ABOUT

Aimara Rodriguez is a first-generation Honduran-American business strategist based in Denver, Colorado. She has a diverse background working at the intersection of startups, tech, and products. Her expertise lies in operations management, partnership development, and product strategy. She has been featured in the Denver Business Journal, Rocky Mountain PBS, Good Morning America, Forbes, Nasdaq, and Entrepreneur Magazine and has mentored for organizations such as Access Mode, Social Venture Partners Denver, Techstars, Google for Startups, Latinas In Tech, and Built by Girls Ventures.

Aimara is actively involved with Latinas In Tech and is a chapter lead for their Denver area. She also runs an online content series called The Spotlight, which brings together creatives and entrepreneurs to discuss topics such as identity, equality, opportunity, and creativity. Through her work, she aims to cultivate opportunities and create spaces for other professionals and athletes of color to lead, thrive, and be heard.

Aimara is also the co-founder of Function f(x) Wellness, a wellness brand that was started by Aimara alongside her brother Carlos, a fitness advocate and personal trainer with over a decade of experience. As brown people who enjoy climbing mountains and training for functionality, they were motivated by a shared mission of creating more access to the outdoors for communities of color and decreasing the knowledge gap about health and wellness in these communities. Their digital store is now open and a portion of all proceeds from gear purchased will go to the non-profit arm of Function f(x) to support their efforts in helping local youth from under-served communities in Denver get access to recreational activities such as weightlifting, mountaineering, and biking.

WORK

ADOBE CREATIVE CLOUD

Most recently, Aimara built Platform Partnerships at Adobe, where she focused on cultivating and unifying the Creative Cloud Platform through the development of various partnerships as well as driving adoption of the plugins and app integrations that partners build. She also helped manage the Adobe Fund for Design, a $10 million fund aimed at supporting teams building products that will help shape the future of creativity and design. In her role, Aimara was responsible for managing the end-to-end process for over 100+ partners building integrations (ranging from established ISV’s to indie developers), building go-to-market plans to increase awareness and adoption of integrations, influencing product roadmaps for new APIs and SDKs that Creative Cloud brought to market, and working cross-functionally to ensure alignment was clear across partnership and product functions on the team. Outside of her work on the Platform & Ecosystem team, Aimara was also actively involved in diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives internally at Adobe, including serving as a co-lead for the Creative Cloud Product Representation and Equity (CCPRE) workgroup and the HOLA employee resource group for Latinx employees.

Aimara has worked with notable partners such as: Workfront (built an Adobe XD plugin), Smartsheet (built an Adobe XD and a UXP-powered Photoshop plugin), monday.com (built an Adobe XD and a UXP-powered Photoshop plugin), Miro (built an Adobe XD plugin), Esri (built a CEP extension), Asana (built a CEP extension and Adobe XD cloud integration), Anima (built an Adobe XD plugin), MURAL (built a Creative Cloud Libraries integration), Lottiefiles (built an Adobe XD plugin), Tiled (built an Adobe XD plugin and Creative Cloud Libraries integration), and Stark (built an Adobe XD plugin) to name a few.

“I had the opportunity to work with Aimara to manage Adobe’s Creative Cloud platform partnerships. I saw Aimara take a raw foundation and turn it into a program that was beneficial for Adobe and our partners. A few things stand out to me about how Aimara approaches her work. First, Aimara is partnership-obsessed. She listens to her partners’ needs and crafts a relevant, tailored, mutually-beneficial growth strategy. Aimara is a consistent and reliable presence that partners can go to. Second, Aimara is a team-builder. Her view is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts when it comes to building high-functioning teams. Aimara went out of her way to ensure new team members across functions had the resources needed to succeed and frequently assisted in (after-hours) projects that were not tied directly to her role. Last, Aimara thrives with a blank slate. Whether designing a campaign on how to communicate new features to users or creating a strategy on how to grow a new partner ecosystem, Aimara was a trusted partner I could go to with the open question of “How should we go about this?” I had fun working with Aimara and would do it again in a heartbeat!”
— Drew Endick (Former Manager, Platform Partnerships at Adobe)
“Aimara is an incredibly thoughtful and trusted leader. She genuinely cares about her teammates and the partners she works with. She has been instrumental in driving a partnership with Adobe that helped put Tiled on the map. She is capable of driving strategic and complex initiatives from start to finish. Everything she has done has been with a tremendous amount of organization and creativity in her work. She’s a team player, an advocate, and someone you can count on to get things done.”
— Chase Lindsley (Vice President of Sales at Tiled)
“Aimara is an exceptional partnership manager - during our work together on monday.com and Adobe CC partnership, Aimara was a true champion for the partnership and was always available to help us get the right stakeholders and resources allocated to this partnership. Aimara truly cares about her work and you can notice it immediately. She is also very well organized and stays on top of all action items and follow-ups which helped us a lot to take the partnership to the next level. Aimara is a hard-working partnership professional and I’ll strongly recommend working with her! ”
— Elina Papernaya (Former Strategic Tech Partnerships Lead at monday.com)
“I have had the privilege and joy of working with Aimara in a partnership capacity for the past couple years. During that time, there are a few traits that I believe have made it possible for her to build effective partner relationships that drive results. (1) She is an advocate for the customer first and foremost. She understands the customer and doesn’t think within a box of limitations, but rather evaluates how to push beyond boundaries on behalf of customers, which in turn serves to the benefit of partners. (2) Communication and managing expectations. Aimara is the epitome of a professional in her communication and is always 2 steps ahead in order to gain alignment, avoid blockers, and optimize timelines and outcomes. (3) Low ego, high EQ/IQ. Aimara brings zero ego to the table. What she does bring is a team attitude that enrolls everyone involved and brings out the best in others, while demonstrating deep understanding of product, user experience, and business implications alike. I would highly recommend Aimara for any capacity in which you may have the opportunity to work with her.”
— Sam Branson (Former Director, Strategic Alliances and Technology Partnerships at Smartsheet)
“Aimara is an absolutely masterful partnerships manager, a fantastic team member, and a wonderful person to work with. She is an invaluable part of any team, and her contributions help elevate that team to excellence. Aimara brings a drive and passion to her work that is second to none, but she’s also incredibly empathetic to partner needs. She cares deeply about ensuring rich, vibrant, successful, and beneficial partnerships across the market — not solely for the benefit of her employer, but for everyone involved. She’s always on the look out for areas to improve — both herself and her team, and even the company as a whole. She invites & accepts constructive criticism, and she’s always improving processes and outputs to meet the needs of her audience — whether that be an executive, a partner, or a report. She is a brilliant communicator, an empathetic leader, driven to solve problems in mutually beneficial ways, and always seeks ways to remove obstacles and overcome challenges. She is wonderful to work with. Our discussions have always been illuminating and inspiring.

If you ever do get the chance to work with Aimara — leap, don’t walk, for the opportunity. You’ll not regret it!”
— Kerri Shotts (Principal Product Manager, Creative Cloud)
“Aimara is an outstanding and highly proactive business partner. We’ve collaborated for several years around technical field enablement. Aimara and her team are quarterly guests on an internal webinar series I host called CoLAB. With topics and subject matter expertise covering the vast landscape of extensibility and platform partnerships, Aimara curates relevant technical guidance around extending the functionality of Adobe Creative Cloud. Aimara’s unwavering support for, and on-going dialog with, technical field enablement (solutions consultants, product teams, customer success managers, sales) ensures that stakeholders have access to the necessary resources and guidance that connect Adobe solutions with other third-party apps and tools. Innately astute and curious, Aimara steadily delivers and informs AND actively listens to better understand customer pain-points and objectives.”
— Dave Weinberg (Principal Solutions Consultant at Adobe)

ALLEY POWERED BY VERIZON

Aimara previously served as the Vice President of Brand Strategy at Alley, a co-working startup where she was a founding employee. During her five-year tenure, she played a pivotal role in the execution of Alley’s strategic partnership with Verizon and served as a key leader in the national expansion from one location to five within one year. During the launch of the Alley powered by Verizon partnership, Aimara wore several hats and collaborated with executives at Verizon to ensure proper communication and cross-functional alignment. She also built a community ecosystem comprised of 300+ startups and hosted numerous events in tandem with Verizon’s 5G Technology team.

Additionally, Aimara worked with notable individuals such as: Lowell LcAdam (Former Verizon CEO), Nick Rockwell (Former CTO at The New York Times), Michael Siebel (Partner & CEO at Y Combinator) and organizations such as Marriott, Paypal, IBM, Samsung, and the U.S. State Department.

“Aimara and I collaborated on a weekly (if not daily) basis both at a strategic level to define the framework of the joint program, and at a tactical and operational level to execute the vision. Aimara loves to learn, engages easily in conversation, and is naturally inquisitive. She quickly grasps concepts and then applies the ideas to new situations that might arise weeks later. She makes connections and is able to see both the big picture as well as the details. Aimara worked well with everyone she interacted with at Verizon. She likes people and it shows in all her interactions with others. Her positive outlook on life is infectious.
”
— Daniel Klein, Former Verizon Senior Manager of Innovation Strategy
“I had the pleasure of working with Aimara for over two years while I was leading Verizon’s partnership with Alley. Partnerships between big corporates and startups can be a tricky dance, but I could always count on Aimara’s professionalism, thoughtfulness, and willingness to collaborate. She came to each interaction with an open mind and a desire to be successful, without ego and pretense. Her work output was consistent and with the structure deemed necessary for a large corporate partnership; an example of her dedication to growth and improvement. Throughout the partnership, Aimara was consistently the most accountable person at Alley.
”
— Nick LiVigne, Former Verizon Global Coworking Lead
“I met Aimara when our organizations first joined forces to create an ecosystem and platform to support and amplify the awareness of startups. In my capacity as Head of the Verizon Innovation Garage, I’ve made it a top priority to learn about Alley and the team behind it. One thing that I’ve learned over time is that, unlike other competitors, Alley is a physical manifestation of its leaders. Aimara sat at the core of the organization for years. Her legacy is forever imprinted in the walls of our building, in the hearts of the startups she’s paved the way for, and in the way the Alley does business. Whether on a center stage or in a closed-door conversation with a client, Aimara is a captivating force. Her energy and creativity levels are boundless. Her entrepreneurial spirit and tenacity for purpose-driven innovation set her heads above her peers. Her leadership style and skillsets rally loyalty to her at
all levels.”
— Melissa Mackey, Former Head of Verizon Innovation Garage
Credit: Raymond Eugenio

Credit: Raymond Eugenio

PROGRAMMING AND MEDIA

Throughout her career, Aimara has executed over 5,000 events. She’s also interviewed some of today’s top entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and media personalities. She believes that a constant barrier to entry for rising millennial leaders is not having the same level of access to information. Through the events she’s curated, she’s built an all-inclusive space that provides tangible insight on topics ranging from personal growth, learning from failure, building a sustainable career, and leadership. Some of her past guests include Charlamagne Tha God (Host of The Breakfast Club), Claude Silver (Chief Heart Officer at VaynerMedia), and Ryan Leslie (Grammy-Nominated Artist).

David Lester (Co-founder of Olipop)

Monica Kondos (Director, Program Management at Nike)

Charlamagne Tha God (Host of The Breakfast Club)