Allegory has had a real impact on our business. It started out as a way for us to better interact with customers and has become a core part of our company culture. The training classes are stimulating and highly interactive, giving participants real tools to use when they go back to their jobs. The training has resulted in a cultural transformation in how we communicate and interact with each other.
— Brent Lang, President, Vocera Communications
Our Talented Team
Marya Stark
Marya recently joined Allegory as Vice President of Business Development. Previously, she was the Founding Executive Director of Emerge America, a national political training program for Democratic women who want to run for public office. To date, 60% of Emerge America's 250 graduates hold public office and another 57 alumnae are running for office in 2008. Over 46% of Emerge America graduates are women of color.
During her tenure at Emerge America, Marya expanded the program to six new states by building Advisory Boards and Boards of Directors of top elected officials, campaign managers and major donors, hiring and training staff, and recruiting and training local candidates. She created and implemented national launch and fundraising strategies, curriculum guidelines, and press and marketing materials. Marya remains committed to Emerge as a member of its Board of Directors. Marya was also a founding board member of the original affiliate, Emerge California, where she chaired the recruitment and selection committee.
Previously, Marya was a co-founder of Kids Computer Workshop, a senior demographer for the CIA (not the Culinary Institute of America), and the Senior Vice President of Urban Box Office Networks. She has done fundraising for many organizations and political candidates, including Emerge America, Human Rights Watch, and the American Red Cross. Marya started her career in corporate finance as an analyst at Smith, Barney in New York. For six years, she did domestic and international mergers and acquisitions at Smith Barney, an investment advisory boutique that she started with a colleague, and later at Completel, a French telecommunications company in Paris, France.
Marya is on the Advisory Board of Hope to Action, an environmental non-profit and holds a public appointment to an environmental task force for the City of San Francisco. She graduated from UC Berkeley with a B.S. in Business Administration and received an M.A in Applied Statistics from Georgetown University.
Dhaya is a communications specialist and the Chief Humorist of Allegory, a training company.
Dhaya is the daughter of Indian immigrants who made their way to the United States with only $12 and a suitcase between the two of them. She jokes they still have the suitcase, although the $12 was spent on pizza.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) she received a Bachelor of Science and a Master of City Planning. Her graduate work focused on energy economics and infrastructure finance in Puerto Rico. She helped teach negotiations to second-year MBA students at the Sloan School of Management. It was at MIT where she created the curriculum for her Charm School classes: "How to Tell a Joke," "Body Language," and "Small Talk."
Most recently she was at Omidyar Network, a $400M fund headed by eBay founder, Pierre Omidyar. Dhaya was responsible for sourcing, executing, closing, and managing both for-profit and nonprofit investments fostering economic, political, and social self-empowerment on a global scale. Her for-profit investments included: Innocentive, Digg, CircleLending, Prosper, Meetup, Voxiva, Eventful, Patients-Like-Me, and Collaborative Drug Discovery (on whose Board of Directors she was an Observer). Her nonprofit investments included KaBOOM!, Myelin Repair Foundation, Sunlight Foundation, and Guidestar.
Prior to joining Omidyar Network, Dhaya advised socially responsible corporations, startups, minority businesses and early-stage startups on strategy planning and operations. She traveled to Cuba on a research grant to study sustainable development and renewable energy entrepreneurship.
At Booz Allen Hamilton, a global management consulting firm, Dhaya specialized in the energy, technology, public sector, and telecommunications/media verticals. She also worked in asset management for Parnassus Investments, a $1B socially responsible mutual fund.
She has spoken at numerous venture capital, economic, political, leadership, and philanthropic panels and conferences. For the 2005 Coro Foundation policy fellows, she taught a day-long negotiations course. She recently taught an oversubscribed workshop on testifying and public speaking for the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network. She spoke on a panel entitled "How to Save the World" and will be moderating a panel entitled "Who Will Save the World" for a group of Indian-American women in San Francisco.
In her free time, she is a student of classical South Indian dance and of Hatha Yoga. She is a stand-up comedienne, performing three sold-out showcases in San Francisco. She has appeared at the San Jose Improv and the San Francisco Punchline with the all-Indian comedy troupe, "Pundits with Punchlines", and has been hired for private events.
Dhaya combines her MIT engineering side (she is sometimes asked to integrate functions in her head at parties) with her business acumen and a fresh comedic perspective. She believes business is a powerful tool for social change and entrepreneurs can change the world.
Courtney is an Instructor and Director for Allegory Inc.
Courtney began her entrepreneurial career twenty years ago building a national retail business. In seven years, she grew a seasonal retail business from 13 to 120 stores nationwide with $10 million in sales. She sourced products from China, launched a new skincare product line, and managed recruitment, training, and retention for the company's retail outlets. She also oversaw the operation of 80 franchisees. Locally, Courtney became a franchisee herself and launched three of her own stores locally in the San Francisco Bay area.
Previously, Courtney was a property manager in Chicago, responsible for managing a historic landmark and the Chicago Stock Exchange. In this position, Courtney managed budgets and relationships with tenants, unions, employees, and lenders. She also oversaw large-scale renovations and extensive tenant build-outs and expansions.
She believes that people are companies' most valuable asset and her success is built on her philosophy of building people's strengths and putting people in the right positions.
As Allegory's first employee, Courtney's entrepreneurial experience and vision lay the company's foundation and helped launch and grow the company.
Courtney is a yoga instructor trained in the Iyengar tradition. She has led Outervention overnight backcountry trips for young women in the San Francisco Juvenile Justice Program. She graduated from Michigan State University with a B.A. in Business.
Marina joins us with a passion for healthy relationships and building community locally and globally. She comes with a variety of team-building experiences as a participant, coach, and organizer. She earned her bachelor's in Art & Social Change: Cultural Studies, '02 with honors, from Mills College. She is also an alumna from the Institute for Civic Leadership, '01. She studied abroad in Zimbabwe and Indonesia, and led an artist-against-AIDS workshop at the National Gallery in Harare. She helped lead the month-long Japan-America Student Conference, "Civic Participation in a Globalizing Society", travelling across Japan in 2003. She has trained women of all ages to become triathletes and complete marathons through See Jane Run. She also serves as marketing director for the San Francisco School of Biodanza and facilitates Biodanza, "The Poetry of Human Encounter" in Berkeley. As a personal organizer, she helps make the world a better place one client at a time. Her travels on five continents have shown her many ways to live and deepened her ecological sensibilities.
In her free time she likes to do creative things like make books and cook exotic food for her friends.
Luke Klipp is proud to join the Allegory team. Currently, Luke is a legislative aide to San Francisco Supervisor Gerardo Sandoval and prior to that was a senior analyst with the Office of the Budget Analyst for the Board of Supervisors. He is President of the San Francisco Young Democrats and a graduate of the New Leaders Council, which is a training program for young progressive leaders. Additionally, he is a candidate for the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee in 2008 and is a PAC Co-Chair of the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club.
Luke holds a Masters degree in Public Policy from the University of California at Berkeley and a Bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor.
