Coco Brown, CEO & Founder, Athena Alliance

Coco Brown Athena Alliance

This episode is in partnership with the University of Pennsylvania’s Momentum Conference, an all-women’s event Oct. 1-3, 2021.

As I’ve entered what I consider the prime years of my career, I’ve been connecting with my girlfriends and colleagues about their aspirations. I spent 25 years in the corporate world and 21 of those had a parallel track spent serving on non-profit boards.

While I eased off the corporate track 3 years ago, I still find that I have much experience and energy to offer. Some of my friends suggested connecting with Coco Brown, CEO & Founder of the Athena Alliance. Coco, too, is a Penn alumna, and she’s built an incredible network of women seeking latter career moves. Many are interested in board service, while others want to start their own companies, and still others are very passionate about venture, private equity or angel investing. 

Athena is a fantastic way for women to continue to learn about these various avenues and connect with one another and companies seeking their expertise. 

About Coco Brown

Coco is a CEO and board member, actively leading Silicon Valley based professional services and tech companies since 1997. From 2002 to 2012 Coco was President and COO of Taos, a Gartner top 20 global IT professional and managed services company servicing hundreds of F1000 and top tier private growth companies nationally. She was also on the board of Taos for 12 years, leading the company through massive economic cycles and business model evolution and growth. Coco led the company to $54m in revenue, and the company has subsequently been sold to IBM. 

In 2016 Coco founded Athena Alliance, a digital platform for learning and agency for top business women striving for the c-suite and the boardroom. Athena has seen 2.8x growth in membership in the last 12 months since launching as a true subscription model and hosts over 1,000 women leaders today. Coco is a well-published expert and speaker on The Modern Boardroom. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. Coco serves on the commercial boards of Athena Alliance, Inc and Archerpoint (an ESOP), as well as the non-profit board of Athena Rising Foundation.

Braxton Woodham, Founder & President, Unfinished Labs

Braxton Woodham, Founder & President Unfinished Labs

Braxton and I started our tech careers together at USWeb/CKS, a web agency that serviced big entertainment brands like NBC, Sony Music, and so many more. In those days, teams were hand-coding websites. There weren’t any content management tools; just brute force.

Those were the early internet days and after I successfully migrated my entire team from NYC back to LA, I left to start my own consumer products company, snacki. Braxton and my paths have crossed several times since, working on projects at Sony Music Digital Ventures, Warner Home Video and Fandango.

Braxton has always  impressed me with his intellectual curiosity; always pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and why things are the way they are. He’s a naturally-gifted leader, effortlessly sitting at the center of a Venn diagram of business, tech, and philosophy. 

His passion for learning and trying new things without fear of failure is inspiring. He knows that one must fail to get to the next better idea. He’s had several successful and less-than-successful outings. And the work he’s now leading at Unfinished Labs is so clearly the culmination of all of his past work. It’s his life calling to build an open source platform so that people can control their own networks and their own data. How about that!? He believes that a global town hall shouldn’t be owned by any one person, company, platform or government. 

This is one of the most important ideas in this particular state of our world’s affairs and his work has massive geo-political implications. I encourage you to tune in to this fantastic episode as he shares his story of how he’s gotten to this point, and where he plans to go.

To learn more about Unfinished’s work, I encourage you to drop into their 2-day conference Sept 23-24, 2021 at The Shed in NYC.

Unfinished Labs’ Conference 2021 Details >>

About Braxton Woodham

Braxton Woodham, President of Unfinished Labs, formerly served as the Chief Technology and Product Officer at Fandango and was co-founder, President, and Chief Technology Officer at Sun Basket, where he continues to serve as a board member. Braxton also was co-founder and Executive Chairman at kuma.capital, a software company providing a platform and applications for systematic digital asset trading and co-founded Tap11, a real-time media analytics platform which was acquired by AVOS Systems in 2011.

Earlier, he was the CTO of InfoSpace’s mobile division where he was responsible for the infrastructure that serviced approximately three quarters of all mobile web traffic in North America. Braxton joined InfoSpace through the acquisition of Moviso, where he led the development of the V4 Digital Media Platform, which scaled by more than 100 times to generate over $1.5 billion in revenue across US, European and Australian mobile carriers.  Prior to joining Moviso / InfoSpace, Braxton served as Executive Director of Technology at Sony Music Digital Media Ventures, where he focused on new Internet initiatives including Keyhole, which was acquired by Google and relaunched as Google Earth.

Notably, Braxton served as Lead Propulsion Engineer for two Atlas missions and was a Captain in the United States Air Force. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Vanderbilt University.