CZ and Friends

Barbara Barrilleaux is the VP of Legal and General Counsel at Brooks Running, the performance running brand owned by Berkshire Hathaway. She leads a 15-person global legal team covering everything from IP and contracts to compliance and privacy across 50+ countries. A former competitive swimmer and former IP litigator, Barbara has guided Brooks through more than a decade of serious growth, includi...

Marina Gracias is the Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary at Varo Bank, the first and only digital-only nationally chartered bank in the United States. She joined Varo as employee number eight before the company had a product in market, leaving a managing director role at Accenture to do it. Marina led the three-year process of securing a de novo bank charter through the OCC, the FDIC, and...

Kim Woodward wasn't looking for a new job when Okta's sales rep reached out. She was happy at her boutique law firm, working closely with clients, and had zero interest in going in-house. But after meeting the team, believing in the mission, and learning she'd have a train buddy for the commute, she took the leap as Okta's third attorney. What followed was an 11-year journey th...

Alisha Cieslak is the former Chief Legal and Risk Officer of Gordon Food Service, the North American food service distributor operating since 1897 across the U.S. and Canada. She joined in 2014 as employee number one in the legal department, when the company was already a $10 billion operation across a dozen states with no in-house lawyer, no active-matters list, no board legal reports, and no fil...

Tina Hwang has a spicy take: legal compliance is table stakes. If you're building technology that parents trust with their kids, meeting the legal bar is where the conversation starts. Tina is the Head of Legal at ClassDojo, the platform connecting teachers, parents, and kids in classrooms worldwide. Before ClassDojo, she spent over a decade at Google, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Meta, building pr...

Ekumene Lysonge is the Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary at NerdWallet, where he leads a combined Trust and Safety organization of 34 people spanning legal, security, compliance, and privacy across a public fintech platform that serves 25 million+ customers a month.  With operational experience across corporate America before legal leadership, he credits that time as a business operator...

Sharon Johnson took a winding path to the GC seat. Before law school, she worked in marketing, sales, project management, and contract management at Verizon, and she credits that experience with shaping how she leads legal today. As Chief Legal Officer, Corporate Secretary, and Chief Compliance Officer at MODE Global, she runs a team of six lawyers across a $3 billion logistics business, with 100%...

Anne Marie Segal spent 15 years as an attorney - at White and Case, a hedge and private equity fund, and her own firm - before becoming an executive coach to general counsel and senior executives across six continents. She knows what it takes to make the leap, and what holds most lawyers back from making it. In this episode, Cecilia and Anne Marie get into the psychology behind lawyer identity, wh...

What does it look like to build a legal team from first principles in 2025, with AI at the center from day one? Cecilia sits down with Mary Ambacher, Deputy General Counsel and Assistant Corporate Secretary at EverQuote, and Lauren Anderson, Senior Counsel at Wayfair, to talk through exactly that.  Mary just started a new GC role after eight years at Wayfair and walked in to find the calculus for...

David Schellhase has been general counsel at three public companies - Salesforce, Groupon, and Slack - and he's learned that great in-house lawyering is less about knowing every law and more about knowing your company's risk appetite cold. In this episode of CZ and Friends, David joins Cecilia to share what three decades in Silicon Valley taught him about risk, prioritization, and when t...

Bjarne Tellmann spent 30 years as a general counsel at Haleon, Pearson, Coca-Cola, and Aramco. Now, as CEO of FjordStream Advisors and author of "Law in the Era of AI" (Wiley), he argues that the disruption of the law firm model will not come from startups - it will come from clients. In this episode of CZ and Friends, Cecilia Ziniti joins Bjarne to unpack what he saw from the inside of...

How does a legal operations team at a global semiconductor company cut contract request time by 73%, earn a seat at the CLO's staff table, and build board-level analytics, all while keeping pace with AI? In this episode of CZ and Friends, Cecilia Ziniti sits down with Sruthi Kosuri and Cindy Prabhakar from the legal operations team at Marvell Technology, an $8 billion company powering the inf...

What if the best thing a lawyer could do is figure out how to make themselves obsolete? Jimmy Toy, Chief Legal Officer at Articore Group (the company behind Redbubble and TeePublic), has been using AI and machine learning in legal work for over 10 years. In this episode of CZ and Friends, Jimmy joins host Cecilia Ziniti to share why the future of legal is not about working faster with AI, but abou...

Nicole Komin and Danielle Shainbrown co-founded two companies together out of Buffalo, New York: Bellwether Advisors, a real estate consulting and advisory practice, and Shainbrown Komin PLLC, a law firm. They launched both in 2022 and have been running them side by side ever since. Their paths to getting there could not be more different. Nicole came up through public interest work, elder law, an...

Rachel Harris, General Counsel and AI Governance & Privacy Officer at Suzy, joins Cecilia to talk about what it takes to be a solo GC at a high-growth AI startup. Rachel's career started in an unlikely place: plaintiff-side pharmaceutical MDL litigation in St. Louis, where she learned to work fast, take big bets, and operate alongside founders who mortgaged their homes to finance cases. T...

Molly Abraham, VP of Legal at Coinbase, joins Cecilia to talk about what it takes to build and lead a 90-person legal team through one of the most scrutinized regulatory periods in tech history. Molly started as a chemical engineer at Procter and Gamble, taught the LSAT at night to pay for law school, and went on to Wachtell Lipton before moving in-house at Kitty Hawk (the Larry Page-backed flying...

Online learning, AI adoption, and what it really takes to build a company worth building. Today's guest is Gagan Biyani, CEO and Co-founder of Maven and co-founder of Udemy, one of the largest online learning marketplaces in the world. Gagan has spent over 15 years building at the intersection of education and technology. His perspective on how professionals learn, adopt new tools, and think...

What does it mean to lead legal without white-knuckling every outcome? Matthew Campobasso, Chief Legal Officer of Zone & Co., joins Cecilia Ziniti on CZ and Friends to answer that question head-on. Matthew brings nearly 20 years of legal experience across criminal prosecution, big law litigation, and in-house leadership. In this conversation, he unpacks why the legal profession has a control p...

Sarah Binder, General Counsel at BetterUp, and Sophie McNaught, Managing Director at Silicon Valley Bank and advisor at Primary Venture Partners, join Cecilia for a sharp conversation on how legal and business leaders think about risk when the stakes are high, and the technology is moving even faster. They get into where risk shows up inside fast-growing companies, why the biggest early-stage risk...

Michael Jacobs, recently retired Partner and Trial Lawyer at Morrison & Foerster, current Evaluative Mediator and Arbitrator at JAMS, has spent decades at the center of the biggest technology disputes of our time, including Oracle v. Google and the Smartphone Wars.  Michael shares his journey from serving as a U.S. diplomat in the Foreign Service to becoming a top intellectual property trial l...

How do you scale legal and compliance in one of the most complex regulatory environments, without becoming the “no” department? In this episode of CZ & Friends, Cecilia Ziniti sits down with Elana Freeman, Head of Legal & Compliance at Swing Education, to discuss what it takes to build a nimble, high-trust legal function inside a fast-growing EdTech marketplace. Elana shares how she naviga...

Ron Bell shares lessons from nearly three decades in Silicon Valley. From Apple during its near-collapse, to Yahoo’s formative years building one of the Valley’s first scaled in-house legal departments, to leading legal and administrative functions today at Collective Health. In this episode, Ron Bell, Chief Legal & Administrative Officer at Collective Health, talks with Cecilia to explore wha...

Anirma Gupta is a growth-stage legal leader with 3 decades of experience across tech, law, and leadership. In this episode she talks with Cecilia about what it means to “create the conditions” for good decisions. Anirma shares a practical model for enabling senior lawyers to step up: define the end game, build a lean tiger team, run crisp checkpoints, and provide air cover when the org gets noisy....

In this episode, Cecilia talks with Mallun Yen, Founder and CEO of Operator Collective, about judgment, risk, and why being an “outsider” can be a real competitive advantage. Mallun traces her path from patent litigator to Chief IP Counsel at Cisco, startup founder, and venture capitalist - and explains why legal training in risk analysis, systems thinking, and failure-mode analysis maps surprisin...

Matt Gipple, former General Counsel of Cruise and now co-founder of Dryvebox, talks with Cecilia about his the transition from legal advisor to decision-maker. Matt shares what it was like to join Cruise in its earliest days - working out of a garage, interpreting California’s first autonomous vehicle regulations in real time, and helping shape how disengagements, reporting, and compliance would w...