Rebecca Altamirano

Rebecca Altamirano is an entrepreneur, author, and activist.  She has dedicated her professional life to working within underrepresented communities to open up access to the culture of power.  As a biracial woman from a multicultural family, she is primed for building bridges between people, networks, and communities. Her professional path has given her deep hands-on experience on working with the underserved and underrepresented. Many of these experiences she has shared as a co-author of Be The Change: Reinventing Schools for Student Success published by Columbia’s Teachers College Press.  Most recently she has been working on Venture Development at Tangelo Technologies, the company she co-founded with her husband in 2007. Rebecca also serves on several boards and task forces including Stanford Hospital, Stanford School of Education, and most recently The Art of Yoga Project, which focuses on early intervention to help marginalized and justice-involved girls prepare for a positive future. She has written for the Huffington Post, Thrive Global, and Ms. Magazine.

After graduating magna cum laude from Wellesley College with a degree in Psychology and English and earning her master’s degree from Stanford Graduate School of Education, she joined her first startup:  building a high school from the ground up in an under-resourced community whose residents were mostly people of color.

In her first year at East Palo Alto Academy (EPAA) Rebecca worked as the community outreach coordinator. A year later she was in her own classroom teaching English, history, and English Language Development to immigrant children. Rebecca became an administrator and Early College Program Director, achieving her goal of having every high school student graduate with having successfully completed at least one college class.  She created numerous programs that continue to serve the students to this day. In collaboration with Stanford and other institutions, she raised millions of dollars for scholarships for undocumented students as well as establishing a scholarship fund for basic student needs such as books and transportation.

In 1999, as a Thomas J. Watson fellow, Rebecca studied weaving in the Andes Mountains.  For a year she traveled to indigenous villages in South America, learning the craft from masters, in the process transforming strings and threads of wool and cotton into blankets, belts, and bags. During a tumultuous transportation strike in Ecuador, she met her future husband, Antonio Altamirano.  They traveled together for one year, surviving and thriving despite challenges of military coups, erupting volcanoes, and other natural disasters before eventually settling in the Bay Area.

Rebecca and Antonio started Tangelo Technologies.  Established in 2007, Tangelo works on experience design with startups and corporations such as Intel, Facebook, Google, and Intuit. Working across multiple facets of business — digital revenue growth, automation, conversational technology, and custom software applications — Tangelo is recognized for its innovative approach.

Diverse since its inception, Tangelo has been working to level the playing field for underrepresented entrepreneurs.  In 2018, as part of an expansion effort, Tangelo established a joint venture with Backstage Capital, an up-and-coming venture fund focused on making investments in companies founded by underserved minorities–women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ community.  Led by Arlan Hamilton, one of the hottest names in venture capital, Backstage has made over 100 investments as of this writing.