Maca Baigorria, a two-time founder whose first startup grew from $0 to $7 million after participating in StartOut’s Growth Lab, returns to lead the accelerator that helped launch her entrepreneurial journey.
NEW YORK, NY — StartOut, the nation’s leading nonprofit championing LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs, today announced the appointment of Maca Baigorria as Head of Growth Lab and Entrepreneur-in-Residence. A graduate of Growth Lab Cohort 8, Baigorria returns to lead the accelerator that helped shape her own success, succeeding longtime program leader Chris Davidson, who is departing to become Chief People Officer at inKind, a Growth Lab alumni company.
“Growth Lab has always been about more than helping founders build companies. It’s about building leaders who lift up the entrepreneurs who come after them,” said Brian Richardson, CEO of StartOut. “There is no better example of that than Maca. She embodies everything Growth Lab stands for: bold entrepreneurship, operational excellence and a deep commitment to community. We couldn’t be more excited to welcome her back to lead the program that helped launch her own journey.”
Baigorria is the founder of Avocademy, a career accelerator that grew from zero to more than $7 million in revenue while helping thousands of people transition into technology careers. She is currently building her second company, Jack, an AI-native hiring platform. Before becoming an entrepreneur, she worked as a mechanical engineer at Boeing and as a UX strategist at IBM and PwC. Born in Argentina and now based in Miami and New York, Baigorria is a proud queer Latina immigrant dedicated to helping the next generation of LGBTQ+ and allied founders succeed.
“So much of what worked at my first company came directly from what I learned in Growth Lab and from the community of world-class entrepreneurs I found there,” said Baigorria. “To carry that work forward, with Chris’s playbook in one hand and my own founder-operator experience in the other, is the dream version of a next chapter.”
The announcement also marks the conclusion of an extraordinary chapter under Davidson’s leadership. Over the past five years, he transformed Growth Lab into one of the country’s premier accelerators for LGBTQ+ founders, mentoring more than 100 entrepreneurs and helping cultivate a program whose 123 alumni have collectively raised more than $1 billion in capital and created more than 5,000 jobs.
“Watching Maca grow from a first-time founder into the leader she is today has been one of the great privileges of my time at StartOut,” said Davidson. “She combines empathy, ambition, operational excellence and innovation in a way that is incredibly rare. There is no one I trust more to lead the next chapter of Growth Lab. Our founders are in exceptional hands.”
Davidson will join inKind, a Growth Lab alumnus, as Chief People Officer, while continuing to support StartOut in an advisory capacity. In addition, he will transition to a new role within StartOut, to be announced in the coming weeks.
Growth Lab’s next cohort begins on August 30, 2026, continuing StartOut’s mission of propelling LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs toward success through knowledge, capital and community.