Jeannine Torres

Jeannine is a self-proclaimed nerd. She loves the SyFy Channel and HGTV. She is passionate about writing, entrepreneurship, social change, and media/technology.

Jeannine is a California native who grew up in the heart of Silicon Valley in Northern California. She started her first successful company at age 16 organizing concerts for at-risk teens in the San Francisco Bay Area, receiving several accolades and awards from both local government officials and the greater community at large. She worked for Google during its early startup (pre-IPO) days in the trailblazing Adwords department. In 2006, she helped direct a small, Harvard-affiliated social enterprise that focused on online education resources and workshops for underrepresented minorities and women across the US. In grad school, her business plans made it to the semi-finals in the extremely competitive NYU Stern Business Plan Competition two years in a row.

Jeannine founded The Parent Tree in 2011, a site where parents could share information and advice, as well as search for and write reviews on local kid-friendly businesses, services and activities. In 2013 she founded Favorite9, an online destination for expecting moms. Since then she has been advising, investing in, and supporting other startups across the country.

Prior to grad school, Jeannine spent several years working in a variety of roles at companies ranging from Fortune 500 corporations, to nonprofits, and government agencies. Her corporate experience includes working in the program department for The California Endowment (TCE), the largest healthcare foundation in the country where she managed $20 million of granted funds. She has also worked as a technical assistant for Xerox PARC, and as a strategy consultant for the Los Angeles County Office of Education, where she focused on the Head Start and Pre-Head Start childcare and pre-natal education programs. She has managed the strategic marketing for both the Los Angeles Film Festival and the Independent Spirit Awards and in 2010, she worked directly with award-winning producer Lawrence Bender (Inglourious Basterds, Inconvenient Truth, Pulp Fiction, etc) to raise angel funds and to help launch his latest documentary film Countdown to Zero.

Jeannine has been invited to speak about entrepreneurship and business at Women 2.0’s Founder Friday in Orange County, Harvard Business School, and UC Irvine. She obtained a Bachelor of Science in Com