Uplevyl: Leveling up professional women

Shubhi Rao wears many hats—Software engineer, finance and corporate executive, CEO, tech company founder, board member, global citizen, community leader, daughter, wife and mother. Shubhi Rao is the founder and CEO of Uplevyl, a global digital platform designed to transform the lives of all professional women through shared experiences, peer connections, and highly curated, personalized content.

A true trailblazer, Shubhi has paved the way for modern female leadership, having served as a senior executive with Alphabet Inc./Google, Tesco (U.K.), PricewaterhouseCoopers(U.K.) and Ford Motor Company, among others. Shubhi also sits on the board of directors for organizations such as the Open Lending LLC, Center for Global Development, International Center for Research on Women and is an Honorary Advisory Council member of the Federal Reserve San Francisco.

I have an eclectic career path: drug store soda clerk, server, temp, inventory auditor, nursing home administrator, professor (Rutgers and University of Missouri – Kansas City), dean, provost, program designer (Babson College), presidential appointee (Director, Women’s Bureau, US Dept of Labor), investor (Portfolia), start-up supporter (Tilted Windmill Games) and now Director of Research at Uplevyl. Along the way, I earned three degrees: BS from the Pennsylvania State University, MBA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Ph.D. from the UT@Austin. My program design work included serving as the founding national academic director for Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses for which I led the Babson College team to design, develop and deploy the program’s curriculum, train the teams from the participating community colleges and manage the quality control system. I also served as the global academic director for Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women initiative. Most recently, I led the design team for FMO, the Dutch economic development bank and their EmPow(H)er program to be offered in developing economies around the world. The theme across almost everything I have done and continue to do is the advancement of women in the workforce, particularly women business owners. Of the things I’ve published, my favorites are those written with others: the Diana Project for Clearing the Hurdles: Women Building High Growth Businesses and Teaching Entrepreneurship: A Practice-Based Approach (volumes I and II with H. Neck and C. Brush) as they are now the top selling books on teaching entrepreneurship in the world. Working with Uplevyl is exciting as it brings together my personal mission with an extreme focus on how we use technology to change the world of work for women.