Bianca Gates, CEO and Co-Founder, Birdies

Bianca Gates is the Co-Founder and CEO of Birdies, the company that created a new category of footwear with the stylish flats that are secretly slippers. Prior to Birdies, Bianca was a Sales Executive at Meta, where she worked with retail and gaming Executives to help them leverage their data and the social graph to scale their businesses. Bianca grew up in Southern California as the oldest child of Latin American immigrants and is a graduate of the University of California, Irvine.
Bianca is passionate about bringing women together to help them achieve their dreams and started the first Lean In Circle with Sheryl Sandberg in 2013, which has now scaled to more than 75,000 Circles in 181 countries around the world. Bianca also advises early-stage founders and serves on the Board of Trustees at The Hamlin School, an all-girls independent school in San Francisco where she lives with her husband and two children.
You May Also Like
The Privacy Payoff: What 11,000 Consumers Want Marketers to Know
At Advertising Week New York 2026, Usercentrics’ Maureen Prado argued that clearer explanations and greater consumer control can help brands build the trust needed to sustain customer relationships.
The Best Agency-Client Relationships Are Built in the Trenches
When was the last time your in-house team handed you a Don Draper holy $#!* moment?
Evolving Commerce Media: How Offsite Unlocks the Full Funnel
Commerce media spent the last decade proving one thing exceptionally well: onsite ads drive immediate conversions. But treating commerce media purely as a bottom-funnel sales tool leaves most of the customer journey untouched.