Martin is the creator of Google’s Effective Founders Project, a global research program that uses people analytics to uncover what makes the best startup founders succeed and shares their success formula with the world.
He has run leadership courses for thousands of funded tech startup founders across more than seventy countries in the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe. He is a frequent lecturer on entrepreneurship, organization design, and people analytics at Stanford, Wharton, and INSEAD.
Martin is a principal of organization and talent development at Google. He works with Google’s senior leaders to shape team culture, develop their people, and expand their leadership, so they can build cool things that matter. In his ten years there, he’s worked with leaders across Google Research, DeepMind, Technology & Society, Responsible AI, Pixel, Fitbit, YouTube, Search, Maps, Android, and Chrome, to name a few.
In 2023, The Aspen Institute recognized him as a First Movers Fellow, honoring his pioneering work at Google. The following year, in 2024, he received the Thinkers50 Radar Award, a prestigious recognition that identifies up-and-coming thinkers whose ideas are predicted to make an important impact on management thinking in the future.
Prior to Google, he was a management consultant with the Boston Consulting Group and a product manager at Johnson & Johnson.
Martin has studied organizational psychology and behavioral science at Columbia University and the London School of Economics. He’s a serial immigrant, having lived and worked in New York, Jakarta, Singapore, Taipei, and Manila, where he is originally from. Today he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Bea, and three kids: Noelle, Jaime, and Andrea.
Josh Yellin
Josh Yellin is a cofounder of the Google for Startups Accelerator. During his time with Google’s Accelerator team, Josh led the growth into 8 global locations, partnering closely with over 300 of the foremost growth-stage startups from around the world.
Additionally, upon seeing the broad-sweeping global appetite for stronger leadership among the world’s top startups, Josh cofounded Google’s Effective Founders Project with Martin in 2015. Since its inception, Josh has facilitated workshops with hundreds of founders in several cities around the world and has mentored many startups on various people and operations topics.
In 2019, Josh became a Chief of Staff in Google Research, supporting organizational strategy and operations for one of Google’s foremost Machine Learning research teams. Today, Josh is an operational leader in Google DeepMind, which is on a mission to build AI responsibly to benefit humanity.
Josh grew up in Chicago, spent a few years as an outdoor guide in Montana and Alaska, led operations for the largest startup community in Silicon Valley, and cofounded Urban Rivers and Wildlife.ai – two environmentally-focused non profits.
Josh studied biology at the University of Illinois and business at the Wharton School. At the moment, Josh lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where he can usually be found walking his dog Moses on a trail or on the beach.
