Profile
Obi Felten joined our board in 2014 and brings world-standard expertise in creating consumer products and businesses, based on cutting-edge technology.
In her day job, Obi works at X (formerly Google X), Alphabet's moonshot factory. X is the team behind projects such as self driving cars, internet access from stratospheric balloons, delivery drones and energy storage using molten salt. Obi is responsible for getting early stage X projects out of the lab and into the real world – or ensuring they fail fast.
Previously she was Director of Consumer Marketing for Google in Europe, Middle East and Africa. Before Google, she launched the ecommerce business of a major UK retailer, worked as a strategy consultant, and led eToys.com's (unsuccessful) expansion to Germany during the first dotcom era.
Along with her work at X, Obi is a startup mentor and angel investor, with a focus on women entrepreneurs. She set up Campus, a Google-funded space for London tech entrepreneurs.
As well as the Shift board, Obi is on the board of Springer Nature, a global academic and educational publisher, and on the board of Picasso Labs, an image analytics startup.
Obi has a BA in Philosophy and Psychology from Oxford University. She grew up in Berlin and saw the wall come down. She lives in San Francisco with her husband (a beekeeper/triathlete), young son (a clown/inventor) and baby daughter (too early to tell, but high hopes that she'll be a rocket scientist/diva). She loves yoga, bicycling, travelling, contemporary art and design, cooking, eating, and her family.
Find Obi on Medium.