Joan DeGennaro

Joan manages community and events at Scale.

Joan's first exposure to being part of a founding team was in Kindergarten. Her family helped re-open her elementary school in Connecticut, and her class was the oldest grade every year, all the way through being the first graduating 8th grade class. They were often called "the guinea pigs." In retrospect, it was a startup, and they were the founding class of the school.

Joan studied Education & Social Policy at Northwestern. Her entry point into the startup world was as a founder in Y Combinator's W16 batch, where she led a nonprofit focused on sanitation access in rural India. She then held roles at Oscar Health and Deepgram managing operations and partnerships. She spent five years at Y Combinator working on Startup School, Co-Founder Matching, and events to support early-stage founders. Before joining Scale, she worked as an independent contractor planning and hosting high-impact events for startups, spanning marketing, recruiting, and community building.

Joan has moved between the Bay Area and NYC five times in her career. She loves the tri-state area and identifies strongly with it, but the Bay Area always pulls her back. There's an optimism here and in tech that she finds impossible to resist. No matter which coast she's on, you can find her organizing social plans with friends and walking distances most people would drive.