theboardiQ was born out of the Founder and CEO, Smitashree's own experiential and immersive experiences in Corporate roles at Motorola (Motorola Inc, Motorola Google, Motorola Lenovo including serving on their India legal entity boards), MetLife, Sun Microsystems and IBM as well as doing executive search in the valley, to make a difference in getting gender, under-represented minorities, LGBTQ+, differently abled and veterans into positions of influence and power for board and executive roles.

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The name "theboardiQ" (iQ signifying intelligent and inclusive boards) was a gift from Frank Orozco, CTO at Slickdeals, a Goldman Sachs investee company, who she helped hire. Frank is of Latino origin and currently serves on an Advisory capacity with theboardiQ.

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Her chance meeting with two fellow Sun Alumni at a Sun Reunion in the Bay Area in 2019, helped onboard them on to the Technical Advisory Board at theboardiQ. Shantanu Gudihal, Senior Product Manager at Microsoft, has authored AI playbooks that have generated more than $100 Million in revenue and has had a successful exit with MeshLabs that was acquired by Pega Systems. Bharath Mundlapudi, CEO at Enterprise Minds, was one of the original brains behind the source code of Hadoop at Yahoo and has worked at Netflix before starting his own entrepreneurial journey. Roopa Mahendra, is an ex-colleague from Motorola who has been the pillar behind all the talent research at theboardiQ.

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Smita's humble efforts in launching theboardiQ Hall of Fame in late 2020, with the clear intent to move the needle in recognizing and shining the spotlight on the best under-represented executive talent, has met with success and harnessed 600+ Media Press Releases, 40+ Official Corporate Communication Releases | 20000+ LinkedIn Likes | 1,000,000+ views | 500+ Tweets and Retweets.