Speakers

Clara Popescu Brooks

Founder & CEO
Homestead AI

Clara Popescu Brooks is a software engineer, systems architect, and manager. Founder and CEO of Homestead AI, ex-Mandiant engineer and manager, and ex-Google manager, based in Northern Virginia. She grew up in communist Romania, where a failed architecture exam unexpectedly redirected her toward civil engineering, a pivot she still describes as the defining “forcing function” of her life.

At Mandiant, part of FireEye and later Google Cloud, she built both solid technical foundations and a clear view of authentic leadership.

Today, Clara is the founder & CEO of ECOU by Homestead AI, a private web and mobile application designed to help families preserve, organize, and narrate their stories, and the initiator of ”Creativity for Engineers”, an editorial project built from interviews with technologists who are also creators; engineering professors, engineers, developers with an artistic streak they haven't yet fully pursued.

Clara writes and speaks about resilience, intrinsic motivation, the emotional texture of working alongside AI, and why she believes a second Renaissance is closer than most of the industry thinks. She is a strong advocate for Renaissance-style education in which the technical and the creative are no longer held apart. She also maintains strong active connections with the Romanian diaspora.