Boryana is the Executive Director at the Straubel Foundation. The Straubel Foundation is focused on accelerating global sustainability through science, engineering and social innovation. Specifically, Boryana’s superpower is identifying and developing human top performance. The Straubel Fellows Boryana coaches span from Forbes 30 under 30 talent, Fellows of the Royal Commonwealth Society, IVY League (Stanford, Harvard, MIT) top performers, and numerous Echoing Green Fellows.

Previously, Boryana build most Human Resources Functions at Tesla. She joined Tesla in 2011, at only ~600 employees, and helped the company through more than half a decade of hyper-growth. By early 2017 the company had grown over 5,000% and Boryana had built and led several world-class teams such as People Analytics, HR Information Systems, HR Operation, Compensation, New Markets Readiness, Mergers and Acquisition Integration, and Business Operations.

Boryana was also the VP of Talent and Culture at Wikimedia, the foundation behind Wikipedia. At Wikimedia, Boryana oversaw all internal Operations, all People functions, Workplace, and the Engineering Team Practices function. After two months at Wikimedia she was promoted to oversee all traditionally COO functions.

Boryana holds a B.S. in Economics from UC Berkeley, an M.S. in Management (Sloan) and an M.S. in Industrial Engineering from Stanford. She has also been awarded: Tesla Top 1%, Brocade Top Performer, Alkiem Global Top performers, CAL Alumni Association Leadership Award, UC Berkeley Future Leaders Award, American Association of University Women Award, 2008 CMS Success Story, Cordes Language Award, CSM CU Award, The Morris Family Award and SMCCD Anniversary Award. She has appeared on the cover or in articles in publications such as Bloomberg, Fortune, HR Executive Magazine, and Bulgarian Manager Magazine.

She is a renowned data-driven, business operations, and optimization powerhouse. As an internal consulting juggernaut, her skills have been applied across all functions of both public for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. Additionally, she is a Sloan Advisor to the Stanford Energy and Environment Impact Fund.

A life-long learner and global nomad, Boryana has lived in Bulgaria, Germany, Austria, Russia, and the USA (since 2005.) She has two young children.