MANDALA

CARLA SCHLEMMINGER  

Ecosystem Maneuvers 

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Carla has 20+ years experience in strategic marketing communications and branding – positioning and promoting start-ups and public companies alike. Whether B2B or consumer brands, her experience spans from fintech to e-commerce to enterprise applications.  

Throughout her carreer,

She worked in marketing for Mellon Private Asset Management (now BNY Mellon), the private wealth management group, and reported to a portfolio manager who handled asset management for high-net-worth individuals and foundations.

During the Dotcom heyday, Carla was on the management team at Niehaus Ryan Wong, considered one of the “IT” high tech PR and branding agencies. She worked on their flagship Architecture of Identity(R) branding workshops, to develop positioning and launch companies and products from scratch — for B2B, e-commerce, and consumer brands including Documentum (now part of EMC) and those in financial services Owners.com (self-directed real estate market) and InsWeb (online insurance). From there, Carla ran global PR for financial risk analytics company Barra (now part of Morgan Stanley) where she took the communications program global, hired PR agencies, collaborated with investor relations, and worked with existing offices distributed globally. In working with many of the company’s academic professionals and financial services industry experts, she crafted a major thought leadership program to give exposure to Barra’s market insights which resulted in significant business and financial industry media coverage.  Post the MSCI-Barra merger, Carla ran marcom for emerging B2B visualization company iRise, and launched their content network in the very early days of social media. On the consumer front, Carla relaunched Plaxo, and has also done go-to-market strategies for international companies entering the U.S. market, such as CrowdPark (social betting in gaming category, Earlybird company) and Trendyol (fashion, KPCB company). Carla has a B.A. in International Relations and French from the University of California at Davis. She has taken courses in Corporate Finance through UC Berkeley Extension. Carla can be found on Twitter on @carlainsf and @Socialbrite.