Leanne Pittsford

Leanne Pittsford is the entrepreneur and founder behind Lesbians Who Tech & Allies, the largest LGBTQ professional community in the world -- committed to visibility, intersectionality, and changing the face of technology with 100,000 non-binary, LGBTQ women, queer women of color (and our allies) in tech and over 40+ city chapters worldwide. Over 30,000 women and non-binary people in tech attend our Annual Summits, making us the largest professional LGBTQ event in the world and the largest event for women in tech. Programmatic work includes a coding scholarship for non-binary and LGBTQ women called the Edie Windsor Coding Scholarship Fund, and a leadership program -- #SQUAD -- focused on supporting our members as they move into senior leadership roles. Leanne launched include, a mentoring and recruiting platform fights bias in technology by scaling access to direct referrals for underrepresented candidates; and the Tech Jobs Tour, which traveled through 25 cities in 2017 to connect diverse and non-traditional talent to over 600,000 open jobs. In their first year the tour engaged 50,000 people including 13,200 mentoring sessions and featuring over 150 companies. Leanne fell in love with tech while managing the data and teaching herself to build online fundraising tools for Equality California that raised millions of dollars for the No Prop 8 campaign. After the campaign, she created her own digital agency, Start Somewhere; and started leanimpact.org, acquired by Lean Startup in 2016.