Tell us about yourself and your background.
I’m Steliana, and my career has been built on a very specific strategy: moving toward complexity. My foundation is in Communications, backed by a PhD in Communications and Technology, and further studies at Maastricht School of Management and MIT. But the real education happened in the trenches. I’ve driven marketing, project management, operations, and digital transformation across NGOs, SMEs, and corporate environments. I’ve been a Head of Growth, a COO, and an executive leader.
Today, I’m the CEO of Vettoria.global, co-founder and Board President of Carierista.org, and a Certified Business Coach. I sit on boards that operate at the intersection of leadership, technology, and women’s advancement, including Global Women TechLeaders and UniHub, and I teach management at the University of Bucharest. If you look at that trajectory, the throughline isn’t just curiosity; it’s a relentless focus on leverage. I want to understand how organizations actually function, where the systems break, and how to build structures that allow people to operate at their absolute highest capacity.
How did you get started in business?
I started by refusing to stay in my lane. My early career was in marketing, which taught me how to listen to a market. But I quickly realized that if you want to drive real impact, you have to understand the mechanics of the entire business. I moved into project management to learn how to execute under pressure, and then into operations and digital transformation to see how systems actually work.
By the time I reached the executive level, I had developed a distinct advantage: the ability to see an organization as a living system where strategy, people, and execution either multiply each other or cancel each other out. Along the way, I realized my highest value wasn’t just running the operations, it was building the platforms that allow others to scale. That’s what pulled me from being an executive into being a founder. Today, whether I’m building Vettoria.global or Carierista.org, my focus is on creating the infrastructure that lets people and companies grow.
Building things, whether it’s a company, a program, a movement, or a single person’s confidence in themselves, is where I feel most useful, and most alive.
Can you share what inspired your journey into philanthropy and community impact?
I’ve been a volunteer since I was 16, in my hometown and I’ve never really stopped. When I was younger, I’ll be honest: volunteering was partly about my own development and meeting new people. It was as much for me as it was for the cause. Over time, that shifted. I became much more dedicated to the causes themselves: women’s empowerment, social impact, and leadership development.
Those causes have never been abstract to me. I was raised by a single mother in a modest household, and I know intimately what it looks like when a woman is doing everything she can with very little safety net, very few role models, and almost no margin for error. That experience dictated where I choose to allocate my time, capital, and platform. I am focused on causes that drive systemic change because that is where you see the greatest return on investment for society. I also know what it looks like when one opportunity, one champion, one open door changes the entire trajectory of what a young woman believes is possible for her. Community work isn’t something I do alongside my career; it is part of my career, woven through every other role I hold.
You are the Board President at Carierista.org. What is your mission?
Carierista
org (which means Career woman in Romanian) is an NGO dedicated to helping women from disadvantaged backgrounds become economically independent, primarily by helping them get a job. We work with single mothers, women with no income, and women with low income, and we deliver everything pro bono: classes, trainings, workshops, financial education, and events covering HR, legal, entrepreneurship and all the other topics. Every program is designed by professionals who volunteer their expertise, which means the women we serve get access to the same quality of guidance that, in another context, would cost them thousands.
The mission sounds straightforward, get a woman a job, but the impact is anything but small. When a woman earns her own income, the effect ripples outward in ways that are easy to underestimate. Her children eat better, stay in school longer, and grow up with a different sense of what’s possible. Her household becomes more resilient to shocks. Her community gains a consumer, a taxpayer, a role model, often a future employer. Research has shown for years that women reinvest a significantly larger share of their income into their families and communities than men do, which means every working woman is, in effect, a multiplier, for her children, her neighborhood, and the broader economy. You’re not just changing one life. You’re changing the trajectory of a family, and over time, of a community. That multiplier effect is the engine behind everything we do at Carierista. It’s also why I believe economic independence is the foundation of every other kind of independence a woman can have.
How do you empower women and create opportunities for change?
By being ruthlessly practical. “Empowerment” is a hollow buzzword unless it’s backed by action and access. For me, it means opening doors, sharing the unwritten rules of business, and actively sponsoring women into rooms where decisions are made, not just mentoring them from the sidelines.
Through Carierista, we build the on-ramps for women to enter the workforce
Through Global Women TechLeaders, we are attacking one of the most glaring inefficiencies in the market: the underrepresentation of women in technology. The highest-leverage careers and the most consequential products of the next decade are being built in tech. If women aren’t in those rooms as founders, engineers, and decision-makers, we are designing the future without half the population. We work to fix that pipeline. And through Vettoria.global, we are creating the infrastructure for senior women to monetize their expertise on their own terms through fractional leadership.
Tech is where the highest-leverage careers of the next decade will be built, and if women aren’t in those rooms, as engineers, as product leaders, as founders, as decision-makers, we’re not just losing individual opportunities, we’re shaping the future of an entire industry without half of the perspectives that should be in it. So at Global Women TechLeaders we work to bring more women into tech, support the ones already there, and create the visibility, networks, and role models that make those careers sustainable over the long term.
And through Vettoria.global, it means creating space for senior women to monetize their expertise on their own terms, through fractional leadership engagements that give them flexibility without sacrificing seniority. Different audiences, very different starting points but the same instinct: build the structures that let women step into what they’re already capable of.
What current projects and initiatives are you excited about?
Vettoria
global is my primary focus right now because it solves a massive market inefficiency. It’s a tech platform dedicated to fractional leadership connecting organizations that need senior expertise on a flexible basis with experienced leaders who want to work that way. The model fits the moment perfectly: companies, especially scale-ups and mid-market firms, increasingly need senior thinking without always being able to commit to a full-time hire, and a generation of accomplished executives, many of them women, want more agency over how, when, and with whom they work. Vettoria sits right at that intersection, and the early traction is telling us we’re solving a real problem on both sides of the marketplace.
I’m also increasingly focused on the international dimension of this work. I’m part of the core team launching the inaugural House of Romania platform, which debuts during the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2027. It’s a significant undertaking, the first time Romania will have a dedicated platform of this kind at Davos, and a meaningful moment for our country’s visibility on the global stage. For me, it’s a chance to help shape how Central and Eastern Europe shows up in one of the most consequential rooms in the world: not as a region being talked about, but as one shaping the conversation. Alongside Davos, I lecture and teach in different markets, and every audience teaches me something. Moving between geographies sharpens my thinking, exposes me to leadership questions framed in unfamiliar ways, and constantly reminds me that the challenges we work on, women’s advancement, leadership development, the future of work, are global by nature, even when the solutions need to be local.
And of course, Carierista continues to evolve. We’re constantly refining how we deliver value, especially as the needs of the women we serve shift with the broader economy and with how work itself is changing.
Can you share a story that illustrates the impact of your work?
What stays with me isn’t usually one dramatic story, it’s the quieter pattern, repeated across years and contexts. A single mother who comes to a Carierista workshop unsure she has anything to offer an employer, and three months later sends a message saying she got the job, and a year later, that her daughter has started talking about going to university. A young woman in a leadership program who, a few years later, is the one designing programs for others coming up behind her. A senior executive who joins Vettoria and finally builds the kind of portfolio career she always wanted, on her own terms. A student in one of my management classes who emails me a year after graduation to say something we discussed shaped how she chose her first job.
None of these are because of me. They happen because the woman at the center did the work. What community, structure, and mentorship provide is the permission and the proof that it’s possible and sometimes that’s the only thing missing. Multiply that by the hundreds of women moving through these networks, and you start to understand why this work matters. It’s not about any single transformation. It’s about changing what feels normal, what feels available, what feels deserved.
What are your aspirations for the next five years?
I want to keep building things that outlast me. Practically, that means scaling Vettoria.global into a meaningful platform across our region and beyond, deepening Carierista’s impact on the women who need it most, and continuing to push the conversation on women in leadership and women in technology, both in CEE and on bigger international stages like Davos. I want to keep teaching, because there’s something about being in a classroom that keeps you intellectually honest in a way nothing else does. And I want to keep growing as a coach and a leader: staying curious, staying useful, staying close to the work, and resisting the very real temptation to coast on what I already know. The day you start coasting is the day you stop being useful to anyone, including yourself.
What legacy do you hope to leave?
I hope the women who come after me spend less energy proving they belong and more energy doing the work they were meant to do. I hope a few of them remember a workshop, a conversation, an introduction, or a door that opened at the right moment, and pass that forward without hesitation. I hope the organizations I helped build continue to serve their communities long after I’ve stepped away from them. Legacy, to me, isn’t a monument or a title or a line on a CV. It’s a slightly easier path for the next person, a slightly larger sense of what’s possible for the one after that, and a few institutions that keep doing the work whether or not anyone remembers who started them.
How can others contribute meaningfully to the causes you care about?
Start where you are, with what you have. If you’re senior, sponsor someone, not just mentor them, sponsor them, meaning use your name, your network, and your access on their behalf, in rooms they aren’t yet in. If you’re earlier in your career, show up consistently in the communities that matter to you; consistency compounds in ways that single grand gestures never do. Support organizations like Carierista.org with time, expertise, or funding – pro bono trainers, HR professionals, lawyers, and entrepreneurs are always needed, and a few hours of your expertise can change the trajectory of someone’s year. And if you’re building something — a company, a community, a platform — design it from day one to include the people who are usually designed out. Inclusion is exponentially harder to retrofit than to build in.
Where can readers connect with you?
LinkedIn is the easiest way to find me. You can also reach me through Carierista.org or Vettoria.global — I’m always open to conversations with people who are building, growing, or trying to figure out what’s next.