Julia Austin

Julia Austin is a seasoned technology executive, investor, and educator with more than three decades of experience building and scaling high-growth technology companies. She has held senior leadership roles during the formative stages of category-defining companies including Akamai, VMware, and DigitalOcean, where she led global engineering, product, and innovation organizations and helped drive significant organizational scale and product expansion.

Austin currently serves as an Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School, where she has been a member of the faculty since 2016. During her tenure, she has taught Product Management and founded several of the school's most in-demand experiential courses, including Startup Operations and The Startup Toolkit. She also served as Faculty Co-Chair of the Rock Center for Entrepreneurship from 2023 to 2025, shaping entrepreneurship curriculum and programming for MBA students and founders.

In addition to her academic work, Austin is an active board member, angel investor, and advisor to early-stage companies. She has advised hundreds of startups and served on multiple boards, bringing particular expertise in product strategy, organizational design, and scaling operations from inception through growth. She is also a long-standing mentor with Techstars and currently leads the AI Innovation Accelerator at NYU Stern, supporting international AI startups expanding into the U.S. market.

Austin is the founder of Good For Her, a nonprofit organization that supports women founders through curated peer networks and leadership development. She is also the author of After the Idea: What It Really Takes to Create and Scale a Startup, which distills practical insights from her operating and advisory experience.

Earlier in her career, Austin served as CTO of DigitalOcean, where she built and scaled the company's engineering and product organizations and launched multiple new product lines. At VMware, she held senior leadership roles in R&D and innovation, including overseeing global research initiatives and advanced development programs. She began her startup journey at Akamai, where she rose to Vice President of Engineering and helped scale the company through its pre-IPO growth phase.

Austin is a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) through the International Coaching Federation and works closely with founders and executives on leadership, team development, and organizational effectiveness. She holds an MS in Management Information Systems from Boston University and a BA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.