Charu Sharma is the Founder & CEO of NextPlay.ai. Companies like Square, Lyft, Asurion and Splunk use their mobile app to build sticky and measurable mentorship programs at scale for employee upskilling, internal mobility, & tapping into untapped mentors and sponsors.
After 6 months of using NextPlay’s app, the mentees felt twice as equipped to achieve their goals at their company and the mentors significantly developed their critical leadership and coaching skills. Collectively, 25% more employees strongly recommended working for their company. NextPlay’s investors and advisors include 500 Startups, LinkedIn’s SVP Engineering, Techcrunch’s former CEO and Microsoft’s former Chief Design Officer.
While at LinkedIn, Charu started a mentorship program for women at LinkedIn as a passion project, which eventually inspired her to start Next Play to create meaningful mentorship relationships at scale especially for women and underrepresented minorities. Charu has previously has built 2 startups form her college, worked at LinkedIn for three years, educated one million women to start their own businesses through her nonprofit, books and documentary film Go Against the Flow. She currently is on her 4th book and writes a column on Inc.
