Martin Gonzalez, An Immigrant Success Story Helping Teams in Startups to Work Together

Profiles in Leadership

Martin Gonzalez

Martin is the creator of Google’s Effective Founders Project, a global research program that uses people analytics to uncover what makes the best startup founders succeed and shares their success formula with the world.Martin is the creator of Google’s Effective Founders Project, a global research program that uses people analytics to uncover what makes the best startup founders succeed and shares their success formula with the world.

He has run leadership courses for thousands of funded tech startup founders across more than seventy countries in the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe. He is a frequent lecturer on entrepreneurship, organization design, and people analytics at Stanford, Wharton, and INSEAD.

Martin is a principal of organization and talent development at Google. He works with Google’s senior leaders to shape team culture, develop their people, and expand their leadership, so they can build cool things that matter. In his ten years there, he’s worked with leaders across Google Research, DeepMind, Technology & Society, Responsible AI, Pixel, Fitbit, YouTube, Search, Maps, Android, and Chrome, to name a few.

In 2023, The Aspen Institute recognized him as a First Movers Fellow, honoring his pioneering work at Google. The following year, in 2024, he received the Thinkers50 Radar Award, a prestigious recognition that identifies up-and-coming thinkers whose ideas are predicted to make an important impact on management thinking in the future.

Prior to Google, he was a management consultant with the Boston Consulting Group and a product manager at Johnson & Johnson.

Martin has studied organizational psychology and behavioral science at Columbia University and the London School of Economics. He’s a serial immigrant, having lived and worked in New York, Jakarta, Singapore, Taipei, and Manila, where he is originally from. Today he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Bea, and three kids: Noelle, Jaime, and Andrea.