicious infamous cheesecake, and indulging in her desires for adventure.
Mid-Career Mentors
Bill Ling
Corporate Tax Director
Airbnb
Bill Ling is the Corporate Tax Director of Airbnb with responsibility over a wide range of tax areas including, international tax planning and structuring, M&A, transfer pricing, US international compliance and reporting, tax controversy, tax policy matters, new business initiatives, and supporting the business on tax matters.
Bill’s nearly 25 year Tax career began with Arthur Andersen in San Francisco, moving on to Deloitte, Alvarez & Marsal Taxand, and back to Deloitte prior to joining Airbnb.
Bill is a Certified Public Accountant in California and Massachusetts. Bill graduated from the American University with a Bachelors of Science in Business Administration as well as Baruch College in New York City with a Masters of Science in Taxation.
Katherine Li
Ascend Member and Co-Founder
Butterfly FX
Katherine builds, advises, and invests in startups in the US, Europe, and Southeast Asia. Particular areas of interest include: Fintech, digital health, and EdTech. She has been on the senior leadership of several companies, building strategy and operations teams, opening doors with new clients, and launching innovation projects. Outside of work, Katherine likes to engage with and support local art, music, and dance communities.
Vivian Wong
Group VP of Higher Education
Oracle
Vivian Wong is an excellent collaborator and communicator with strong leadership skills, with over 20 years’ experience building on-premise, SaaS, and mobile products for PeopleSoft, Oracle, Taleo, ServiceMax, and TargetX.
As Group Vice President of Oracle Higher Education, Vivian currently leads the product development team at Oracle for higher education. Under her direction this team is building a next generation student information system - Student Cloud - which through its groundbreaking approach to empowering institutions and students globally will disrupt the industry.
Vivian is strategic, results-oriented and highly focused on customers’ success. An expert at building, transforming and leading high-caliber teams, Vivian is talented at fostering an empowering, fun and collaborative environment to unleash the full potential of an organization. Vivian is a strong customer advocate; she ensures quality, usability, performance and scalability are always designed and built into the solutions she delivers.
Vivian is passionate about making the world a better place. For team bonding, she leads her teams to practice philanthropy.