Immersive Experiences
In addition to an incredible line-up of speakers from a wide array of industries, Responsive creates experiences like no other.
Participate in talks and interviews with some of the brightest minds and thought leaders currently shaping organizational design in the 21st century.
Dawn Sharifan
Dawn Sharifan is the Head of People at Slack, an adjunct professor at San Francisco State University, and an Advisor at PeopleTech Partners.
Slack is world-renowned cutting-edge communications software, and has been heralded as one of the fastest growing software companies of all time. Slack has also become known as a company that prioritizes its people and adopted unusual approaches to hiring and retention, for example spearheading hiring people who are formerly incarcerated and otherwise passed over populations.
Dawn is recognized as an outstanding HR leader and educator, with well over a decade of experience. Her three life maxims are: self-awareness is the key to everything, personal growth is a pain in the butt, and always be kind.
Merritt Anderson
Merritt Q. Anderson is a passionate leader in the tech space giving voices to and advocating for communities that are traditionally underrepresented in the workplace. Prior to founding Merritt+ Consulting, she served as GitHub’s VP of Employee Experience and Engagement. While there, she initiated and launched the ‘Hubber Handbook,’ GitHub’s first employee handbook--which was built collaboratively using GitHub--and incorporated company-wide employee feedback, in the spirit of open source and transparency.
As a Compliance & Privacy Officer and later the Regional Director of Human Resources at Kaiser Permanente, Merritt championed the diversity and inclusion strategy and agenda for Northern California. She is passionate about utilizing her background in employment law and human resources to increase organizational performance and employee satisfaction.
With over a decade of cross-functional HR leadership experience, she promotes continued professional growth and amplifies companies’ commitment to diversity. When she’s not creating communities of belonging, Merritt is cheering on her three kids at sporting events and serving as CHRO of her family.
Katelin Holloway
Katelin is passionate about building scalable, inclusive institutional cultures. She is a partner at Initialized Capital and the former VP of People & Culture at Reddit
First introduced to the notion of intentional cultural development at Pixar Animation Studios, she studied alongside the storytellers that would ultimately change the course of her career. From film to tech (and a few interesting layovers in between), the one common denominator remains: enabling people through belonging to create beautiful, innovative products.
In 2019, Katelin joined us on the Responsive stage to talk about her experience becoming a parent in fast growth tech space. At Reddit, she took a creative and non-traditional approach to supporting her teams by creating a holistic benefits plan that is customizable, flexible, and specifically targets employee engagement and growing families. During her time with Reddit, the company nearly quadrupled in size, growing from 75 to 270.
Katelin continues to cultivate thriving cultures as a PeopleTech Advisor, at Initialized Capital, and the mother of two.
Mark Libscomb
Mark Libscomb is the Vice President of Global Talent at Adobe. He is also the former Head of HR at Tesla, Netflix, and 23andMe. Mark is also an Advisor for PeopleTech Partners.
Mark often talks about his philosophy of “flipping the org chart” which he describes as putting the leader at the bottom of the org chart to show that their responsibility is to serve everyone above them on the team. Mark is an advocate of bringing emotional intelligence to his teams, supporting future workforces with deeply human approaches as well as carefully vetted technologies.
Mark is passionate about “Untapped Potential” and how modern companies can support people from atypical backgrounds.
Dr. Emily Anhalt
Dr. Emily Anhalt is a psychologist, emotional fitness consultant, and the CoFounder and Chief Clinical Officer of Coa, an in-person mental health experience that is opening locations across the US.
For the past ten years, Dr. Anhalt has been working clinically with executives, founders, and tech employees, and has conducted hundreds of interviews with prominent psychologists and entrepreneurs about how leaders can improve their emotional fitness. Dr. Anhalt has matched more than 400 people into therapy, and has collaborated with some of the fastest-growing technology companies and VC firms in the world, including Google, Asana, TEDx, Github, NASDAQ, Unilever, Bloomberg, and True Ventures.
Previous Presenters
Brands You Might Recognize
We bring some of the most recognizable brands to Responsive Conference to share their discoveries and ideas with you.
Interactive Experience
Responsive Conference is about interactive participation, and not just passive learning.
By attending the conference, you’ll participate in experiences that represent the best of what the Responsive movement embodies—creative thinking, collaboration, and responding to real-world organizational challenges quickly and effectively.
Daily Small Groups
Community-based events often spark the kind of creativity that is less readily apparent in online meetings, and encourage innovative thinking around how to approach the ever-increasing unpredictability in the workplace and beyond. By tapping into this “human economy,” Responsive Conference allows attendees to think big and redefine the Future of Work.
This year, we will be incorporating Small Group Huddles into each day of the conference, providing a chance for attendees to interact with one another outside the context of the conference agenda.
Each Small Group is led by a facilitator, and will tackle a different relevant issue about organizational and workplace challenges. This is a chance to come away with tactics and ideas to take back to your own company, and to form connections with a new group of colleagues that you can turn to for advice in the future.
Want to Participate?
Visit our “Get Involved” page for more on speaking, volunteering, or even running your own independent events.