We’re super excited to welcome Leslie Nakajima, our new Head of Global Communications at Mapbox!
From deep learning to mobile to mapping, Leslie brings 20 years of experience positioning new products, new technology, and working with open source communities to our team. Leslie’s extensive knowledge of the space and comms experience will help us amplify our market positioning, and Mapbox’s value to our customers, partners, and stakeholders.
Prior to Mapbox, Leslie was Chief Marketing Officer at Sentient, an AI platform focused on scaling neural networks. Before her work scaling machine learning, she was VP of Communications at Mozilla where she led all PR and comms for Mozilla, and also its Firefox products globally including the launch of Firefox OS. In addition to her experience in machine learning and mobile, Leslie worked in the mapping space, serving in a number of key leadership roles at Nokia including heading software, services, and developer communications at Nokia Maps - starting during its peak - when Nokia bought Navteq in 2008.
Although not a coder or a financier, I have passionately spent years in back rooms with engineers, developers, CEOs, founders and investors and have a strong comfort level with communicating technical matters, complex business ideas, and highly disruptive propositions to a variety of audiences in a plain and simple way.
Working with founders, boards, dreamers and philanthropists to reach their strategic communications and marketing goals is what excites me, as is helping people.
Leslie will be partnering closely with our Marketing team focusing on public relations and analyst relations. When she is not trying to change the world, Leslie is surfing or practicing yoga.
Welcome to Mapbox! 🚀