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Evan Wittenberg
Advisory Board Member
Bio:

Most recently, Evan was EVP and chief people officer at Ancestry, the world leader in both genealogy and consumer genomics, with 1600 employees world-wide.  As a member of the seven person executive leadership team, Evan helped guide the privately held company through a period of tremendous growth by finding, developing and retaining amazing talent—and ensuring a fantastic culture.

Before Ancestry, Evan spent five years as SVP of people at Box, a public cloud content management software company.  As Box’s chief people officer he was responsible for scaling the company from—$50M to—$500M in revenue and 400 to 1700 employees in 14 countries.  He was a member of the senior executive leadership team that took the company public in 2015.  Prior to Box, Evan was Hewlett-Packard’s chief talent officer, where he was responsible for the largest technology company in the world’s diverse global talent.  Specific responsibilities included executive recruiting, talent management, career development, performance management, diversity and inclusion, executive development, and talent data sciences.


Previously Evan spent four years as head of global leadership development at Google.  He created and grew the function and was responsible for leadership development globally and cross-functionally, leading a team that built a variety of programs, courses and development opportunities for Googlers to improve their leadership mindset, skills and behaviors, and enable the company’s rapid growth and ground-breaking innovation.

Before Google, Evan was the director of the graduate leadership program at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.  In this role he was responsible for all of the leadership development activities for the school’s 1,600 M.B.A.s, taught the core course in leadership and teamwork, and ran the school’s experiential leadership learning program, the Wharton Leadership Ventures.  He was also associate director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management.

Prior to his role at Wharton, Evan worked on the merger of New York Hospital—Cornell Medical Center and Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, which resulted in the creation of the largest hospital in the country.  There he was responsible for cultural integration of the two entities, and the creation and delivery of the hospital’s leadership development program.  His early career was in entertainment, during which he worked for Saturday Night Live, Late Show with David Letterman, and the Gersh talent agency. Evan grew up in Soho, New York City.

He received his Bachelor of Arts degree with distinction in psychology and english literature from Swarthmore College, and his Master of Business Administration with Honors from the Wharton School, specializing in strategic change leadership.

An avid world traveler and outdoorsman, never shy of a good physical challenge, Evan is a black belt in full contact Japanese karate, and has been to all seven continents.  He has climbed a number of high altitude peaks, including Mt. Kinabalu in Malaysian Borneo, Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania (twice), and Mt. Cotopaxi in Ecuador.  Evan’s current adventure is fatherhood—he and his wife have a daughter and two sons.