Best Tech Manager (Boston) | Jeanne Hopkins leads Ipswitch’s worldwide marketing organization, building a metrics-based powerhouse to fuel demand for the company’s IT management tools.

Best TeBest Tech Startup (NYC) |Imbrex is founded on the principle that all stakeholders in the real estate industry should be in control of their proprietary data, and the belief that maintaining individual ownership. To Imbrex, decentralizing access is the path to a truly global network in listing and transacting real estate.ch Startup (NYC) |Imbrex is founded on the principle that all stakeholders in the real estate industry should be in control of their proprietary data, and the belief that maintaining individual ownership, while decentralizing access is the path to a truly global network in listing and transacting real estate.

Best Tech Workplace for Diversity (Washington DC) | We strive to embed Diversity & Inclusion focused best practices into workflows across our organization. We believe this strategic outlook yields better hiring outcomes and inclusion effectiveness. Specific to hiring, our Recruiting Operations team personally vets all job descriptions to make sure they do not contain bias language or require unnecessary skills or credentials that don’t directly pertain to success in the role. Next, we have set and received executive buy-in for hiring aspirations for our technical division. Our hiring metrics are focused on 3 key areas in the hiring process: sourcing, interviewing and offer rates with an emphasis on gender minorities and race/ethnic minorities.

Best Tech Workplace for Diversity (Toronto) | Indellient deserves the Best Tech Workplace for Diversity award because of their efforts to incorporate inclusion in all facets of their business. This begins from the hiring process, where the HR reps search for candidates based on more than the required skills for the job, but what makes them stand out, their hobbies, interests, what languages they speak and their hidden talents. They use resources like Unbiasify to reduce unconscious bias during the hiring process. They also pride themselves in being an equal opportunity employer and eliminating the gender bias in our field. See for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI74FZt1AhM&feature=youtu.be

Best Tech Startup (San Francisco) | OverOps is disrupting IT operations and the software delivery supply chain by equipping development and DevOps teams with unprecedented insight into the functional quality of applications to help them ensure software reliability and avoid costly downtime.

Best Tech Startup (Boston) | Buoy has a friendly text/chat-based interface that allows users to interact in a familiar medium, providing a level of comfort in their moments of sickness and concern.

Best Tech Work Culture (Boston) | Talla employees have the opportunity to help change how businesses engage with their employees. The best ideas come from individuals who feel challenged and free to stretch their creative muscles.

Best Tech Startup (Washington DC) | MetiStream is passionate about innovation and creativity and is always pushing the boundaries of technology. As a healthcare analytics company using the bleeding edge of AI and ML techniques, we help healthcare organizations maximize the use of their data assets to improve patient outcomes, decrease risks and accelerate healthcare discoveries. Through our product, Ember, we can integrate all healthcare data types, from clinical, claims, and genomics, and provide end-to-end search, analysis, and prediction. Deeply engaged and connected with the big data community, we are also the Founders and organizers of the Washington DC Area Apache Spark Interactive and AI and Big Data Healthcare Meetups with ~5000 members.

Best Tech Startup (Toronto) | Xesto is building a machine learning platform to change the way creators and developers think about interaction – they can now leverage natural user interaction in their creations. Using Xesto’s patented IP creators will be able to prototype & build experiences with integrated gesture recognition interfaces through an API in minutes. Similar to how NLP was a catalyst for speech recognition, the machine learning engineers at Xesto are applying spatial analysis for gesture recognition. They enable gesture recognition & interaction on current hardware (iPhone X, VR headsets, smartphones coming out, etc..) allowing creators to prototype and build exciting experiences across industries and technologies. Their tracking technology can be leveraged in AR & VR from both a shopping perspective (try on experiences) to interaction with virtual objects on smartphones.

Best Tech Manager (Toronto) | Dave promotes career growth within his team by allowing members of his team to take turns hosting weekly lunch and learns to the organization. The goals of these lunch and learns vary from demonstrating what specific employees are working to providing visibility to the organization. They also serve as a way to expose his team members to potential areas of interest they may not have known much about. He is very involved in encouraging his team to take courses and attend workshops outside of the office that can strengthen their skills as leaders themselves and push them out of their comfort zones to learn new skills. He empowers his team on a daily basis by always making sure the company vision and strategy is well articulated while not micromanaging or becoming stressed when under pressure.

Best Tech Work Culture (Los Angeles) | With dual offices in Helsinki, Finland and Los Angeles, CA, Seriously brings together the mobile games capital of the world and the entertainment capital of the world. The merging of these two locations creates a unique work culture and environment that challenges employees to see from the creative marketing and entertainment side, as well as the technical and creative gaming side.

Best Tech Work Culture (NYC) | Beyond understands that successful teams are based on diverse people with different backgrounds, collaborating in safe and positive environments. Beyond organizes into cross-functional teams allowing the tech team to be involved far earlier, learn from others and help influence the direction of their projects.

Best Work Culture (Orange County) | At SendGrid, engagement is our passion. We love our customers and are dedicated to helping them connect with their users. We spend every day nurturing our unique “4H” culture, holding ourselves to a standard worthy of our customers. SendGrid incorporates input and feedback from existing employees. The space features an open floor plan design, floor-to-ceiling windows, pairing rooms for engineers to code together and many collaborative workspaces! We honor the values of honesty, happiness, humbleness, and hungriness.

Best Tech Manager (Boston) | Gina's greatest strength as Chief of Product for Ovia Health is that she knows the women and families who use our apps better than anyone. When Ovia launched its first app, Ovia Fertility, Gina spent countless hours and days interviewing women who were pregnant or trying to conceive. Women in her life, women in her friends' lives, women who were brave enough to answer a Craigslist ad: if you were pregnant or trying to get pregnant in the Greater Boston Area at that time, chances are, you talked to Gina. This is because the business of women's health is so personal to her: she cares deeply about supporting women and families at home, in the workplace, and beyond. She's a user of Ovia's three apps herself, using Ovia Fertility, Ovia Pregnancy, and Ovia Parenting on her own path to parenthood with her two daughters, Hazel and Quentin.

Best Tech Manager (Los Angeles) | Chris always makes himself accessible to the team and genuinely cares about their happiness and career growth. He has crafted a clear and understandable framework outlining guidelines to empower Software Engineers to improve and succeed on three aspects, Technical, Execution and Leadership. He communicates the direction for team’s projects and continually support the progress with meeting and 1-1’s, yet gives freedom to his team members to make their own decisions on how to get to the end goal.

Best Tech Startup (Toronto) | DNAstack is a software company that develops cutting-edge technologies that help scientists discover and treat the causes of genetic diseases. Its main product, the Canadian Genomics Cloud, is an integrated platform to manage, analyze and share genome sequence and clinical data. This public cloud computing platform, the first of its kind in Canada, gives every scientist in the country unfettered access to award-winning technology empowering precision medicine and other applications in genome research. By building infrastructure that better shares data, tools, and compute resources nationally, we stand to vastly increase the value of each genome sequenced and the power for those data to drive new insights that will help improve and save the lives of people affected by genetic diseases.

Best Workplace for Diversity (Orange County) | Jabil Inc is a global company which promotes and understand the added value of diversity and inclusion. In an industry dominated by man, Jabil is proud to present a year over year growth of women representation in manufacturing, management and support roles. Our engineering teams consist a mix if genders, nationalities and religions. Those teams are the main reason why Jabil Inc is considered as one the global leaders in manufacturing automation, especially for custom applications.

Best Tech Work Culture (Los Angeles) | To ensure a good cohesion in the entire engineering department, once a week we all have lunch together and split into random groups of 4/5 people. The company also has an extensive on boarding program to ensure any newcomers get all that they need and team up with a "buddy" who is someone out of their own department to ensure that they are really nicely integrated into the company.

Best Tech Startup (Los Angeles) | UpKeep is a mobile-first solution for maintenance management. Our user-friendly solution allows users to snap a picture of a broken piece of equipment, create a work order, and send it off to a technician for repair - all from a mobile device.

Best Tech Startup (Toronto) | DarwinAI is one of the leading Artificial Intelligence startups in Canada. Founded by leading academics at the University of Waterloo, our technology leverages AI itself to generate highly optimized deep neural networks without sacrificing functional accuracy. Moreover, this IP enables ‘explainable’ deep learning – the ability to understand why a neural network reaches the conclusions it does (critical in highly regulated industries).

Best Tech Manager (Boston) | David Safaii is CEO of Trilio, the Massachusetts-based data protection company that’s taking on the backup paradigm. David joined Trilio in 2014 as the company’s first non-founding team member and has grown the company from a fledgling start-up to a venture-backed, rapidly growing cloud infrastructure-as-a-service company. In only a couple of years, David secured the resources to develop and productize what started as an open source project, brought the new solution to market, quickly secured a handful of key customers, and locked down a series A funding round to continue the company’s growth. Through David’s leadership, Trilio has since been on a rapid growth trajectory (of both customers and employees), with even more accomplishments to come. Throughout all these milestones, Trilio remains a relatively lean company in an industry filled with heavily funded startups and weighty enterprise organizations. David uses this as an opportunity to take an active role in managing both his direct reports, and the development of the company as a whole.

Best Tech Manager (Boston) | Agero has a number of outstanding Tech Managers. However, the contributions of Balaji Srinivasan over the trailing 12 months stand out. More remarkable, this is a leader with 20 years of service. Some with that tenure can tend to “coast”, but year on year Balaji grows his team’s capabilities and kicks it into another gear.

Best Tech Startup (Boston) | The Elemental Machines team is comprised of transformative leaders with diverse professional backgrounds. Team members have previously worked in the energy, media, education, life sciences, consumer, and technology industries. So,what brings this unique group of individuals together? The answer is that each team member is motivated to be a part of the pioneering team for IoT for life sciences industry.

Best Tech Startup (Los Angeles) | Bitcoin IRA, the first and largest cryptocurrency platform that allows customers to purchase Bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies for their retirement accounts, is working to disrupt the problematic state of retirement in America.

Best Tech Workplace for Diversity (Toronto) | Having recognized that diversity is a pillar of this success, CMiC actively participates in global hiring practices by sourcing talent from all over the world to find the essential competencies, professional experience and demonstrated success necessary to fuel the company’s ‘innovation engine.’ CMiC believes that by leveraging Canada’s growing pool of highly skilled immigrants, it can leverage the fresh perspectives they bring to enhance our approach to creating new products, bringing them to market and deploying them in partnership with hundreds of customers.

Best Tech Startup (Chicago) | RhinoDox is a cloud-based, end-to-end Intelligent Content Management platform for Manufacturing companies aimed at helping front-and-mid-office teams move content into a digital world so that it is safely stored, easily found and quickly integrated into their daily processes. We focus on reducing the time these teams spend searching for and finding documents so they can spend more time growing revenue.

Best Tech Work Culture (Chicago) | Having a fun, dynamic company culture is one of our top priorities. With offsites, continuing education opportunities, volunteering events, quarterly social events, and snacks (so many snacks!) we're always investing in our team. This dedication to culture allows us to attract and retain top talent in the digital industry.

Best Tech Work Culture (Toronto) | Localcoin provides an open-space work environment that allows their employees to collaborate on ideas and work together in a free setting. With food provided every day, along with complimentary coffee and drinks to recharge, Localcoin accommodates their employees with the necessary supplies for a successful day. In addition, the directors are very hands-on with their employees, providing guidance whenever necessary as well as the freedom to pursue projects without micro-management.

Best Tech Startup (San Francisco) | The Sauce Labs mission is to free organizations from the burden of testing so that developers can innovate and deliver no fail applications faster. With scrappy startup roots and passion for helping developers innovate faster, they’ve led the industry forward and have received a number of industry accolades for doing so.

Best Tech Startup (San Francisco) | With over 200,000 stays booked and over 110,000 of those within the last year, Sonder is quickly becoming the new way to stay. Sonder doesn’t force guests to choose between the conveniences of a hotel and the authenticity of a rented home, creating a new market segment that offers the best of both options.

Best Tech Work Culture (Los Angeles) | At SnackNation we have environment in which employees are empowered to entrepreneurial in their roles, regardless of whether they’re an executive, manager, or individual contributor. All ideas are judged on their merits, and team members are encouraged to create solutions – campaigns, programs, or even whole departments – that didn’t previously exist.

Best Tech Workplace for Diversity (Washington DC) | Ostendio has three founders - each one an immigrant or a minority founder (or both!), so diversity has always been important to the company right from the get-go. At Ostendio, we believe that what makes us different allows us to thrive, which is why we place such a big emphasis on building an inclusive environment.

Best Tech Manager (San Francisco) | As founder of Infield Digital, Marc leads a team of engineers, designers, and marketing specialists helping companies in multiple industries with their digital transformation. A deep knowledge of strategic communications has led him to guide numerous multi-channel campaigns bridging online and offline media.

Best Tech Work Culture (Boston) | Cimpress is a strategically-focused group of 12+ ecommerce businesses, including Vistaprint and National Pen, all managed in a decentralized, autonomous manner. It has created an edge in the market through a best-in-class tech culture that collaborates to solve real business problems, encourages team members to push the status quo and promotes idea-sharing.

Best Tech Work Culture (Boston) | Curriculum Associates, an educational technology company on a mission to make classrooms better places, focuses heavily on its tech team’s growth and well-being.

Best Tech Startup (Boston) | GreatHorn protects businesses using ubiquitous cloud email platforms from today’s sophisticated email threats by automating detection, remediation, and post-delivery incident response.

Best Tech Workplace for Diversity (Toronto) | TWG is committed to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. We follow hiring best practices and have launched initiatives designed to ensure that workforce is diverse. In May of 2015, TechGirls Canada and TWG launched a year-long pilot project to explore, test and report on a set of strategies for boosting gender and racial diversity, equity and inclusion. We are also huge supporters of the LGBTQ+ community, sponsoring such events as Venture Out. TWG had a booth at this year’s conference and supported one of our employees, who spoke. In the area of recruitment, we have developed a close working relationship with Global Skills, a company dedicated to pairing the world’s top technical talent with Canadian companies using the new federal Global Skills Strategy.

Best Tech Workplace for Diversity (Toronto) | At Wattpad, we’ve long recognized that diversity is our strength. Our company culture, our teams, our ability to innovate, and ultimately our product, are all made stronger by the variety of perspectives, experiences, and voices that make up Wattpad. Wattpad’s commitment to diversity has been established since Day 1. The fact that we were founded by two people of colour (one of whom is an immigrant), in Canada (one of the most diverse countries in the world), has helped us maintain a more diverse perspective than most technology companies. In fact, one of our core values is #Inclusive. Today, we’re proud to say that a majority--56%--of Wattpad employees are women and for a more intersectional look at our team composition, we’re proud to say that People of Colour make up close to half (45%) of all Wattpad employees and 41% of our Leadership Team. Company-wide, 21% of Wattpad employees are Women of Colour, 15% are non-native English speakers, 8% identify as having a disability, 13% identify as LGBTQ+, and 3% are transgender.

Best Tech Startup (NYC) | After uncovering a need for mobile workers that lies between crammed coffee shops and the sky-high price tag associated with big name co-working giants, KettleSpace leverages underutilized hospitality space in the NYC market, KettleSpace by providing affordable membership-based workspace solutions for freelancers, creatives, and budding entrepreneurs, while providing a new, profit-rich revenue stream to restaurant owners and leading hospitality partners.

Best Tech Startup (Toronto) | Ritual saw significant opportunity to transform the restaurant industry and digitize local commerce, following in the footsteps of the way the retail industry was transformed. After seeing large companies, like Starbucks, heavily investing in their digital solutions, they knew there was opportunity to help local restaurants compete. While this opportunity is open to many industries including restaurants, health and beauty and other non-retail categories, Ritual Founder, Ray Reddy, determined that the right starting point was Quick Service Restaurants. Not only is it a trillion-dollar market globally, but there is no other vertical outside of quick service restaurants that people transact with on a daily basis.

Best Tech Manager (Washington DC) | After being named CIO in 2015, Amy Doherty focused on continuing the evolution of IT into a value creator and innovator within AARP. She has creatively built bonds and lines of communications with the ITS team through regular meetings to better understand how things are progressing. Shortly after, delivery of projects were up ninety-six percent and there were thirty-four percent fewer outages.

Best Tech Startup (Philadelphia) | BSD Education is dedicated to empowering the kids of today with the tools for tomorrow. They partner with schools globally to make it easy to integrate tech and coding into all subjects, without the need to hire skilled professionals. To do this, they have developed innovative and engaging curriculum, offer professional development and have built an online learning platform.

Best Tech Manager (Silicon Valley) | Eugene IS the company culture. He lives and breathes it. It's almost hard to explain in words just how much Eugene has done for the company, its culture and its employees. He knows everyone's wive's/husband's names and checks in regularly not just about work, but about personal life, whether the person is a high level executive or an intern. He makes sure there are team building events, that everyone is happy within their teams, and no one is left behind by weekly check ins with the HR and Administration teams.

Best Tech Workplace for Diversity (Toronto) | Destiny Solutions hire employees based on skills and qualifications and are not biased against gender and/or ethnicity. During our hiring process, we focus on the candidate’s cultural fit and their alignment with our core values, which allows us to build a diverse team. Our team composition is 40% female and 60% male and our employees also come from different cultural and social backgrounds which cultivates different opinions and views. We also actively hire students and new graduates to help evolve our company with new ideas.

Best Tech Workplace for Diversity (San Francisco) | Mapbox strives to embed Diversity & Inclusion focused best practices into workflows across their organization. They believe this strategic outlook yields better hiring outcomes and inclusion effectiveness.

Best Tech Workplace for Diversity (Boston) | Payfactors is working hard to promote and encourage diversity of backgrounds and diversity of thought. We have grown our monthly "Women Talk Tech" lunches from a small group of 5 or 6 to a group of over 20 women in tech. It has been amazing to watch the program grow to include women of all ages and backgrounds, coming together to discuss the industry we all support.

Best Work Culture (Orange County) | Ad Exchange Group cares about their employees mental, physical, and social health. For the body, free yoga, meditation, and tai chi classes are provided in office weekly. For the heart, fun-filled events are held regularly to entertain and engage the workforce, such as bowling competitions, office Olympics, game nights, and more. For the soul, ADEX corporate throws social responsibility events such as clothing drives for Working Wardrobes, charity auctions for Colette’s Children’s Home, or a full day of volunteering at Someone Cares Soup Kitchen in Costa Mesa.

Best Tech Work Culture (Toronto) | What makes the Slalom Delivery Center different? The answer is a common one across Slalom: Our People, Our Values and Our Culture. Who we are in the delivery center is the fabric of our being, and the people that sit in our Delivery Centers are the soul of what happens here. So what makes the Slalom Delivery Center different? We start with the Slalom Core Values, focus on skill, curiosity and collaboration, and then mix in a true affection for our client’s best interests and what emerges is a dynamic, energetic place where writing software becomes a joy, and delivering excellence for our clients becomes commonplace.

Best Tech Manager (Orange County) | Craig Stapleton has worked at Advantech for 27 years and his decades of knowledge and positive interactions with clients have helped shape the company’s roadmap and guided the future direction of its gaming solutions. Craig exemplifies strong leadership through his attention to detail, exceptional mentorship practices, and emphasis on cross-training and maximizing his team’s individual skill sets.

Best Tech Startup (Philadelphia) | Guest-Rm is innovative and disruptive by being the first of its kind to focus on a network of friends and friends of friends; encouraging travel in a safe and cost effective way to inspire users to travel and explore the world.

Best Tech Manager (San Francisco) | When looking at prospective candidates the #1 thing Ilan looks when interviewing is that they are a "nice, good and genuine person". Ilan cares more them being a nice, pleasant person to work with because he wants everyone to work together harmoniously.

Best Tech Workplace for Diversity (Toronto) | We have built a diverse and inclusive team that has shaped the foundation of our company and culture from our very core throughout our entire organization. Diversity at Betterez represents diversity of thought, cultural background and abilities. We speak nearly 10 languages and strive to attract talented people from diverse backgrounds during our hiring process; people who represent the vast clientele that we have from around the world. Together, our employees are building and shaping the foundational core of our business through their own perspectives.

Best Tech Manager (Chicago) |CTO Perry Moutzouros’ top focus at Oranj is providing a great team culture, as well as promoting career growth. He prides himself on his ability to evaluate talent that doesn’t fit in a box, and while each engineer is originally hired to fill a specific role, Perry also realizes that roles change as fast as technology and encourages taking on new roles to promote growth – not just technical growth as programmers, but also social and professional growth as humans and leaders.

Best Tech Startup (NYC) |Zipari is a technology start-up company based in DUMBO, Brooklyn, NY. They’re on a mission is to disrupt the insurance industry by introducing consumer-centric solutions powered by data analytics. They employ individuals who want to build a company, a culture and solve complex challenges.

Best Tech Work Culture (Chicago) | We foster a creative and free thinking, work hard/play hard environment by providing for employee wellbeing. As a mission-driven culture, we give back through a lot of community events like food drives and volunteer work. On a weekly basis, employees have access to holistic benefits like healthy organic food, yoga, massages and personal trainers.

Best Tech Workplace For Diversity (Los Angeles) | Evite fosters a best-in-class environment in which all employees can excel, regardless of gender, race or belief. While Evite does not set a specific quota for the diversity mix for any team or the company overall, Evite's hiring process strives to find the best candidate possible and that is achieved by its unique hiring criteria. Candidates are evaluated based on three core measures: required capabilities, energy accretive and real output. By looking at each candidate holistically, Evite boasts a leadership team comprised of 54% women, and across the organization, women account for 55% of all employees. Diversity and inclusion play a critical role in employee development. Whether it be through our monthly "Lunch and Learn" highlighting International Women’s Day, guest speakers from various backgrounds or a men's bake off, embracing and celebrating diversity is a key reason for Evite's growth.

Best Tech Workplace Diversity (Boston) | MineralTree breaks the mold of a typical startup by employing team members that span a broad range of age groups.

Best Tech Manager (Orange County) | Bill Cunningham always takes time to listen to his employee’s ideas, questions and concerns. He is always looking for ways to support and develop his team. He shows a great deal of compassion and is always asking what he can do to help. At the end of the day, Bill has managed to perfectly balance his roles and become a business partner, mentor, and friend to all.

Best Tech Workplace for Diversity (Philadelphia) | Penji's core strength is their diversity. Everyone in the company has come from a unique/diverse background and permeates through their marketing. The company make up is predominantly women and also people of color. They have also started an internal podcast called Shades of Success that highlights individuals making strides in the world of diversity and inclusion, with the focus of making positive change within their community.

Best Tech Startup (Toronto) | Shorcan requires top tech talent to operate on the cutting edge since their hybrid model allows traders to access the marketplace via voice or electronically. It is a known fact that cryptocurrency is tied tightly to technology so without seeking the best talent it would nearly be impossible to maintain competitive in the market. As a startup, it is vital to remain competitive by demonstrating cutting edge talent and understanding the technological needs of what the market requires especially since traders would have access to our marketplace electronically.

Best Tech Manager (Orange County) | Tim Sullivan is dedicated to bettering the careers and personal lives of his team. He prioritizes learning and growth and ensures that his team has the proper tools to be more efficient and grow along with the tech industry. Tim is also a philanthropist who loves to give back to the community and sets an inspiring example for his team and colleagues.

Best Tech Startup (Washington DC) | United Income is an innovative startup in the online investment management and financial planning space. It was founded by Matt Fellowes, a seasoned financial services executive who sold his previous fintech startup, HelloWallet, for over $50 million. Since its 2017 launch, United Income has been featured in over 150 media stories highlighting its executives’ insights and employee-written reports. The company now manages $420M in assets.

Best Tech Startup (Los Angeles) | LeafLink, the largest wholesale marketplace for the cannabis industry, has over $600MM in annualized revenue moving through its many verticals, allowing 600+ brands and over 2,100 retailers to create efficiencies with its custom-built cannabis commerce platform, with inventory management, streamlined ordering processes, and CRM capabilities.

Best Tech Startup (Silicon Valley)|LeafLink currently processes an estimated 9% of all legal cannabis wholesale orders in the US. Additionally, the company focuses on developing a close-knit, collaborative corporate culture in many ways. Every month the company presents an “AcoLLade” to someone who exemplifies one of their core values (on their careers page). The company also takes a team trip to one of the states they operate in for hitting an annual company goal. The company is currently planning one of these outings for hitting a $500M sales goal. LeafLink also has a program called LeafLinkUp where employees are paired across their offices nationally to have a 30 min phone chat to get to know each other better.

Best Tech Work Culture (Chicago) | As a data-driven business, the technology team at Infutor is a large contributor to the success of the company. Infutor’s commitment to maintain a company culture of innovation, transparency and support are all factors that have helped place them in the top 20 on the 2018 Crain’s Chicago Business Best Places to Work List.

Best Tech Manager (Chicago) | Throughout his 20-year career Erik Brown, a senior director in West Monroe’s Technology practice, has honed his skills as a trusted business consultant and deep technologist, enhancing his ability to serve as an exemplary advisor to both his team and senior client executives. As an early employee of the firm, joining West Monroe in 2002, Erik has played an integral role in leading the people first culture at West Monroe. He has a passion for delivering complex technology-enabled business solutions in a variety of platforms, and he’s known for mentoring engineers and technical managers both within West Monroe and on client teams.

Best Tech Startup (Philadelphia) | One of NeuroFlow's core company values is "have a healthy disregard for the impossible". They are disrupting the health care space, adding immense social value, and delivering great experiences to their users. The company was founded on the belief that owning your own data can drive needed behavioral change. As such, Neuroflow will help users gather and analyze data from any source they can - from cutting edge wearables in body monitoring to encouraging habit-forming self-reporting.

Best Tech Manager (Los Angeles) | With over 10 years of B2B and B2C custom software experience, RJ has developed noteworthy expertise in tech. Her impressive background working with esteemed companies such as Google, AB InBev, and DuPont coupled with her unique management style make her a beloved leader. RJ is a compassionate mentor, a fiercely efficient manager, and an incredible female role model. She directs her attention not just to senior leadership but also to junior employees. RJ takes the time to mold junior employees -- taking them under her wing to help them recognize their strengths and become the best versions of themselves.

Best Tech Startup (Toronto) | Vena Solutions was founded 7 years ago by 3 guys in a coffee shop who recognized that Excel was pervasively used by medium and large businesses to do financial planning and analysis but had severe limitations when it came to collaboration, data integrity, auditability and the data volumes large companies generate. The initial product prototype connected Excel to a database in the cloud so that Excel becomes a window onto your financial data but the data is securely stored online