Coco Brown excels at guiding leadership teams through periods of great change, driving accelerated growth and business expansion and making the absolute most of the opportunities and constraints of the broader economic and environmental conditions.
Coco is the Founder and CEO of Athena Alliance, Inc. a subscription model SaaS platform for community, learning and access to opportunity. Athena’s members are top executive women from industry giants including Microsoft, Bank of America, Disney, and Alphabet, and rising leaders like Databricks, Stripe, and TalkDesk. Athena offers a dynamic, “on demand” approach to moving ahead and staying ahead. Athena’s B2B customers are enterprise CHROs and heads of L&D, investing in the advancement of their top women. Within Athena, leaders find live learning, a powerful community for peer-to- peer exchange, and hundreds of hours of business videos that offer an “evergreen MBA” experience. Through Athena, women are guided into the c-suite, the boardroom, investing, entrepreneurship, and their Third Act. Under Coco’s strategic leadership of Athena, thousands of women have advanced their executive careers, and over 300 women have landed board seats.
From 1997 to 2014, Coco served as VP of Professional Services, then COO & President, and Board Director of Taos, a market leader in IT Services serving hundreds of F1000 companies such as Apple, Cisco, Facebook, and Silicon Valley Bank. As VP of Professional Services, Coco led the company through a period of significant accelerated expansion in the late nineties, which saw a 300% increase in staff, to 700 people across five key national markets. Coco was made COO in 2002 to lead the company through and out of a managed contraction resulting from the dotcom bust, which had reduced the business by 90% to near bankruptcy. Coco’s leadership secured Taos’ survival and embedded structure that ensured future success, including during the “great recession” following the housing and financial market crisis of 2008. Coco’s exemplary leadership in these very different market conditions is a testament to her tenacity and her hard-earned insight into the difficult leadership decisions necessary to guide an organization through periods of change. In 2003, Coco became President and COO and led Taos in diversifying the business to increase its fundamental value and market position through the addition of Managed Services and Project Services. These enabled Taos to elevate its valuation, and strategic impact and value to the CIO, and extended Taos’ offerings into a global market with projects in Europe, Asia and South America. Coco stepped down from leadership in 2012, but stayed on the board as one of only three owners of the business until 2014. Taos sold to Private Equity in 2015, and was acquired by IBM in 2021.
As Athena’s founder and CEO, Coco uses her influence and position not only to guide c-suite and boardroom evolution, but to influence leaders to be servant leaders for their employees, stakeholders and shareholders. Coco is a sought after and frequent speaker at CEO summits including Microsoft’s elite global CEO Summit and Greycroft’s CEO summit. Coco’s market impact has also earned her a variety of leadership awards including Business Woman of the Year for both Silicon Valley and San Francisco, and Silicon Valley’s top 100 Women of Influence. Coco is consulted on leadership and board topics in articles by leading publications including Fortune, Forbes, NACD, WSJ, and Bloomberg.
Coco received a degree in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, 1992. She and her husband enjoy rock climbing, camping, and scuba diving with their two children. Born in Malaysia and having lived in Europe, Asia and the US Coco considers herself multi-continental.