2025 Lunch & Learn – Silicon Valley

Paroma Sen

Vice President of Corporate Marketing

Astera Labs

Paroma Sen is the Vice President of Corporate Marketing at Astera Labs. She has 20 years of experience in technology marketing, spanning hardware, software and services, across B2B and B2C domains. Prior to Astera Labs, Paroma was the Vice President of Midmarket Marketing for North America at SAP.  

Paroma started her career with large B2B companies like National Semiconductor and Dolby Laboratories. Returning to India for a brief stint in 2013, she spent one year in the philanthropy domain and then went on to head marketing for five startup companies, including NDTV Ethnic, a B2C ecommerce startup.  

Paroma has an MBA from Berkeley (Haas), MA (Advertising) from UT Austin and MS (Computer Engineering) from UT Austin. Her passions lie in the market adoption of innovative technologies that improve people’s lives. In her spare time, Paroma loves to advise startups, travel, write short stories, and volunteer with animal socialization. 

Susan Akbarpour

Managing Partner

Candou Ventures

Susan is a serial entrepreneur & investor with a proven track record of successfully founding and leading startups across advertising, finance, retail, and media. Her career is marked by driving digital transformation and fostering innovation. She earned her MS in Management from Stanford GSB, where she remains actively engaged, and is the founder of the Akbarpour Aalaei Fellowship, granting scholarships to Farsi-speaking students at the GSB. 

With deep expertise in the rapidly evolving AI space, Susan has served on the boards of five AI companies in the last few years.AI and Entropy. Beyond her commercial ventures, she’s a passionate advocate for public media and women’s empowerment, contributing her time to non-profit boards such as KQED, How Women Lead, and Moms Against Poverty. 

Currently, Susan is the Managing Partner at Candou Ventures, an early-stage VC fund. Candou focuses on investing in and supporting startups in the AI, SaaS, IoT, blockchain, and cloud infrastructure industries. She is also a Limited Partner in funds like How Women Invest, Practical Venture Capital, and Venture University Venture Partners. As a candidate in the Nasdaq & NYSE Board Advisory Network/Diversity Initiative, Susan actively champions diversity on corporate boards, promoting inclusivity and equal representation. 

Furthermore, Susan launched Democracy 3.0, a non-profit technology platform dedicated to combating the spread of misinformation and disinformation that contributes to global societal polarization.  She also serves as Founder and Chair of Markit.Place, a new platform unveiled by her team that makes the creation, distribution, and attribution of shoppable content truly magical, not mechanical! Markit.Place is poised to disrupt the current surveillance economy, ending the advertising industry’s practice of selling consumer attention to usher in a third model of content monetization that frees media from advertising dependence. 

A sought-after conference speaker and commentator on social media and TV, Susan is a contributing writer to Forbes, IPR Journal, Disruptor Daily, … and is frequently featured in mainstream media outlets. Beyond her professional pursuits with Candou’s portfolio companies and her own startups, Susan enjoys traveling, teaching, designing software (which she playfully calls “software as an art”), writing, playing pickleball, mentoring aspiring entrepreneurs, and spending quality time with friends and family. She has been recognized with multiple media, community, and business awards.