Bio

Dr. Charna Parkey is an experienced serial startup tech executive, product builder, engineer, speaker, writer, mentor and coach, leveraging over 17 years of experience to successfully bring several B2B AI/ML products to market. Currently, she is a Real-Time AI Product & Strategy leader at DataStax through the acquisition of Kaskada where she was most recently the VP of Product. At Kaskada, a product lead startup, she co-created the first commercially available feature engine with time travel. A system for real-time feature engineering, raising the level of abstractions that allow you instantly generate training datasets from historical data and get production instantly. Co-author and inventor on several patents, including patent-pending work on ML/coordinated feature engine at the edge. She has worked with customers spanning a broad range of industries, including 90% of the Fortune 100, to implement machine learning products at scale. Leadership experience: Founder of disciplines, most recently Product and Data Science, previously 4 disciplines, leading 3 of those simultaneously: Applied Science; Customer Success Engineering, Account Management, and Support. Extensive experience communicating the mission and vision to hire, coach, and promote a team of 19 directly. Deep experience in mentoring and growing leadership in Engineering and coaching first-time Executives in many disciplines. Track record of interviewing at all levels, including C-level executives cross-functionally. Management experience: Experienced manager of managers, budgets, and change management in high-growth environments. Contributed to every hiring process to scale the team from 6 to 100 across all disciplines, at which point the engineering org was mature enough to conduct its own IC interviews. After, I contributed to hiring processes for managers and executives cross-functionally, scaling from 100-150. Business experience: Currently responsible for Partnerships, Go-to-market iterations, and Sales in addition to Product at a 10-person startup. Responsible for running an M&A process, as well as experience contributing to diligence in multiple raise rounds from Series A - C. Directly managed and scaled revenue from pre-revenue to 14.5M in ARR as the VP of Customer Success at Textio.