Sabeen Ali

University of San Francisco alumna Sabeen Ali has worked throughout her career and during her time at the university to advocate for women who work in the technological sector. She sees the opportunities that technology can offer regarding equality—including racial, cultural, and class distinctions. True to her mission, Ali has reinterpreted the USF slogan, “Change the World from Here,” into her own version: “Change the World with Code.”

Ali’s focus on teaching young girls to code drives her entrepreneurial actions within the San Francisco technology community. She believes that code is a universal language and that it speaks to equality because it does not reveal gender, race, or class in the end result. In her opinion, being an entrepreneur and possessing that spirit means finding the opportunities to advance within any environment. Her focus on overcoming obstacles to achieve something greater than herself is the reason she pursued her master of science degree in organization development, through which she plans on giving back to the world. She sees proposed limitations as something that can be tackled and used as a motivator to find solutions, as demonstrated by her many accomplishments within her field. For Sabeen, the end goal of every initiative she partakes in is a change toward equality in business and management.

Ali has, since graduating, implemented and participated in a number of organizations that encourage social change and the entrepreneurial spirit. In her role as CEO of AngelHack, a developer relations platform and hub of the largest developer ecosystem in the world, she has worked tirelessly to promote women in technology. AngelHack’s mission is to help corporate changemakers drive open innovation for products, platforms, and brands by connecting them to the smarts, scale, and speed of the world’s most vibrant hacker community. Their outreach initiatives are crafted to help corporate change-makers meet, greet, and connect with the workforce of the future. Ali works to promote the company’s mission through the programs she hosts and creates within her field.

Ali’s body of work includes giving a presentation on the subject of women in technology at a TEDxOrangeCoast conference, where she spoke about the universal language that coding brings to her field. She explained to an audience of world-class innovators, thought leaders, designers, and educators her mission to ignite excitement in young women who have a passion for technology and code.

In addition to her role as CEO of AngelHack, Ali also founded the nonprofit Code for a Cause. This organization teaches women and adolescent girls to code. They are currently working in San Francisco to first prove the model, but ultimately their outreach will be worldwide. The focus of Code for a Cause is to implement sustainable solutions by bringing the tech and nonprofit sectors together to support underserved communities.

In all of these instances, Sabeen is putting her efforts toward promoting equality by creating a global hacker community that can start a universal dialogue surrounding technology and code.