Bethanie Baynes

Bethanie Baynes is a seasoned technology executive with two decades of experience across various business units at Google and Amazon. Baynes has earned extensive expertise in negotiating highly complex deals, bringing new products to market and scaling operations in customer support and business intelligence teams. With leadership roles across Search, Commerce, Gaming, Media & Entertainment, News & Publishing and most recently Healthcare and Grocery, Baynes brings a depth of knowledge of the unique challenges and transformation opportunities of various industries. Her current responsibilities include leading C-level corporate partnerships through product and partner innovation across all assets of Amazon’s portfolio with an emphasis on Healthcare and Grocery. Further, over her 18 year tenure with Google, she represented the company in several forums with domestic and international government officials.

Baynes knows how to operate in both a startup and large corporate environment. Having lived through several acquisitions (YouTube, DoubleClick, Admeld, AdMob), she has deep insight into the complexity of integrating acquisitions, both in systems and in team cultures. More critically, Baynes has spent many years unwinding “early days” deals and as such operates with an eye toward deal and relationship sustainability; having learned the hard way about risks that lie ahead if strategic partnerships are not established with a long term view.

Notable achievements and responsibilities include:

• Closed the first ever YouTube upfront campaign making YouTube the largest digital partner for a major film studio in 2008

• Closed first multi-platform deal across Google Search and DoubleClick products for top ISP/Media company resulting in significant savings to Google and flipping three key businesses from competitors

• Closed additional 20+ deals across top partners in multiple industry sectors resulting in 25% incremental revenue growth

• P&L responsibility for multi-billion dollar top partnerships organization, showcasing growth of +18% Y/Y

• Development of pipeline and business intelligence function for Google executive leadership in an evermore complex reporting organism

• Organizational design across 50 people to define title, roles & responsibilities, quota targets, reporting structure and scope of role

• Member of Executive Hiring Committee, reviewed over 300 candidate packets

• Founder of Breadwinning Women community within Google, which by 2021 had grown to 3500 women in over 20 different countries globally and hosted over 20 events each year.

Baynes possesses stellar relationship building skills and has a strong reputation as a direct and empathetic leader, allowing for the best of creativity, innovation and commitments from the teams she leads. She is a natural leader, handling even the most challenging of management and leadership issues with grace and pragmatism. She also has extensive experience with hiring, recruiting and talent management as an active member of the executive hiring committee at Google for several years, having reviewed over 300 candidate hiring packets.

Baynes is a tireless women’s advocate and recognized leader on the topic of breadwinning women. She founded the Breadwinning Women’s community at Google which has grown to over 3500 women globally. Baynes is the host of the podcast, Working Wife, Happy Life! launched in early 2020. She has been featured on CNBC, Refinery 29, Medium, Know Your Value “Women in the News”, Said Business School at Oxford University, Chief Mom Officer, and on podcasts such as So Money with Farnoosh Torabi, Listen Money Matters and the Ellevate Network. She has contributed to multiple panels including for communities such as HeyMama, Mindr Global and The WIE Suite and the parents network at NASA. She was an official speaker at the Women’s March NYC 2020 and moderates many Talks At Google events for the Google sponsored YouTube channel on topics focused on furthering women in various industries including the film Equity, the film Egg, the documentary She Started It and the books The Myth of the Nice Girl and Fair Play.

Baynes holds a BA in Human Services from Northeastern University in Boston, MA. She has been awarded placement at several global leadership conferences for women including Women Transforming Leadership at Said Business School at Oxford University and the Women’s Director Development Program at Kellogg. She enjoys world travel, made easier by her fluency in Spanish thanks to her two fun-filled “gap” years in Alicante, Spain. Baynes lives with her husband and two children in Brooklyn, NY.