PETYA GRADY, C'03

Petya Grady, C’03, program manager at Teamable and co-founder and board chair at CodeCrew, will be the Babson Center’s 2022 Humphreys Entrepreneur-in-Residence for the Advent Semester. When she began her career in tech, Petya’s liberal arts education was crucial. In Petya’s view, “learning across disciplines was a gift that was defined by its embrace of new ideas and continuous evolution.”

While on campus, Grady will meet with students and faculty and deliver a campus presentation, “Lessons from a Liberal Arts Major Working in Tech,” at 4:30 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 27, in Convocation Hall. This event is co-sponsored by the Office of Civic Engagement, Sewanee DataLab, and the Departments of Math and Computer Science. 

Teamable, an HRtech startup in Memphis, Tennessee, is an end-to-end software platform that empowers talent professionals to find top performers, connect them to fulfilling work, and drive business growth. Their clients include Spotify, Elastic, Canva, Lyft, and other Fortune 500 companies. Prior to joining Teamable, Petya spent several years working in tech in user experience strategy, program management, and corporate innovation supporting brands such as ServiceMaster/Terminix, FedEx, Hilton, and St. Jude Children’s Cancer Research Hospital.

As a native Bulgarian and a woman working in tech, Petya became an advocate for promoting diversity and inclusion in the tech industry. She co-founded CodeCrew, a non-profit organization providing computer science training to under-represented students in Memphis and currently serves as the Board Chair, focusing on organizational development, fundraising, and finance. What started as a small passion project became an industry leading organization with national recognition. Last February, CodeCrew was a recipient of Nike’s Black Community Commitment Grant. 

Recounting her time at Sewanee, Petya wrote, “One of my most cherished lessons is to always be an upstander. An upstander is a person who has chosen to make a difference in the world by speaking out against injustice and creating positive change. Taking courses in history and politics and being involved in multiple social justice causes while on [Sewanee’s] campus has made me believe that you can affect positive change regardless of your title, company, or specific role in life. I put that idea into practice every day.”

At Sewanee, Petya was the activism coordinator at the Women’s Center, president of the Gay-Straight Alliance, and a member of the Russian Club and the Organization for Cross-Cultural Understanding (OCCU). She graduated with a B.A. in political science and then earned a M.A. from Penn State University in political science. Petya was recognized as Top 40 Under 40 by the Memphis Business Journal and was the first recipient of the State Farm “Exist to Assist” Community Service Award.

The Humphreys Entrepreneur-in-Residence program is made possible by a generous gift from Debra and David Humphreys, C '79. The Humphries residencies brings outstanding and innovative business leaders and entrepreneurs to the University to provide experiential perspectives to undergraduates.