Board of Directors

Bio coming soon.

Jody Kramer is a communications and marketing leader. She began her career in Washington DC as deputy press secretary for a U.S. Senator from NY. After moving to the Bay Area, she joined a leading public relations firm, and provided strategic counsel on media relations, political affairs and crisis management, for clients such as Applied Materials, Cypress Semiconductor, Xerox, Apple Computer, and Second Harvest Food Bank.

From there, Jody was an early hire at Netscape, helping to build one of the first, and best-known Internet brands. After AOL acquired Netscape, Jody went on to lead communications for a host of start-ups as well as major technology companies, passionately crafting narratives regarding corporate visions, engineering genius, customer successes and community involvement.

In addition to her professional pursuits, Jody is passionate about child development. She serves on the boards of Kehillah as well as 4City, a new non-profit dedicated to building connections through youth sports.

Jody graduated from the University of Michigan with a bachelor of arts in English Literature. Jody has three children, including a recent 2020 graduate of Kehillah who is now attending Dartmouth College.

Jonathan and his wife, Elana, live in Palo Alto. Their son is in the class of 2023 at Kehillah and they have a daughter in middle school.

Jonathan is a lawyer and startup advisor, focusing on technology companies. Previously, he was Associate General Counsel at Google, where he oversaw teams of lawyers who advised on a variety of product and business issues.

Prior to joining Google, he was an attorney at the law firm of Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati, where he counseled a wide range of technology companies on commercial and technology transactions. Before practicing law, he was a researcher in the physics department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Jonathan has a bachelor’s degree in physics from Harvard University, a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a law degree from Stanford University.

Joanna Strober is a technology and finance executive focused on helping companies scale and evaluating new investments. In addition to founding, raising capital for, and running her own successful company, she brings more than 20 years of experience in direct private equity and venture capital investing in digital health and consumer companies. As an advisor to and investor in a number of notable consumer Internet companies that went public, including BlueNile, eToys, Babycenter (as part of eToys), HotJobs and Flycast, Joanna is a seasoned board director whose experience includes membership on BlueNile’s Compensation and Audit Committee.

A former practicing corporate attorney, Joanna is a persuasive advocate with expertise in a variety of corporate transactions, including public offerings and mergers and acquisitions. She has spoken extensively to corporate and graduate school audiences on the topic of women and leadership. 

Joanna is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Kurbo Health, the largest global provider of pediatric obesity treatments. The company was acquired by Weight Watchers Reimagined (WW) in 2018, at which time Joanna became the head of the child/teen division of WW. She also currently leads business development efforts for WW Health Solutions to generate relationships with platforms and health insurers. In her present role she regularly presents to the WW Board of Directors. 

Prior to creating Kurbo Health, Joanna spent six years as a Managing Director at Sterling Stamos Capital Management, where she established and managed the firm’s Private Equity and Venture Capital fund of funds and raised over $200 million to invest in buyout funds and venture funds globally. She has also raised and invested capital for private equity and venture funds at Pacific Community Ventures and Symphony Technology Group, as well as at Bessemer Venture Partners, where she was a General Partner and generated gains of over $250 million over a five-year period. 

Joanna is also the co-author of Getting to 50/50, a Random House book that focuses on women and leadership. An experienced public speaker and repeated Guest Lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, she has given many talks on this subject to corporations and educational institutions. 

Joanna has a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, where she graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and a J.D. from UCLA Law School, where she served as an Editor of the UCLA Law Review.

Matthew Gemello is a corporate partner and the chair of Orrick’s global corporate business. A seasoned lawyer, Matthew guides global technology companies and their financial sponsors through transformational domestic and cross-border transactions. Matthew currently serves as the board chair of Think of Us, a design-thinking lab seeking to transform child welfare through systemic change (Audacious Project grant recipient 2023), and the board vice chair of the Youth Law Center, a San Francisco-based legal advocacy for children in foster care and the juvenile justice system.

Matthew and his wife Moon live in Redwood City and are the proud parents of Delilah (University of Oregon class of 2026) and Bodhi (Kehillah class of 2025). A fourth generation resident of the Peninsula, Matthew is passionate about his family, the outdoors, skiing, mountain biking and other alpine activities. His love of the beautiful game means you can find him up very early in front of the TV on weekends.

Jim McManus is the retired Executive Director of the California Association of Independent Schools, where he spent 12 years leading the largest state association of its kind in the nation, encompassing some 230 schools, which enroll more than 90,000 students. He is the former headmaster of Castilleja School in Palo Alto and Mayfield Senior School in Pasadena. His 13 years as a head have been combined with nearly 30 years as a trustee at six different independent schools. He has also served on the Boards of the California Association of Independent Schools (CAIS), the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), the International Council Advancing Independent School Accreditation (ICAISA), and the California Association of Private School Organizations (CAPSO).

From 1993 to 2007 — and again from 2019 to the present — Mr. McManus has maintained a consulting practice that has served more than 175 independent schools and school associations across the country. His chief areas of focus have been strategic planning, Board development, school foundings and mergers, Board and head evaluations, and school climate assessments. He has been a frequent speaker on a variety of issues at professional meetings, including presentations at NAIS conferences, ranging in focus from global trends affecting schools, to the characteristics of baby-boomer parents, to new approaches in assessing social-emotional learning. His publications have covered topics as diverse as rapid transit tunneling, the specious science and racist attitudes that gave birth to the first SAT, and the factors throughout American history that have caused independent schools to perish.

A native Californian, Mr. McManus is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Occidental College. He holds a master’s degree from The Claremont Graduate University, where he also completed his Ph.D. course work, with a special emphasis on the ethical and spiritual dimensions of education. He resides in Sierra Madre, California, and is the father of two children who are independent school graduates — his daughter (who is a Dean of Students and Belonging at an independent school in Los Angeles), and his son (who avidly devotes his energy to mountain entomology, farmers market hip-hop performance dancing, mineral collecting, and blogging on Instagram for his 10,000 followers).

Dr. Pope specializes in curriculum studies, service learning, student engagement, school reform, and qualitative research methods. She is particularly interested in student voices and the students' perspectives of school. She focuses on academic stress and its consequences for students' mental and physical health, engagement with learning, and integrity. She co-founded Challenge Success to partner with schools and families to implement research-based strategies for student well-being and engagement. She is the author of "Doing School": How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students (Yale University Press, 2011), which was awarded the Notable Book in Education by the American School Board Journal, 2001. She is co-author of Overloaded and Underprepared: Strategies for Stronger Schools and Healthy, Successful Kids (Wiley, 2015). Dr. Pope co-hosts the podcast "School's In" on Siriux XM radio.