Rachel is passionate about developing unique programming to help build a culture of openness and belonging that embraces diversity as a dimension of a company’s overall talent strategy. As a Senior Advisor, Rachel works closely with Norwest and its broad portfolio of companies to educate and guide them on diversity and inclusion strategies and best practices.

Rachel Williams is a Bay Area native with more than 20 years of experience in Silicon Valley. Her experience spans human resources – recruiting, strategic employee relations and engagement, organizational change, culture & learning development, inclusion programming, and implementation. Rachel is the former Head of Equity Inclusion & Diversity at Google X – the moonshot factory. X creates novel technology solutions to address the world’s most challenging problems.

Prior to X, Rachel held roles as the first Global Head of Diversity & Inclusion at StubHub where she focused her efforts on bringing equity to the company’s workforce, workplace, and marketplace to drive inclusion.

Prior to StubHub, Rachel was the first Head of Diversity & Inclusion and Corporate Recruiting at Yelp. Building Yelp’s diversity initiatives from the ground up to accelerate action, which led to a 10 percent increase in women in technical roles, as well as the creation of numerous employee resource and affinity groups that had more than 75 percent employee participation, among other accomplishments.

In addition to her roles within various corporations, Rachel lends her time to advise organizations dedicated to the improvement of diversity, equity, and inclusion. She was an early advisor to Diversity Advocates, a Kapor Capital empowered group that seeks to advance inclusion by providing resources, knowledge, and network to do pioneering work. As an Advisor to Village Capital, Rachel met with several founders of color to help with strategy and provide impactful feedback.

Rachel has spoken on her work and thought leadership at numerous conferences and universities including Tech Inclusion Conference, SXSW, the White House, North Carolina A&T, Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School, Northwestern Kellogg School of Management, and MIT Sloan. Rachel graduated from UC Berkeley (Go Bears!) and enjoys spending time with her more than 300 family members whenever she can.