Ingrid Alongi

Ingrid started her career as a Web application developer while finishing up graduate school in the 90s – as evidenced by preferring to pronounce .gif as “jif.” The first half of her career was in the Interactive Agency space where she eventually became Director of Technology in San Diego. Ingrid eventually found herself back in her hometown of Boulder, Colorado, where she worked at venture-funded startups including Gnip (Acquired by Twitter, 2014).

Having experience with both interactive agencies and venture-funded startups, Ingrid wanted to combine the best parts of both worlds–providing job stability for engineers, while at the same time focusing on innovative, interesting, and challenging work. Thus, Quick Left was born. Over the 7 years of growing Quick Left, Ingrid led the company through a merger with a Portland-based product company, expanded offices to three major cities, and shipped hundreds of products for budding startups to Fortune 100 companies.

Her company Quick Left was acquired by Cognizant in 2016, with the purpose of developing an internal startup Accelerator. The group has expanded to over 1000 people globally and has grown into Cognizant’s internal product division. Ingrid worked on issues related to people, culture, and diversity within the Accelerator’s North American and Global offices. The Accelerator team exceeds diversity numbers for the rest of the company as well as market competitors.

Ingrid loves working with people, making connections, motivating, collaborating, and solving problems. She is a sought-after public speaker, having won numerous awards including Entrepreneur of the Year. Quick Left made the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies a few years in a row. Ingrid also is Chair of the Board for Turing School of Software and Design and is a mentor for TechStars. Her personal belief is that successful technologies lie in the intersection of technology and human connection. While she’s no longer writing code, she’ll always be an engineer at heart, thinking strategically about providing impactful solutions.

Ingrid lives in Boulder, Colorado with her 4-year-old twin girls. In a past life, she was on the US Cycling team as well as a competitive nordic skier. She’s traded in her gear for a pair of running shoes for new athletic challenges ahead. And to keep up with her girls who are now riding their own pedal bikes.