Meet The Educators

Annie Belanger

WAC OWNER & FOUNDER

Annie has lived many lives, from the hedge fund world as, Female Founder, angel investor, to her most important role, the mother of 3 children.

Over the years, she has worked in finance at Conquest Capital, a CTA hedge fund, and at the Park Hill Group, a division of Blackstone where she was overseeing the marketing of third party managers in the alternative space.  What she came to realize is that a lot of women do not have the knowledge that would help them make the right investment decisions, and many are overwhelmed with all the online educational information available. She has also seen that female founders are being left out of access to capital. Annie wants to empower women to be involved with their investment decisions and hopeful.

Neha Kumar

WAC CO-FOUNDER, CO-FOUNDER NEW MONEY VENTURES AND LECTURER UCLA

Neha Kumar has over 14 years of experience operationalizing and scaling startups. She is currently running a venture fund on a mission to build the next generation of game-changing consumer-focused brands. In addition to running a venture fund, Neha is also a lecturer at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, where she has been teaching for over nine years. Before launching her fund, Neha served as the COO & CFO of Create & Cultivate (sold a majority stake to a Private Equity firm in 2020), and also led growth efforts at Drinks.com. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and her MBA from the University of Southern California (USC). She currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two young children. 

WAC CO-Founder, Consultant, Investor  

Jade Chatham consults to startups and investors, focusing on early-stage, purpose-driven companies with diverse founding teams. Jade co-founded and managed Chatham Law Group, a boutique entertainment firm, with her husband Chris Chatham prior to its exit to Manatt. During this time they facilitated high profile influencer, movie and television talent found businesses and invest in startups. Prior to this Jade worked in feature film editing for over a decade, creating and managing digital workflow for directors including George Clooney, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Stephen Soderbergh. She has additionally designed and executed several residential and commercial real estate projects. She serves on the boards of Inspired Education and Canyon Elementary School. Born and raised on the Big Island of Hawaii she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and three children. She holds a B.A. from Princeton University. 

Robin Berman

PROFESSOR OF PSYCHIATRY & AUTHOR

Robin Berman, MD, is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

Dr. Berman is a founding board member of the Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital at UCLA and an Advisory Board member of Matthew McConaughey’s Just Keep Livin Foundation.  She is the author of Permission to Parent: How to Raise Your Child with Love & Limits. She has appeared on The Today Show and Good Morning America, and her book has been featured in the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the London Times, and Time Magazine online. Permission to Parent has also been published in the UK under the title Hate Me Now, Thank Me Later.  Dr. Berman is on the Parents Magazine Advisory Board, is a featured contributor to The Today Parenting Team online, and is a regular contributor to Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP online blog.

Carol Cheng-Mayer

INVESTOR

Carol has spent over 25 years in finance, including Bel Air Investment Advisors in Los Angeles and several banks in New York and Hong Kong.

She currently focuses on investing in women-founded companies while also serving on the advisory board for Women’s Entrepreneurship Day’s Los Angeles chapter. Her investment time is energetically committed to helping other women advance their financial paths.

Carol was a founding board member for the Kobe and Vanessa Bryant Family Foundation and was on the Board of Los Angeles Advisors for The Asia Society. In her capacity as a mother, she has spent much time shepherding a group of young men through the work of Plastic Oceans to
teach the skills of public awareness and fundraising. In 2016, Carol was recognized for her work in the community by the Anti-Defamation
League (ADL), as she was a recipient of the Deborah Award. She Is currently on the Advisory Board for the Climate Emergency Fund.

Carol has a B.A. from Columbia University and an M.B.A. in Finance from New York University-Stern School of Business.

Pepper Austin

MANAGING DIRECTOR ANDERSEN

Pepper Austin has over 15 years of tax experience. She is a member of the Andersen Private Client Services group and works with high net wealth families and their related businesses, trusts, private foundations, and other entities. Pepper’s client base includes multi-generational family groups, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and founders/executives at early to late-stage companies.  

Pepper’s has extensive knowledge and expertise in the following areas:

• Personal income tax, charitable giving, estate and gift tax planning 
• Partnership, limited liability companies, S corporations, and fiduciary taxation 
• Wealth transfer and business succession planning 
• Assistance with Internal Revenue and Various Tax Authority Examinations, and
• Qualified small business stock, option and compensation planning

Pepper was also an adjunct professor for the Masters in Taxation program at Golden Gate University, teaching Advanced Federal Income Taxation. She also serves as a trustee and treasurer of several non-profit organizations. 

Supriya Barta

PARTNER BEL AIR INVESTMENT ADVISORS 

Supriya joined Bel Air Investment Advisors LLC in 2015. She delivers the firm’s wealth management capabilities and resources to high-net-worth individuals and families. With over 20 years of experience in wealth management, Supriya previously worked at J.P. Morgan, Sterling Stamos and Goldman Sachs.

Supriya grew up in Santa Monica. She went to Harvard-Westlake School, received a Bachelor of Science from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley (with Honors), and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business with a Certificate from the Public Management Program. She holds FINRA Series 7,9,10, and 63 licenses.

Emme Kozloff

PORTFOLIO MANAGER/ANALYST

Emme Kozloff is an equity portfolio manager at Capital Group. As an equity investment analyst, she covers global capital market infrastructure providers. She has 23 years of investment experience and has been with Capital Group for 16 years. Earlier in her career at Capital, Emme covered U.S. & Europe asset managers and U.S. retail.

Jesse Draper

FOUNDER OF HALOGEN VENTURES

The founding partner of Halogen Ventures focused on early-stage investing in consumer technology companies led by female and co-ed teams. Draper is a 4th generation venture capitalist and the creator and host of Emmy-nominated television series, The Valley Girl Show. She is a fierce advocate for investing in women and the opportunity to use technology and innovation to solve some of the biggest issues facing women and families today. 

Christy Glass Lowe

CEO CLOWE

Since January 2016, Ms. Lowe has been the CEO of CLowe Advisors, LLC, a strategic consulting firm specializing in capital strategy for consumer-focused businesses. Prior to founding CLowe Advisors, LLC, Ms. Lowe was a Managing Director at Imperial Capital, LLC from 2007 to 2015.  At Imperial, she founded the annual Imperial Capital Consumer Conference in 2009, which featured branded consumer companies and consumer-focused private equity investors. Prior to Imperial, Ms. Lowe was the Co-Founder & Head of Consumer Practice at USBX Advisory Services, LLC from 2000 to 2007.  Ms. Lowe was a Corporate Finance Associate at Goldman Sachs & Co from 1998 to 2000 and a Financial Analyst in Investment Banking and Capital Markets at Goldman Sachs from 1993 to 1996. She serves on the Board of Directors of Burch Barrell, she is an Advisory Board member at Clare V., a Board Member and Finance Chair of the Pacifica Christian High School; and a Finance Committee Member of the Park Century School. Ms. Lowe received a BA in International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania, a BS in Finance from the Wharton School, and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.  

Dominique Mielle

INVESTOR, AUTHOR, POLO PLAYER

Dominique Mielle is a Franco-American investor and former hedge fund manager. She was named one of the “50 Leading Women in Hedge Funds” by the Hedge Fund Journal and E&Y in 2017. She is currently a contributor to Forbes on the topics of hedge funds, distressed investing and diversity and has published op-eds in the Financial Times, Business Insider, and Absolute Return.

One of the only senior women in the hedge fund industry, she played key roles in complicated bankruptcies and restructurings and currently sits on the board of numerous corporations. 

Her memoir, Damsel in Distressed, offers an insider’s view of what it’s like to be a woman hedge fund manager in a business overwhelmingly dominated by men. She describes her twenty-year career, rising through the ranks to the partner of a $24 billion hedge fund complex, with a combination of intelligence, humor, and an unwillingness to be minimized by genderism.

Julia Boorstin

CNBC SENIOR MEDIA & TECH CORRESPONDENT

Julia Boorstin is CNBC’s Senior Media & Tech Correspondent based at the network’s Los Angeles Bureau.  She covers media with a special focus on the intersection of media and technology. Boorstin also plays a key role in CNBC’s bi-coastal tech-focused program “TechCheck” (M-F, 11 AM-12 PM ET/8 AM-9 AM PT), delivering reporting, analysis, and interviews around streaming, social, and the convergence of media and technology.  She joined CNBC in May 2006 as a general assignment reporter and in 2007, moved to Los Angeles to cover media.

In 2013, Boorstin created and launched the CNBC Disruptor 50, an annual list she oversees, highlighting the private companies transforming the economy and challenging companies in established industries. Additionally, she reported a documentary on the future of television for the network, “Stay Tuned…The Future of TV.” She also helped launch CNBC’s ‘Closing the Gap’ initiative covering the people and companies closing gender gaps, and leads CNBC’s coverage of studies on this topic. She is currently writing a book called, “WHEN WOMEN LEAD: What they achieve, Why they succeed, and How we can learn from them,” about female founders that Simon & Schuster’s Avid Reader imprint is publishing in October 2022.

Boorstin joined CNBC from Fortune magazine where she was a business writer and reporter since 2000. During that time, she was also a contributor to “Street Life,” a live market wrap-up segment on CNN Headline News.

In 2003, 2004 and 2006, The Journalist and Financial Reporting newsletter named Boorstin to the “TJFR 30 under 30” list of the most promising business journalists under 30 years old. She has also worked for the State Department’s delegation to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and for Vice President Gore’s domestic policy office.

She graduated with honors from Princeton University with a B.A. in history. She was also an editor of The Daily Princetonian.

Michel Narganes

PARTNER AT MANATT

Michel Narganes is a partner in Manatt’s ­­­­­San Francisco office. She has guided venture-backed startups and other, established clients—including various technology companies, media and gaming ventures, financial institutions, health care companies and others—through licensing, technology and commercial transactions, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), financing matters, and developer and publisher agreements for more than 15 years. Michel also works with disruptors in the growing cryptocurrency space with respect to blockchain-based technologies and transactions in the Web3 ecosystem. She was an early mover in this area, representing the platform that facilitated the highly publicized sale of an American digital artist’s nonfungible token (NFT) artwork in the first digital auction held by one of the largest global auction houses. She is sought after for her business-minded counsel on the convergence of cryptocurrency with other emerging industries, including the rise of tokenization in gaming and transactions in the nascent metaverse. Before joining Manatt, Michel served as in-house counsel at a large technology company, where she played a key role in the growth of global strategic partnerships, M&A and corporate compliance operations. Michel is also an entrepreneur, having founded her own legal services firm, providing her firsthand experience tackling the gamut of challenges emerging companies face throughout their life cycles. 

Kate Nevin

PRESIDENT OF TSWII CAPITAL ADVISORS

Kate is President of TSWII Capital Advisors and Portfolio Manager for both TSWII and TSWS focused on investments in hedge funds, venture capital and other alternative strategies. Her career has spanned more than two decades, beginning as an analyst in New York City in the early 2000’s with Lehman Brothers. After marrying and relocating to Charleston, SC, Kate joined TSW where she has been actively managing portfolios for over twenty years..

She is a member of 100 Women in Finance and PEWIN. Kate currently serves on the LP Advisory Committee for Hannah Grey Ventures, is a member of the Nexus Impact Society, a founding member of Asteri Collective, and is currently serving on the Editorial Committee of the Academy of Institutional Investors. She is Founder + Board Chair Emeritus of Enough Pie, a non-profit in Charleston, SC.

Kate has received the CAIA (Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst) designation. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1999 and completed The Executive Program  of the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business in June 2004. Kate was a 2014 Diversity Leadership Fellow at the Riley Institute of Furman University.

Kate often speaks and moderates at conferences, has presented at TEDx and participates on committees advocating gender equality and conservation. She lives on a sea island outside of Charleston, SC with her husband and three children.

Ashley Bleckner

PRIVATE WEALTH ADVISOR ELLEVEST

Ashley is based in Southern California. A CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ (CFP®) professional, she’s been in the financial services industry for over a decade since obtaining her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics. “Women are unique in so many ways that aren’t accounted for in traditional financial planning or investment management,” she says. “So it’s time. It’s been time. And Ellevest is at the frontline of that pivotal switch.” She spends her time actively involved in the community serving as the chair of SheVest for UCI’s Center for Investment and Wealth Management, which focuses on financial literacy for underrepresented groups. Ashley also is the chair of the TLD committee for her local Alzheimer’s Association chapter.

By Ashley: “4 Reasons to Outsource Your Portfolio Management,” “Things to Consider for Year-End Charitable Giving,” “Managing Your Wealth in the Early Days of Widowhood,” “How (and Why) to Make a Family Mission Statement,” and “The Money Talk: The One With the Sudden Windfall.”

Holly Framstead

GLOBAL PRODUCT STRATEGY AND DEVELOPMENT AT CAPITAL GROUP

Tom Henske

INVESTOR AND AUTHOR OF IT MAKES TOTAL CENTS

Tom Henske has been a leader in the financial industry for nearly three decades.
Tom started his career in financial planning in 1994, withCowan Financial Group. Shortly thereafter, he started his own company, HenskeAdvisors. In 2003, they were acquired by National Financial Partners (merging them into Lenox Advisors) which went public shortly thereafter. Tom remained an equity partner until 2020 when he retired to focus solely on matters of life insurance and building Total Cents. Professional designations: CFP®, ChFC, CLU, CTS, CFS, CLTC, CES