Sophie Novati is the CEO and co-founder of Formation, an A16Z-backed Engineering Fellowship helping underrepresented engineers break into top tier companies. Sophie originally started her journey with a degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. Over the next 6 years at Facebook and Nextdoor, she became a staff software engineer building product and product infrastructure. After struggling to hire great engineers for her own teams, she explored mentorship programs and discovered that programs today get nowhere near the engineering rigor that her teams were looking for. She founded Formation to combine modern adaptive learning technology with a top tier mentorship network to help solve this problem at scale and to fill the over 400,000 open computing roles with a more diverse workforce.