Speakers
CEO and Founder, Silkroad Innovation Hub
Co-founder & Chief Scientific Officer, Colorifix
Co-founder & CEO, Mercury
Founder, Alcorn Immigration Law
Managing Partner, M13
Co-founder & CEO, Anthropic
Founder & General Partner, Trust Fund
Director of Content, Money 20/20, Fintech Family Hour
Partner, Greylock
VP Marketing, Securiti
Co-Founder, ThriveAgric Ltd
Co-Founder & CEO, Moov Financial
Founder & CEO, Switchboard
Chief Ethicist / Assistant Professor, Meta
Partner, Collaborative Fund
Head of Trust & Safety, Airbnb
Co-founder & Managing Partner, Afore Capital
Co-founder & Managing Partner, January Ventures
Founder, General Partner, Atento Capital
Chief Product Officer, Amplitude
GM, Online Business, Zoom
Principal Architect, Responsible AI & Tech, Salesforce
General Partner, NFX
Vice President of Partnerships, Techstars
Managing Director, General Catalyst
Founding & Managing Partner, Asymmetric Capital Partners
Partner, Founders Fund
Assistant Tech Editor, Washington Post
Managing Director, Insight Partners
EVP, Partnerships, NewsGuard
Founder & CEO, Katmai Tech
Senior Director, Marketing Center of Excellence, Insight Partners
Managing Director, IndieBio & General Partner, SOSV
Founder & Chief Visionary, Wonder Women Tech
Chief Marketing Officer, Confluent
Co-Founder and CEO, Clari
Co-founder & CEO, Vanta
Managing Partner, Supply Change Capital
President, Silicon Valley Bank Commercial, Silicon Valley Bank
Deputy Chief Technology Officer & General Manager, The Aerospace Corporation
Co-founder & CEO, BoxPower
Director, Incident Response, Dragos Inc
Global Head of Technology, Google.org
Founder & CEO, Worthix
Lightspeed Venture Partners, Partner
Chief Scientist, Numbers Station
Partner & Head of Research, Wing Venture Capital
Co-founder & CEO, LangChain
Partner, CapitalG
Partner, Norwest Venture Partners
Co-founder & COO, swsh
Vice President, Head of Innovation & Design for CEMEA, Visa
Founder & Managing Partner, RareBreed Ventures
Co-founder & CEO, Epsilon3
Executive Director, CITRIS & the Banatao Institute
Co-founder & CEO, Cromydas
General Partner, NFX
COO, Atomic
CEO, Sorcero
Director Threat intelligence Strategy, Microsoft
COO, Farm-ng
General Partner, GV (Google Ventures)
Head of Fintechs, Digital Partners & Visa Ventures – LAC, Visa
Co-founder & CEO, swsh
Co-founder & CEO, Berkeley Yeast
Chief Product Officer, GitLab
General Partner, Maven Ventures
Chief Strategy Officer, Social Discovery Group
Mayor, City of Atlanta
Commander, U.S. Space Command
Former CMO, Advisor, Several Hypergrowth Companies
CEO, GitHub
Founding Partner, Beacon Capital
SVP, Fintech Partnerships, Global and North America, VISA
President & COO, Checkout.com
Founder & CEO, Promise
Co-founder & CEO, Paradigm
Vice President & Chief Technology Officer, The Aerospace Corporation
Co-founder & Chair, unspun
CEO, Bedrock Learning
Senior Sales Executive, Discover Global Network
SVP, Head of Visa Commercial Solutions North America, Visa
Partner, Index Ventures
Founder & CEO, Horizon Quantum Computing
Co-founder & CEO, Partanna
Co-founder & Business Development, Kadre
Vice President, Customer Experience, ISVPay Inc
Founder and CEO, Pangea Cyber
Co-Founder, Tribe AI
Partner, Sapphire Ventures
Co-Founder and CTO, Monte Carlo
Director of Open Robotics, Intrinsic
Creative Director, Koto
Co-founder & CTO, Runway
Founder & CEO, Kognitos
Founder & CEO, Wellthi Technologies
Co-founder, Solana & COO, Solana Labs
Partner, Drake Star
Partner, Flint Capital
Senior Partner, In-Q-Tel
Program Manager, Space Portfolio, Defense Innovation Unit
General Partner, Benchmark
Partner, Mayfield Fund
Managing Partner, Point72 Private Investments
Co-founder & CEO, Writer
Interim CEO & COO, Digitalundivided
Partner, Kleiner Perkins
Co-founder & President, Dandelion Energy
Managing Partner, Cortado Ventures
CEO, Career Karma, Inc.
Acting Head of Trends and Innovation, Abu Dhabi Early Childhood Authority
Partner, Bessemer Venture Partners
Co-founder & CEO, Synctera
Head of Startup Banking, J.P. Morgan
General Partner, Unusual Ventures
Co-founder and CRO, Vouch Insurance
CEO, Notice.co
Founding Partner, Chingona Ventures
Founding Managing Partner, Pear VC
Partner, Reach Capital
Co-founder & Managing Partner, 645 Ventures
Founding Partner, Seven Seven Six
Founder & CEO, Haun Ventures
Partner, Sequoia Capital
Founder & Managing Partner, Precursor Ventures
Co-founder, School Twist
CEO, Amulet
Astronaut & Commander, Inspiration4 & Polaris Program
President & CEO, The Aerospace Corporation
Partner, Accel
Vice President, Environment, Policy, & Social Initiatives, Apple
CEO, Healthie
Chief Product Officer and SVP Engineering, Uber
Founder & Managing Partner, Kindred Ventures
Founder & CEO, Securiti
Vice President of Partnerships, Meta
Investor, Yosemite
CEO, Magic Leap
Co-founder & CEO, DealMaker
Engineering Manager, Runway
Regular Contributor, Fast Company
Senior Vice President & General Manager, Mobile, Compute, & XR (MCX), Qualcomm, Inc.
Senior Strategy Director, Koto
Founder, Mental
MD & Head of Investments, Samsung Next
Global Head of Market Expansion Visa Direct, Visa
Deputy Center Director (Acting), NASA Ames Research Center
Co-founder & CEO, Deepdub
VP, Global Developer Strategy & Business Enablement, Mastercard
AppSec CTO, Palo Alto Networks
Executive Director, IT Park Uzbekistan
Managing Director, Cleo Capital
CEO & Founder, Linkedist
CEO, Google Cloud
Executive Director, Howe Innovation Center, Perkins School for the Blind
Co-Founder & CEO, Modular
Founder & CEO, Dusty Robotics
Founder & CEO, AppMap
Partner, NEA
Investor and Coach, Launch Lab/Fika Ventures
Founder & CEO, Piermont Bank
Chief Strategy Officer, Haun Ventures
Client Services Director, Koto
Physician Executive, InterSystems
Co-Founder & CEO, SambaNova Systems
Senior Research Scholar, Hank Holland Fellow, Stanford University
CEO, OnePlus North America
Partner, MaC Venture Capital
Managing Director, Insight Partners
Ransomware Researcher / Intelligence Analyst, Recorded Future
Co-Founder & CEO, Jorie Healthcare Partners
Senior Technical Advisor, CISA
Co-founder & General Partner, Canvas Ventures
Co-founder & CEO, Siren
Partner, Primary Venture Partners
Founder Robust.AI & Geometric.AI; Emeritus Professor Psychology & Neural Science, NYU
Senior Researcher, Citizen Lab
U.S. Dept. of Defense Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer, U.S. Department of Defense
Founder & CEO, LSA Global/Latinx Startup Alliance
Co-founder & CEO, Hidden Door
Co-founder & General Partner, Coalition Operators
Co-founder & CEO, Sunshine
Co-founder & CEO, Nominal
Startup and VC Program Manager, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Chief Information Officer, Century Supply Chain Solutions
Founder & CEO, Secureframe
Founding Partner, SSM
Founder, This Week in Fintech; General Partner, The Fintech Fund,
Co-founder & Managing Partner, Phenomenal Ventures
Sales Engineering Manager, InterSystems
COO, BlocPower
Managing Director, Koto NY, Koto
Principal Director, The Aerospace Corporation
Partner, Greylock
Co-founder & CEO, DynamoFL
General Partner, GV
CEO, Govini
ATLAS Deputy Director, Space System Command
Founder & CEO, Zūm
Chief Product & Strategy Officer, G-P (Globalization Partners)
Co-founder & CEO, Tribe AI
Co-founder & CEO, Forethought
AI Product Lead @ Meta/ex-Google, Founder @ AI Product Bootcamp, Meta
Founder, Banana Capital
Chief Executive Officer, Kitovu Technology Company
NBA Superstar & Philanthropist, Entrepreneur
US Market Lead, Abu Dhabi Investment Office
Investor, Blitzscaling Ventures
Director, Office of the CISO, Google Cloud
Partner, Brick & Mortar Ventures
Senior Director, Content Authenticity Initiative, Adobe
Co-founder & CEO, Homebound
Sr. Manager, Performance Marketing & Analytics, Vericast
SVP, National Systems Group, The Aerospace Corporation
Co-founder & CEO, Plaid
Assistant Secretary Defense, Space Policy, Department of Defense
Executive Consultant, Space Workforce 2030
Chief Business Officer, OAK'S LAB
Founder & CEO, Hadrian
Chief Scientist, Toyota Motor Corporation
Co-founder & CEO, Cloudflare
Chief Privacy Officer, Product, Meta
Executive Director, The AI Institute
Senior Researcher, Citizen Lab, University of Toronto
CTO, Atlassian
VP, Global Government Relations, Cruise
Creator of Next.js, Founder & CEO, Vercel
Investment Partner, Maven Ventures
Partner, Mayfield
Vice President, Product, Navan
Co-founder & Co-CEO, Helsing
Principal, Vertex Ventures
Partner, Cowboy Ventures
VP, Fintech Business Development, Visa
Manager, Third Derivative
Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Investment Security, U.S. Department of the Treasury
Founder & CEO, G-P (Globalization Partners)
Founding Partner, Cambrian Ventures
Group Partner, Y Combinator
Internnational Policy Director Stanford Cyber Policy Center, Stanford University
Founding Managing Partner, Maven Ventures
Sr. Manager of Public Relations, Qualcomm Incorporated
Founder & Partner, Defy.vc
CEO, Finix
Director of Security Research, Sternum IOT
Co-founder & Managing Partner, Greycroft
Co-founder & CEO, Aptos Labs
Partner, Khosla Ventures
Co-founder & Managing Partner, Flourish Ventures
Co-founder & CEO, Agility Robotics
Co-founder & President, Wonder Dynamics
Partner & Global Automotive Sector Leader, KPMG
General Partner, a16z crypto
EVP & General Manager, Navan Expense, Navan
Founder & CEO, Credo AI
Director, UC Berkeley Disaster Lab
Co-Head Innovation Economy; Head of Specialized Industries, Commercial Banking, J.P. Morgan
Founder& CEO, Thistle Technologies
Co-founder & President, Alloy
Vice President of Developer & Performance Technology, NVIDIA
General Partner, Bowery Capital
Founder & CEO, Redwood Materials
Chief Content Officer, War on the Rocks
Co-founder & CEO, Respondology
Chief Compliance Officer, Unit
Entrepreneur & Co-founder, Instagram
Vice President, Chrome, Google
Chief Technology Officer, Redwire
CEO, Kickstarter
Co-founder & CEO, Robinhood
Sr. Business Development Manager- NA & Global Fintech, Visa, Inc.
Senior Vice President, Global Fintech Programs, Mastercard
Chief of Staff & Strategic Initiatives, Infleqtion
CEO, Diligent Robotics
Friendly Hacker & CEO, SocialProof Security
Founder & CEO, 10Times
CEO, Zellic
VP Product, Polygon zkEVM Product Lead, Polygon Labs
Co-founder & CEO, MindsDB
Deputy Assistant Secretary Defense, Aquisition Integration & Interoperability, Office of the Secretary of Defense
General Partner, Theory Ventures
Deputy Director, Space Systems Integration Office, Space Systems Command
Founder& CEO, UPSIDE Foods
Acting Chairperson of Innovation and Digital Development Agency, Innovation and Digital Development Agency of Azerbaijan
Partner, G2 Venture Partners
CEO and Founder, GXO, Inc.
HR & Talent Acquisition Lead, We Are Kadre
Founder & CEO, Cruise
Founder & CEO, Social Discovery Group
Co-founder & CEO, Helm.ai
CEO and Co-Founder, Remote
CEO, i2c
CEO, Edsoma
Managing Director, Food and Agriculture, S2G Ventures
Partner, Sapphire Ventures
Chief Design Officer, Otter.ai
Co-founder & EVP, EeroQ
Partner, Breakthrough Energy Ventures
Director, Program Planning, Secure World Foundation
Co-founder & CEO, Kraftful
General Partner, Park Rangers Capital
CEO, Intrinsic
President, Signal
Founder & General Partner, Dunbar Capital
Chief Strategy Officer, BlackSky
Host, Techsetters
Partner, Cowboy Ventures
Chief Commercialization Officer, Circ
Quantum Physics Division Chief, National Institute of Standards & Technology
CTO, Agility Robotics
Startup Coach & Fractional Founder, Fundable Startups
Founding Partner & Managing Director, Cake Ventures
Principal, F-Prime Capital
VP, Sales & Customer Success Center of Excellence, Insight Partners
Product Manager, Arta Finance
Co-founder, Solana & CEO, Solana Labs
Partner & Head of Technology, New Enterprise Associates (NEA)
Chief Innovation Officer for Commercial Banking, J.P. Morgan
Co-Founder & CEO, Zip
Managing Director, Stella Ventures
Deputy Minister, Digital Development, Innovation and Aerospace Industry of the Republic of Kazakhstan
Creative Director for Product, OnePlus
Co-founder & CEO, Context
Co-founder, President & COO, Cloudflare
Trainer | Mentor | HR Project Manager & Scrum Master., JOBPONT
Neural Interfaces Research Manager, Facebook Reality Labs
Data Science Manager, CVS Health
Asset Abdualiyev
CEO and Founder, Silkroad Innovation HubAsset Abdualiyev serves as the CEO and Founder of Silkroad Innovation Hub, a thriving startup community in Silicon Valley catering to entrepreneurs hailing from Central Eurasia. With a robust background in strategy and operations, he has previously held roles at Taskrabbit.com, McKinsey & Company, and the Almaty Mayor’s Office. Additionally, Asset is an angel investor and startup advisor. He also sits on the boards of Kazakhtelecom, the foremost telecommunications operator in Central Asia, and the American University of Central Asia, a leading institution for liberal arts education in the region. Asset holds Master’s degrees from Stanford Graduate School of Business, Harvard Kennedy School, and the University of Dundee.
Jim is a founder and Chief Science Officer. Jim has had a life-long passion for the environment, with a PhD in Ecology and Evolution. At the University of Cambridge, Jim’s background in building tools for molecular genome analysis led to early adoption of synthetic biology methods aimed at the construction of a biosensor as a sustainable method to assess arsenic contamination of drinking water in Nepal and Bangladesh.
Immad Akhund is the co-founder and CEO of Mercury and an angel investor with more than 250 investments.
Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives.
Karl Alomar is managing partner at M13. Karl was previously the COO of DigitalOcean, where he helped scale the business from first product over six years and prepared it for its eventual IPO (NYSE: DOCN). During his 20-year operating career, Karl also co-founded and ultimately exited two other technology companies as CEO.
Dario Amodei
Co-founder & CEO, AnthropicDario Amodei is the CEO of Anthropic, an AI research company. Anthropic is a public benefit corporation dedicated to building steerable AI systems that people can rely on, and generating research about the opportunities and risks of AI. Claude is Anthropic’s AI assistant for tasks at any scale, and is based on Anthropic’s research into training helpful, honest, and harmless AI systems. Previously, Dario served as Vice President of Research at OpenAI, where he led the development of large AI language models like GPT-2 and GPT-3. He is also the co-inventor of reinforcement learning from human feedback, the technique that powers conversational AI systems like ChatGPT and models created by Anthropic. Before joining OpenAI, he worked at Google Brain as a Senior Research Scientist. Dario earned his doctorate degree in biophysics from Princeton University as a Hertz Fellow, and was a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
Sophia Amoruso is the Founder & General Partner at Trust Fund, an emerging early-stage venture fund focused on pre-seed and seed-stage investments. In 2020, Sophia founded Business Class, a comprehensive digital entrepreneurship course and community for founders. Sophia made her mark as the founder of fashion e-commerce phenomenon Nasty Gal, which she founded in 2006 and built to over $100 million in revenue. Sophia is also the author of #GIRLBOSS, which spent 18 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List, sold 500,000 copies, and was adapted into a Netflix series of the same name produced by Charlize Theron. In 2016, Sophia was featured on the cover of Forbes Magazine’s America’s Richest Self-Made Women issue, and has been featured on the covers of Inc., Entrepreneur, Success, and Money magazines. Sophia was also named to the Fortune 40 under 40, Forbes 30 under 30, Inc. 30 under 30, and Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business lists. Sophia resides between Los Angeles and Kauai and can’t remember what she was thinking when she decided to accept three tiny toy poodles named Donna, Gino, and Cosi into her home, rent-free, forever.
Zach Anderson Pettet
Director of Content, Money 20/20, Fintech Family HourAs Content Director of Money 20/20, the largest FinTech conference in the world, Zach Anderson Pettet is interested in financial inclusion, education, and leveling the playing field in the US economy. Zach also hosts the Fintech Family Hour Podcast and nerds out on all things fintech.
Jacob is a product executive and builder who backs founders building the next generation of consumer software. Prior to joining Greylock, Jacob spent 8 years at Snap, where he helped scale the company from its early days to 360M+ DAUs and $4.5B in revenue. For most of his time at the company, he ran a team of several hundred people across the product, design, growth, data science and analytics, and user research teams. Under his leadership, he launched some of its biggest initiatives, including Spotlight. Most recently, he launched My AI, Snap’s own AI chatbot powered by ChatGPT. Prior to Snap, Jacob co-founded and led product at ThinkAkili, an online retail analytic platform. He holds a B.S. in Biomedical Computing from Queens University.
Eric Andrews is VP of Marketing at Securiti, a leader in multicloud data protection, privacy and governance. He has more than 25 years of leadership experience in the networking and security industry. Previously he was VP Cloud Security at Symantec, driving marketing for the fastest growing division within the company. Eric came into Symantec through the acquisition of Elastica (via Blue Coat), where he led marketing for the CASB startup since its inception. Prior to Elastica, he led marketing for WiChorus, a wireless gateway startup which was acquired by Tellabs. He has also held leadership roles at NetDevices (acquired by Alcatel), Turnstone Systems (IPO) and Newbridge Networks. Eric holds an MS and BS in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Ayo Arikawe is the Co-Founder & CTO of ThriveAgric LTD, a fast-growing agricultural technology company that is passionate about ensuring food security and productivity in Africa by empowering smallholder farmers through its flagship proprietary products; Agricultural Operating System (AOS). Till date, ThriveAgric has partnered with several organizations to unlock over $150m financing for farmers; worked with over 500,000 smallholder farmers; produced and traded over 800,000 metric tonnes of grains; impacted over 2800 communities across 26 states in Nigeria and targeted 10,000,000 farmers in 2027. Thrive Agric also directly employs over 2,500 people with an average age of 27 and indirectly engages over 40,000 youths all over Africa. Ayo also leads the market access thematic group of the Nigeria Economic Summit Group (NESG); a notable platform for public-private dialogue in Nigeria and he serves on the Advisory board of Ukhanyo Farmer Development (a non-profit organization that helps South African farmers unlock finance). He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from Covenant University and is an alumnus of YCombinator, Google Launchpad, and World Food Programme Accelerator. Recently he emerged winner of the 2022 Visa Everywhere Initiative (VEI) for Central Europe, Middle East Africa. In 2019, he also emerged Top 10 Jack Ma Foundation Africa Netpreneur Prize Initiative (ANPI) and is a 2019 YTech 100 recipient from the Future Awards Africa. His noteworthy achievements all started as a result of his flair for solving big problems and real life issues on a large scale.
Wade Arnold
Co-Founder & CEO, Moov FinancialSerial entrepreneur Wade Arnold is the Co-Founder and CEO of Moov Financial, responsible for rebuilding banking infrastructure for modern, cloud-native applications without dependence on legacy technology. As a visionary leader, Wade is instrumental in establishing Moov’s renowned open source libraries and creating Moov’s rapidly expanding developer community. Throughout his career, he’s served in various high-profile roles at banking and fintech organizations, most notably as the founder and CEO of Banno, a white-label digital banking platform that was acquired by Jack Henry. Previously, Wade served as Executive Vice President of Technology at BillGO, an all-in-one platform for managing and paying bills. Wade has also served as a member of several boards, including the President of the Association for Financial Technology (AFT), and is a mentor at Techstars. Wade holds a Computer Science degree from the University of Northern Iowa, an MBA from the University of Iowa, and completed the ABA Stonier Graduate School of Banking.
Amir Ashkenazi is a serial entrepreneur, having founded and sold three companies prior to launching remote collaboration tool startup Switchboard. Amir founded Shopping.com in 1997 and performed the CTO role until it was acquired by Ebay in 2006. Amir then became VP of Product Search at Ebay until 2007 when he founded Adap.tv, a video advertising platform, and was CEO until 2013 when it was acquired by AOL. Amir was then president of AOL from 2013 to 2015. In 2018 Amir founded Toukee, an AI & voice technology company, which was acquired out of stealth by LogMeIn. Switchboard came to life during the pandemic when Amir became frustrated with standard video calls that didn’t serve him during his virtual guitar lessons. Then he created the solution to his problem: a collaborative platform where anyone can open multiple applications and work seamlessly together.
Dr. Chloé Bakalar is Chief Ethicist at Meta. She joined Meta’s Responsible AI team in May 2019, where she has developed and leads an applied ethics program focused for AI and genAI. Ethics at Meta both (1) identifies and builds understanding of the ethical considerations around Meta’s family of AI-powered platforms, products and systems, and also (2) designs and operationalizes ethics tooling to enable ethics-forward product work. In addition to her work at Meta, Bakalar is an Assistant Professor of moral / political philosophy and public law (esp. civil rights and civil liberties), at Temple University. Her academic research focuses on the intersection of information technology, ethics and democratic citizenship. Before joining Meta and Temple, she was a Values and Public Policy Postdoctoral Associate with appointments at Princeton’s University Center for Human Values (UCHV), Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) and the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics (CSDP). During that time, she co-founded the Princeton Dialogues on AI and Ethics, an interdisciplinary academic program aimed at empowering AI design and deployment to produce greater positive impacts on people and society while reducing potential risks.
Sophie invests in consumer products at Collaborative Fund in New York.
Naba Banerjee
Head of Trust & Safety, AirbnbNaba Banerjee is Head of Trust & Safety at Airbnb. Naba’s focus is to ensure that guests and Hosts have peace of mind as they live, travel and host on Airbnb. Naba’s most recent work includes the development of Airbnb’s reservation screening technology, to help identify potentially high-risk reservations and prevent those users from taking advantage of our platform. Naba oversees Airbnb’s work to combat fraud, stop bad actors from using the platform, and build trust between Hosts and guests. Naba has over two decades of experience building products that deliver innovative, customer centric solutions. Naba joined Airbnb after spending 13 years at Walmart.com, where she played an instrumental role in the evolution of product management, ranging from enabling shipping packages to customers faster and building mobile apps that help customers self scan and checkout faster.
Anamitra Banerji is a co-founder of Afore Capital.
Maren Bannon is Co-Founder and Managing Partner at January Ventures, a pre-seed firm focused on B2B startups that are digitally transforming traditional industries, including work, health and climate. January Ventures has invested in 60 companies to date, and closed Fund II in March 2022. Maren is an engineer turned operator and entrepreneur. Before co-founding January Ventures, Maren was CEO and co-founder of LittleLane, a mobile marketplace for local experiences. Her operating experience also includes marketing and sales roles at health tech startups as well as leading consumer marketing for a $1B product at Genentech. She is a contributor at Forbes and a Mentor at Stanford StartX and TechStars. She has an MBA from Stanford and an Engineering degree from Dartmouth. Maren is based in London, United Kingdom.
Michael Basch
Founder, General Partner, Atento CapitalMichael is the Founder and General Partner of Atento Capital, where he leads the vision and strategy for the firm and investments. From sourcing deals to supporting the portfolio companies, Michael takes an active role both within the team as well as the broader portfolio. Before joining Atento and moving to Tulsa, OK, Michael had a vast operational background. Michael’s career started as a barista at a coffee shop in high school. Through undergrad and business school, he oversaw operations of 22 stores and managed a $19M coffee operation. Michael eventually partnered with close friends to grow a product manufacturing company to nearly $40M in revenue before selling it to a publicly traded company. During that time, Michael began investing in real estate as well as angel investing. This led him to join Spotad, one of his portfolio companies, as President, building that from $0 to $16M in revenue in under two years. From there, he joined the Clinton Campaign in 2016 and continued looking for more ways to make animpact. This led him to launch Atento Capital in Tulsa, where he’s spent the last 5+ years investing in early-stage companies and driving various transformative programs and initiatives geared toward building a vibrant and inclusive tech ecosystem. He received his MBA from The University of Southern California and has lived in California, New York, London, and Tel Aviv. Michael is husband to Romi, and father to Leo, Olivia, and his furry daughter, Osita.
Justin Bauer
Chief Product Officer, AmplitudeJustin is a product and analytics expert who believes that personalization starts with great data. As the Chief Product Officer at Amplitude, Justin leads product management, design, growth, and analytics, and helps companies from startup to enterprise unlock the power of their products. He’s a 2x entrepreneur as well as an alumnus of McKinsey, Stanford GSB and Carleton College.
Wendy Bergh has deep domain experience in e-commerce, marketing, and mobile. She has spent 20+ years in leadership roles across leading e-commerce brands and Fortune 500 companies. Wendy is passionate about delivering customer experiences that deeply engage users, and increase conversion and loyalty. She has a proven track record of driving strategic initiatives, building high-performing teams, and delivering exponential revenue growth. Wendy is currently at Zoom, where she is GM, Online. In this role, Wendy is responsible for Zoom’s Online revenue and growth by making it simple for customers to try, buy, and engage with Zoom products in a self-service ecosystem. Previous to Zoom, Wendy held leadership roles at Service Now, Minted, and Walmart. Wendy holds an MBA from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and a B.A. from Colby College.
Kathy Baxter
Principal Architect, Responsible AI & Tech, SalesforceAs Principal Architect of Responsible AI & Tech at Salesforce, Kathy develops research-informed best practices to educate Salesforce employees, customers, and the industry on the development of responsible AI. She collaborates and partners with external AI and ethics experts to continuously evolve Salesforce policies, practices, and products. Kathy is a member of Singapore’s Advisory Council on the Ethical Use of AI and Data and a Visiting AI Fellow at NIST contributing to the AI Risk Management Framework. She is on the Board of EqualAI and periodically co-hosts their podcast, “In AI We Trust?” Since 2018, she has been involved with the World Economic Forum’s Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Prior to Salesforce, she worked at Google, eBay, and Oracle in User Experience Research. She is the co-author of “Understanding Your Users: A Practical Guide to User Research Methodologies.” She received her MS in Engineering Psychology and BS in Applied Psychology from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Morgan is the co-founder of Libra and was Head of Strategy for Novi, Facebook’s digital wallet for the Libra payment system. She originally joined Facebook as part of the Corporate Development team in 2017 where she worked on defining Facebook’s strategy around blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and decentralized technology. Prior to Facebook, Morgan ran Corporate Development at Medium where she led the Embedly acquisition and played a key role in developing Medium’s subscription strategy. She began her career on the Deal Team at Andreessen Horowitz. Morgan joined NFX in 2020 to invest in networks and marketplaces across a wide spectrum of sectors, most actively in web3. She loves working with technical Founders who are creating new markets.
Morgan is the Vice President of Partnerships at Techstars. In this capacity, Morgan works with corporate, government, university, investor, and non-profit partners to support founders all over the world.
At General Catalyst, Marc is part of GC’s fintech/crypto investment team. Marc focuses on early stage investing across both crypto and fintech, as well as building out the creation strategy. Additionally, he contributes to GC’s expanding AI efforts. Marc’s core areas of interest include: (1) security and data infrastructure; (2) startup tooling platforms that make building a software, and especially financial services, company easier, such as authentication/identity products, crypto on-ramps, automation tools for tax/compliance/accounting; (3) the intersection of fintech and crypto, specifically platforms that leverage both decentralized technologies as well as fintech best practices on UI/UX, user acquisition, and compliance; and (4) building from zero to one, and starting companies and getting first hire, product, client, distribution deal. Prior to joining GC, Marc spent years as a founder-operator with an emphasis on new fintech, AI, and crypto technologies. Marc co-founded Tagomi, one of the first institutional prime brokerage for digital assets (Coinbase purchased Tagomi in 2020). As an angel investor, Marc worked closely with founders on sales, distribution, and fundraising, investing from his family office in early stage fintech, crypto, and AI/start-up tooling companies. Earlier, Marc worked at Airbnb, Castanea Partners, and McKinsey, with a focus in business operations and investment analysis. Marc received his MBA from Harvard Business School in 2016 and graduated from Harvard College in 2008.
Prior to founding Asymmetric, Rob co-founded and served as co-CEO for eight years of Catalant Technologies, the market leader enabling companies to frictionlessly access and deploy talent, ranging from employees to over 70,000 elite independent consultants and 1,000 boutique firms. He is currently Chairman of Catalant. Rob is also co-author of a book titled, Reimagining Work: Strategies to Disrupt Talent, Lead Change, and Win with a Flexible Workforce, which lays out a vision and path for a new relationship between global companies and talent. Prior to founding Catalant, Rob was a private equity investor at Goldman Sachs and Bain Capital, where he focused on the healthcare and high-tech industries. In these roles, he served as an advisor to and collaborator with both public and private management teams on topics including organic growth, competitive strategy, mergers and acquisitions, capital allocation, and financing strategy. Rob is also an Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School in the Entrepreneurial Management unit, co-teaching the Scaling Technology Ventures course on funding and accelerating the growth of disruptive internet companies. Rob graduated from Princeton University with an A.B., cum laude, in Economics and Finance, and from Harvard Business School as a Baker Scholar. He played on the junior varsity basketball team and served as Student Body President.
Sam is a Partner at Founders Fund. He invests in companies at all stages and works with founders and go-to-market leaders on accelerating revenue growth and increasing the value of their business. Previously, Sam served as Chief Revenue Officer at Brex, where he oversaw revenue growth from less than $1M to several hundred million dollars of annualized revenue. Sam joined the company before its official launch, and when he left four years later the company was valued at $12.5B. Prior to Brex, Sam was VP of Sales at Zenefits, where he oversaw revenue growth from less than $1M to $70M of ARR in two years. Sam joined the company pre-Series A as employee number 18. When he left, the business was over 1500 employees and was valued at $4.5B. Sam was an active angel investor during his time at Brex and Zenefits, backing 25 software startups ranging from Seed to Series C.
Lisa Bonos is a longtime Washington Post editor and writer. She’s currently the assistant tech editor in The Post’s San Francisco bureau. Previously, she covered dating, relationships, friendship and single life for The Post’s lifestyle section.
Whitney Bouck joined Insight Partners in 2022 as a Managing Director and brings more than 30 years of operating experience to venture capital. In addition to advising the firm’s many portfolio companies, Whitney sits on the boards of Paycor, Trengo and BlueOcean. Prior to joining Insight, Whit sold three companies, led three through IPO, facilitated two spin-offs, and executed more than 15 acquisitions. Her most recent role was as COO of HelloSign, where she was responsible for growing and scaling the company in partnership with the CEO, CTO and the executive team. HelloSign was acquired by Dropbox in 2019, and Whitney continued to serve as COO of the business inside Dropbox. Before joining HelloSign, Whitney ran the global marketing organization at Box and built Box’s Enterprise business from the ground up, helping pivot the company from being an SMB-oriented product. Whitney also spent 15 years with Documentum and then EMC (via acquisition) and held a variety of leadership positions, including CMO of the Information Intelligence division at EMC. Previously, Whitney held a variety of technology and leadership roles at both Sybase and Oracle.
Sarah Brandt
EVP, Partnerships, NewsGuardSarah Brandt is Executive Vice President of Partnerships for NewsGuard, a company that counters misinformation using human intelligence. In that role, she manages NewsGuard’s global partnerships with generative AI providers, technology platforms, ad tech providers, media monitoring companies, researchers, and more. She is based in Austin, Texas. Prior to joining NewsGuard, Sarah worked at Bain & Company, a global management consulting firm. She graduated from Yale University.
Erik founded Katmai in 2020, a time when the entire world was re-learning how to communicate with one another. As his business transitioned to remote work, he became frustrated by the limited and lifeless options available for working together online and began looking for alternatives. A chance encounter with a promising tech demo led to Erik leveraging his 20+ years of industry contacts, building a team that could develop a solution to this problem. Today, Katmai is building that solution: a digital environment that facilitates meaningful, people-first communication. Prior to founding Katmai, Erik’s life revolved around music. He received his BFA from New York University’s Clive Davis Institute, and went on to create and operate Braund Studios, a production company in Brooklyn and Los Angeles. Erik has worked with artists and performers such as Julian Casablancas, P Diddy, Nick Jonas, Courtney Love, Sting, Brian Cox, and Mac DeMarco, while producing content for The Food Network, Audible, Yamaha, The New York Times, Morgan Stanley, and many others. Erik was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska, approximately 260 miles northeast of the beautiful Katmai National Park. Given that the company aims to give digital life a sense of place, Erik took inspiration from his beautiful home state — where he still returns regularly to visit family and play with his rock band, Delmag.
Jared Brickman
Senior Director, Marketing Center of Excellence, Insight PartnersJared Brickman is Senior Director of the Marketing Center of Excellence at leading software investor Insight Partners, where he advises CMOs of the firm’s 500+ portfolio companies on how to go-to-market. Jared’s research, as well as his 15 years of operating experience, span product marketing, account-based marketing (ABM), post-sale marketing, attribution, and applied generative AI. While a marketing leader at fintech unicorn Snapdocs, Jared built an account-based program that 2x’d bookings and 3x’d average contract value in a year. Prior to that, he led drone startup PrecisionHawk’s expansion into four markets, doubling revenue twice year-over-year. Jared holds an MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with his wife Sarah and son Wesley.
“Coach Po” is Managing Director of IndieBio and General Partner at SOSV, the venture firm that backs IndieBio. Po was a finance and tech journalist covering Silicon Valley for Wired, The New York Times Magazine, and an oped contributor for The Wall Street Journal. His science journalism has been honored with nine national awards, and he is the author of seven bestselling books that are available in 28 languages worldwide. His work has been cited in 185 academic journals and 503 books. His background is in Economics. He learned finance at Credit Suisse and consulting at a division of Arthur Andersen. He has significant experience leading complex customer service organizations, building communities, and even communities of like-minded companies. He’s navigated public-private partnerships with many government agencies. Prior to IndieBio he spent four years as a Futurist with Attention Span Media, consulting innovation pipelines and partnering strategy for globally-recognized brands. Most recently, Po is the co-author of Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner, published by Twelve Books, a division of the Hachette Publishing Group.
Lisa Mae Brunson is Chief Visionary and Founder of Wonder Women Tech, host of the Wonder Women Tech Show Podcast, and a speaker, author, and a Social Innovation Architect. She serves as Chair for the Commission for Technology and Innovation for the City of Long Beach, and serves on the board for CSULB Innovation and Entrepreneurship. As a Black, Latina and Indigenous female, Lisa Mae is passionate about Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Belonging and Humanity. She builds programs and initiatives working with Fortune 500 Companies, Government Entities, Schools and Universities, Organizations, and individuals to address the challenges stemming from lack of inclusion, discrimination, systemic racism, gender parity and more.
Stephanie is an accomplished business leader with a 20-year track record of success in business-to-business solutions marketing, business operations, field marketing, and brand positioning. As Confluent’s CMO, Stephanie is responsible for leading and scaling Confluent’s global marketing organization as the company pioneers a fundamentally new category of data infrastructure focused on data in motion. Before Confluent, Stephanie was CMO of Salesforce, where she led a global team of 1700 marketers working at the intersection of product vision, a dynamic market, and a world-class sales organization. Stephanie also served as EVP, Product Marketing, at Salesforce. Prior to Salesforce, Stephanie served as CMO and SVP at IHS Inc. and SVP of Marketing at SAP, in addition to marketing leadership roles at Oracle, Business Objects, and Hyperion Solutions. Stephanie is co-author of Driven to Perform, a book for all business professionals, providing them corporate performance management tools for strategy, planning, execution, modeling, and optimization to improve their business performance.
Christina Cacioppo is the CEO and co-founder of Vanta, a leading security and compliance Trust Management platform backed by Sequoia Capital, Craft Ventures, Y Combinator and Crowdstrike Ventures. Over 5,000 companies, including Autodesk, Chili Piper, Flo Health and Quora, rely on Vanta to build, maintain and demonstrate their trust—all in a way that’s real-time and transparent. Prior to founding Vanta, Christina led product management for Dropbox Paper and was a member of the investment team for Union Square Ventures. Christina received her B.A. in Economics and M.S. in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University.
An engineer turned venture capitalist, Noramay Cadena leads investments at MiLA Capital and Portfolia’s Rising America fund.
Marc Cadieux
President, Silicon Valley Bank Commercial, Silicon Valley BankMarc Cadieux is president of Silicon Valley Bank’s commercial banking business where he focuses on the needs of innovation companies at all stages of development, including the investors who back them. Marc’s career at Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank, began in 1992. In the three decades since, he has held a variety of top credit and sales roles serving some of the world’s most innovative companies. Most recently, he served as chief credit officer, appointed in 2013, and oversaw credit policy and process, credit underwriting, loan approval and portfolio management activities. He is a strong advocate of bank initiatives to expand opportunities for those who are underrepresented in the innovation economy. He serves as an executive sponsor for the company’s employee resource group focused on women employees. When he first joined SVB, Marc launched the bank’s first loan workout and restructuring group. He has held a variety of roles in credit, sales, and relationship management, which included assistant chief credit officer, Peninsula region manager, and risk manager for the Eastern U.S. division, the UK, Israel, and Canada. Previously, Marc held several positions with Pacific Western Bank and Bank of New England. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Colby College.
Brian Cameron
Deputy Chief Technology Officer & General Manager, The Aerospace CorporationDr. Brian Cameron is the Deputy Chief Technology Officer and the General Manager of the Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) for The Aerospace Corporation. The role of OCTO is three-fold: to develop, implement, and manage Corporate technical and strategic investments, mature innovative technologies and prototype advanced concepts, and drive engagement with commercial partners to harness solutions for government missions. Prior to joining OCTO, Dr. Cameron served as Principal Director for Advanced Research and Engineering focused on advanced technology development, R&D space systems, innovative ground systems, and strategic planning for a national security space customer. He started at Aerospace in the Engineering and Technology Group in various roles related to performance modeling and simulation for advanced sensors, algorithm development, prototyping, and payload development for national security and civil space customers. Dr. Cameron received his B.A. in Physics from Cornell and his PhD in Astrophysics from Caltech.
Angelo Campus
Co-founder & CEO, BoxPowerAngelo Campus has spent 12 years working on BoxPower Inc. and its precursor research projects. Originally the lead designer, Angelo has held almost every role at BoxPower and now leads sales and forward-looking technology development. Angelo is a 2019 Forbes 30 under 30 listmaker, 2019 Halcyon Fellow, 2019 GSBI Fellow, DRK Entrepreneur, 2017 Echoing Green Climate Fellow and 2017 Princeton Tiger Entrepreneur Award winner. Angelo graduated magna cum laude from Princeton in 2016, where he designed an independent major combining civil engineering and anthropology, where he focused on renewable energy technologies and business models for rural electrification.
Lesley Carhart is the Director of Incident Response for North America at the industrial cybersecurity company Dragos, Inc., leading response to and proactively hunting for threats in customers’ ICS environments. Prior to joining Dragos, Lesley was the incident response team lead at Motorola Solutions. Following four years as a Principal Incident Responder for Dragos, Lesley now manages a team of incident response and digital forensics professionals across North America who perform investigations of commodity, targeted, and insider threat cases in industrial networks. Lesley is also a certified instructor and curriculum developer for Dragos’ incident response and threat hunting courses. Lesley is honored to be retired from the United States Air Force Reserves, and to have received recognition such as “DEF CON Hacker of the Year”, “SANS Difference Maker”, and “Power Player” from SC Magazine. You may find Lesley organizing resumé and interview clinics at several cybersecurity conferences, lecturing, and blogging and tweeting prolifically about cybersecurity. When not working, Lesley enjoys being a youth martial arts instructor.
Jen Carter
Global Head of Technology, Google.orgJen Carter is the global head of technology at Google.org, Google’s philanthropic arm, and leads the company’s pro bono initiatives. She has been at Google for over 14 years and works to harness the power of technology to accelerate the impact of nonprofits & civic entities around the world. As part of that effort, Jen manages a team of ~50 Google.org Fellows working in areas like education, economic opportunity, climate, crisis response, and more, with a focus on supporting underserved communities and providing opportunity for everyone. Over the past few years, she has led 400,000+ hours of pro bono work dedicated to that cause, helping nonprofits & civic entities build and launch over 30 social impact products. She was recently recognized as the Most Admired Product Leader, who up-and-coming product leaders aspire to be, as part of the Product 50, honoring the most innovative people in product.
Guilherme Cerqueira is the founder and CEO of Worthix, an Atlanta-based technology startup. He has +20 years of experience in Marketing Research, is a serial entrepreneur, and is a member of multiple accelerators and associations, such as 500startups, ATDC, ESOMAR, and Endeavor. Cerqueira majored in Psychology and has multiple degrees and certifications from renowned international institutions such as ENSEAD, Standford, and Harvard Business School.
Guru Chahal, a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, is a visionary investor with a passion for revolutionizing digital landscapes. Renowned for his insights into industry trends encompassing DevOps, automation, security, and application development, Guru’s expertise is invaluable. Since 2012, he has been an instrumental force at Lightspeed, spearheading early investments in groundbreaking companies like Zscaler (IPO), Avere Systems (acquired by Microsoft), and Avi Networks (acquired by VMware). As a co-founder of Avi Networks in 2013, he played a pivotal role in propelling the company from infancy to catering to an impressive 20% of Fortune 50 giants. Guru’s dynamic journey led him back to Lightspeed in 2019, where he continues to make astute investments in cutting-edge ventures like nGrok, Hubilo, Noname, Infiot, and Pensando.
Ines Chami is the Chief Scientist and Co-Founder of Numbers Station. She received her Ph.D. in the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering from Stanford University where she was advised by Prof. Christopher Ré. Prior to attending Stanford, she studied Mathematics and Computer Science at Ecole Centrale Paris. Ines is particularly excited about building intelligent models to automate data-intensive work. Her work spans applications such as knowledge graph construction and data cleaning. For her work on graph representation learning, she won the 2021 Stanford Gene Golub Doctoral Dissertation Award. During her Ph.D. she interned at Microsoft AI and Research and Google Research where she co-authored the graph representation learning chapter of Kevin Murphy’s “Probabilistic Machine Learning: An Introduction” book.
Rajeev is a partner at Wing and head of research. He spearheads Wing’s research franchises and summits, and hosts and interviews the most recognizable names in business and technology today.
Harrison Chase is the CEO and co-founder of LangChain, a company formed around the open source Python/Typescript packages that aim to make it easy to develop Language Model applications. Prior to starting LangChain, he led the ML team at Robust Intelligence (an MLOps company focused on testing and validation of machine learning models), led the entity linking team at Kensho (a fintech startup), and studied stats and CS at Harvard.
Jill is an investment partner at CapitalG where she focuses on emerging use cases for AI/ML, data infrastructure, and enterprise technology. She has spent the past few years working with senior Googlers and industry experts to round out her AI/ML thesis and has had the fortune of working with several tremendous founders and technologists in the space. Since joining CapitalG in 2020, Jill has led the firm’s investment in Magic and played a leadership role in investments in executive women’s network Chief and financial data leader MX. She has also been a guest lecturer at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business since 2019. Prior to joining CapitalG, Jill worked in senior startup operating roles, both as the CEO of a private equity-backed business and as the founder of a Y Combinator-backed startup. Jill graduated magna cum laude from Williams College with a dual degree in Economics and Psychology and was captain of the women’s basketball team. She came out to the West Coast to earn an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, but she was born and raised in Boston where she had the opportunity to cheer on the most impressive era of professional sports a city has ever experienced (Go Patriots).
Priti brings more than twenty years of corporate and business development experience to her role as a partner on Norwest’s consumer Internet team. Prior to Norwest, Priti spent nine years at Facebook in executive roles in corporate development and business development, where she led M&A efforts for the company, negotiated key partnerships, and served as a strategic advisor to product leadership teams across Facebook. Before her time at Facebook, Priti spent six years at Google in strategic partnership roles. As director of distribution partnerships, she led deals for Google applications such as Toolbar and Chrome and negotiated transformative search partnerships with companies such as Apple and Mozilla. Top-line revenue from these deals grew from $0 to $4 billion under her stewardship. Earlier in her career, Priti earned her startup chops in strategy and management roles at two fast-growth companies, one of which was acquired by Inktomi in 2001 and the other went public in 1997. Priti holds an MBA with honors from Northwestern’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management and graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with degrees in architecture and communications.
Weilyn Chong is the Co-Founder/COO of swsh, the social app that strengthens the relationships that matter to you. Weilyn was born in Singapore and raised in Singapore, Hong Kong, and The Netherlands. Weilyn studied Economics and Computer Science at Princeton University. She co-founded The Entrepre女ers Network, a community and a network of 6 podcast shows supporting women entrepreneurs across the world. She is a board member at the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center and the host and producer of VEP podcast at the Center.
Akshay Chopra
Vice President, Head of Innovation & Design for CEMEA, VisaAkshay is a serial tech investor, inventor and board member. Akshay serves as Head of Innovation & Design for Visa for 90+ countries in Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa (CEMEA), and on the Board of the MENA FinTech Association. He has built over 8 major innovation labs & hubs for tech firms and governments across Asia, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. He leads teams of product experts, designers, engineers, and digital commerce specialists based in Visa’s Innovation Centre in Dubai, and Visa’s Innovation Studios in Moscow, Nairobi and Saudi Arabia. His team co-creates new commerce use cases with products with banks, internet companies, FinTechs and merchants across the region. Since 2021, Akshay has also been overseeing Visa’s cryptocurrency products in CEMEA. Akshay holds 8 global patents in the FinTech and payments, and has served in various digital leadership capacities in Asia-Pacific and EMEA. He has played a key the role in the development of numerous commercially successful products in eCommerce and digital banking. A veteran digital and product development expert, Akshay and his teams have run over 200 co-creation sprints with diverse partners. Akshay is an active venture investor, with several deals and exits in fintech, payments, eCommerce, AI and beyond. Prior to his current role, Akshay was a founding member of Visa’s Asia-Pacific Innovation Centre in Singapore, where he served as Senior Director and led partner co-creations. Prior to Visa, Akshay co-founded and led the Deloitte Greenhouse in Southeast Asia, a award-winning joint initiative between the Singapore government and Deloitte, focused on analytics-driven innovation. Before Deloitte, Akshay served as Director, Emerging Markets at Gartner, and started his career at Standard & Poor’s. Akshay holds an MBA from the Indian School of Business and BA (Honors) in Economics from the University of Delhi.
Mac Conwell
Founder & Managing Partner, RareBreed VenturesMcKeever “Mac” Conwell II is a software engineer by trade and was a former DOD contractor with a top-secret clearance. He was a two-time founder with an exit and a failure. Next Mac moved on to the venture capital world via the Maryland Technology Development Corporation as part of their Seed Investment Team. During his four years there, Mac amassed experience leading an initiative to create the first and only, at the time, state-backed pre-seed fund for women and minorities in the country; known as the Builder Fund. The program institutionalized the friends and family round for black-, women-, and minority-led startups and was subsequently funded long-term by the state of Maryland. Mac then went on to found RareBreed Ventures, a pre-seed to seed venture fund that invests in exceptional founders outside of large tech ecosystems.
Laura is the CEO and Co-Founder of Epsilon3. Among the initial members of the operations team for SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, she helped put the US back in the human space flight business. Laura wants to continue to revolutionize the space industry, beginning with operational tools.
Camille Crittenden, Ph.D., is the executive director of CITRIS and the Banatao Institute and co-founder of the CITRIS Policy Lab and the EDGE (Expanding Diversity and Gender Equity) in Tech Initiative at UC. She served as chair of the California Blockchain Working Group in 2019–20 and co-chaired the Student Experience subcommittee of the University of California’s Presidential Working Group on Artificial Intelligence. Prior to coming to CITRIS in 2012, she was executive director of the Human Rights Center at Berkeley Law, where she helped to develop its program in human rights, technology and digital media. She has written and spoken widely on these topics, as well as technology applications for civic engagement, digital equity, and government transparency and accountability. She held positions as assistant dean for development with International and Area Studies at UC Berkeley and in development and public relations at University of California Press and San Francisco Opera. She earned an M.A. and Ph.D. from Duke University.
Nick is the Co-Founder and CEO of Hunt Club, a full-service recruiting company that connects businesses with the world’s best talent. Prior to Hunt Club, Nick founded New Coast Ventures, a venture studio that started or invested in over 40+ early-stage startups, including Gopuff and Compass. Nick is also a Forbes 30 Under 30 award winner, multiple Inc 500 recipient, and is deeply passionate about starting and growing new companies.
James Currier
General Partner, NFXJames Currier is a co-founder and partner of NFX Guild, an early-stage fund with a three-month program for marketplace and network businesses.
As COO, Healey oversees the daily operations of the 11-year-old venture studio to support founders and foster an inclusive culture where team members thrive. He is a serial entrepreneur with three successful exits and a passion for creating exceptional customer experiences and assembling world-class teams. Driven by his entrepreneurial vision and Atomic’s model of building companies in parallel, Healey co-founded BoomPop at Atomic in 2020, where he also serves as CEO and helps Fortune 500 companies create the next generation of workplace culture. Before Atomic, Healey was the Head of Retail Innovation at eBay, Chief of Staff to the CTO, and led business development for milo.com, which he helped sell to eBay in 2010. Healey went on to run and sell two companies (one in retail, one in restaurant tech) before joining Jack at Atomic in 2019. Healey subscribes to the radical notion that being a good person is a competitive career advantage. He’s a father of two, husband to an amazing wife, and a graduate of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.
Dipanwita Das
CEO, SorceroDipanwita Das is an award-winning technology entrepreneur and a Sir Edmund Hilary Fellow. She is CEO and Co-founder of Sorcero, the leading platform for AI powered product analytics for Life Sciences and is Google’s partner for Generative AI in medical publications. She developed Sorcero’s vision of applying advanced analytics to medical and scientific content to improve patient outcomes and helped author the company’s 5 patents in biomedical AI and LLMs. Dipanwita previously built the digital scientific platform for the largest global public health policy initiative, influencing health outcomes for over three billion people. Dipanwita has graduated from two of the world’s top 5 startup accelerators and completed Y Combinator’s Female Founders program. She completed Stanford GSB’s Executive Program for Social Entrepreneurship, earned her M.A. from IDS at the University of Sussex, and her B.A. from St. Stephen’s College. She is heavily inspired by science fiction and philosophy and writes her journal in Elvish.
Sherrod DeGrippo is Director of Threat Intelligence Strategy at Microsoft. She was selected as Cybersecurity woman of the year in 2022 and Cybersecurity PR Spokesperson of the year for 2021. Previously, she was VP of Threat Research and Detection at Proofpoint, where she led a global team of threat researchers, malware reverse engineers and threat intelligence analysts. Her career in cybersecurity spans 19 years with prior roles including leading Security Business Services at Nexum, senior solutions engineer for Symantec, senior security consultant for Secureworks, and senior network security analyst for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). She is a frequently cited threat intelligence expert in media including televised appearances on the BBC news and commentary in the Wall Street Journal, CNN, New York Times, and more. Having presented at Black Hat, RSA conference, RMISC, Sleuthcon, and others, Sherrod is a well known public speaker. In her personal time, Sherrod co-hosts the cultural lifestyle podcast Bit Obscene and spends time with her rescue dog Boris Karloff.
Claire is a seasoned robotics and engineering professional with a diverse background in the field. She most recently held the position of COO at Farm-ng. Prior to this, she served as Vice President of Engineering at Nvidia, where she developed the groundbreaking Isaac Platform for Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. Claire also co-founded self-driving tech company OTTO and held the role of Vice President of Engineering before its acquisition by Uber. Her experience extends to leading advanced robotics projects at Google Robotics.
Frederique Dame
General Partner, GV (Google Ventures)Frederique is general partner at GV specializing in disruptive technologies in the consumer space. She has spent 15 years building consumer and enterprise products for public companies and startups. Frederique helped start GV’s Women’s Health team and leads the cross-functional team of investors and advisors making investments in this space. Before joining GV, Frederique led product and engineering efforts at Uber, where in just four years, she helped scale the company from 80 employees to more than 7,000 and from 14 cities in four countries to 400+ in 68 countries. At Uber, she was also responsible for overseeing strategic programs focused on the global driver workforce and employee growth and productivity. Earlier, Frederique pioneered social at Yahoo!, building online communities and adding user-generated content to the company’s Search and Marketplace products. She also worked at online photo-sharing services Photobucket and SmugMug, for which she built social gaming mechanics to engage audiences and drive revenues. Frederique holds a Master of Science in Spacecraft Technology and Satellite Communications from University College London and a Master of Science in Telecommunications Engineering from Télécom SudParis.
Rodrigo De Paula
Head of Fintechs, Digital Partners & Visa Ventures – LAC, VisaRodrigo Barros de Paula is the regional Head of Fintech, Digital Partnes & Visa Ventures for Visa Latin America and the Caribbean. De Paula is a leader with over 25 years of experience in the financial services and digital payments industry. As the fintech alliance leader for LAC, he is responsible for identifying and managing strategic partnerships, alliances and commercial agreements with fintechs players throughout the region, as well as with payment enablers, large technology companies and Visa Ventures. His focus on the past few years has been on finding new, innovative and effective ways to provide digital payments solutions to fintechs, processors, enablers, issuers and acquirers in Latin America. He began his career in Brazil in Itau, where he served in several roles, including legal, core products, loyalty services and co-branded cards. He holds a Law degree with a Master in Corporate and Economic Law from Getulio Vargas Foundation in Sao Paulo, and a MBA from Insper in Brazil.
Alexandra Debow is the Co-Founder/CEO of swsh, the social app that strengthens the relationships that matter to you. She is a Canadian born and raised in Hong Kong. Alexandra studied Computer Engineering at NYU Tandon and Data Science at NYU Shanghai. During Covid, she built Alive Vibe, a virtual events marketplace connecting 30,000+ Gen Zs. In Shanghai, she built Entrepreneurs in Action, a founders’ dinner series, The Entrepre女ers Network, a women entrepreneurs podcast network (6 shows, 20,000+ audience), and The WHY WAIT? Collective, China’s first Gen-Z led women entrepreneurship conference. She worked at Alibaba’s Entrepreneurial Program in HangZhou. She worked on GGV Capital’s infrastructure investment team.
Charles Denby is a scientist turned entrepreneur. Working under UC Berkeley professor and renowned metabolic engineering pioneer Dr. Jay Keasling, Charles’s early scientific career involved bioengineering yeast to produce next-gen biofuels (i.e., clean diesel). His career path, however, would be redrawn by a hobby. While exploring home brewing as a way to engage his passion for beer, Charles saw how the same technology used for making biofuels could be applied to the production of beer and wine, making them more consistent, efficient, and less reliant on resource-intensive agricultural products such as hops and fruit. In 2017, he founded Berkeley Yeast to commercialize this technology and its transformative benefits. Today the company sells bioengineered yeast with extraordinary capabilities to hundreds of breweries and wineries across the country.
David DeSanto is the chief product officer at GitLab Inc., where he leads GitLab’s product division to define and execute GitLab’s product vision and roadmap. David is responsible for ensuring the company builds, ships, and supports the platform that reinforces GitLab’s leadership in the DevSecOps platform market.
Sara Deshpande is a General Partner at Maven Ventures, a Seed venture fund specializing in consumer software and emerging consumer trends best known for its early investments in companies like Zoom, Embark Trucks, and Cruise Automation. She specializes in high-growth consumer software, digital health, family tech, consumer web3, alternative protein, and other emerging trends. Select investments include Wildtype, Daybreak Health, Hello Heart, Carrot Fertility, Embark Trucks, Kinside, Simulate, Pledge, Twine, and Chariot. Sara was the first employee at Maven and has built her career investing in early stage founders. She has worked with startups around the globe for 15 years, including at The Idea Village in New Orleans where she developed a love for helping founders articulate and achieve a bold vision against all odds. She is Lecturer in Management at the Stanford GSB where she teaches an MBA elective course on startups and is a regular contributor to Forbes on Venture Capital. Earlier in her career, Sara was a management consultant in the Healthcare Strategy practice at Deloitte. Sara holds a BS in Finance from Xavier University in her hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio and an MBA from Stanford.
KJ Dhaliwal is a highly accomplished technologist, entrepreneur, investor, and business executive with over a decade of experience. Dhaliwal became the Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) of Social Discovery Group and SDG Lab after the company acquired his dating app Dil Mil in 2019. Before becoming CSO of Social Discovery Group and SDG Lab, Dhaliwal managed Dil Mil’s engineering, product, and marketing initiatives. He also co-founded Finantric Capital, a top-performing investment fund. Dhaliwal graduated cum laude from Drexel University with a Bachelor of Science in engineering and a minor in finance and entrepreneurship. He started his career on Wall Street before transitioning into the tech sector with the social data analytics company Union Metrics.
Andre Dickens is the 61st Mayor of Atlanta. A proud native of Atlanta and a product of Atlanta Public Schools, Mayor Dickens is focused on bringing opportunity and equity to the city that he loves. Mayor Dickens’ agenda is rooted in Moving Atlanta Forward, through improving public safety, increasing opportunities for the city’s young people, empowering neighborhoods, and investing in housing and combatting homelessness, all while fostering a culture of integrity in the City. As he shared in his first State of the City address, his vision for Atlanta is: One city with one bright future. A city of safe, healthy, connected neighborhoods with an expansive culture of equity, empowering upward mobility and full participation for all residents, embracing youth development, and an innovative, dependable government moving Atlanta forward, together. Prior to his election as Mayor, Dickens served eight years as an at-large City Council member. He was an entrepreneur for over a decade in both the private and nonprofit sectors and a leader in Atlanta’s tech sector. Mayor Dickens is a graduate of Mays High School and holds a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology as well as a Master of Public Administration from Georgia State University. Mayor Dickens enjoys spending time with his daughter, experiencing live music, attending church services, and traveling the world. He is an avid supporter of all of Atlanta’s sports teams.
U.S. Army General James H. Dickinson is the Commander, U.S. Space Command, the 11th and newest unified combatant command. He assumed command on Aug. 20, 2020, after serving as the first Deputy Commander of U.S. Space Command. General Dickinson is a native of Estes Park, Colorado and a 1985 graduate of Colorado State University where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering. He holds a Master of Science in Operations Research and Systems Analysis from the Colorado School of Mines and later earned a Master’s degree in Strategic Studies from the United States Army War College. As the Commander of U.S. Space Command, General Dickinson is responsible for defending U.S. and Allied interests in the space domain while providing space-enabled combat effects to joint warfighters around the world. He exercises combatant command authority over 18,000 Soldiers, Marines, Sailors, Airmen, and Guardians operating ground and space-based systems around the world that provide satellite communication, space domain awareness, offensive and defensive space control effects, and position, navigation, and timing services. General Dickinson has commanded at every level in the United States Army from Platoon to Combatant Command and is the Senior Air and Missile Defense Officer in the Department of Defense.
Carilu Dietrich is a former CMO, most notably the head of marketing that took Atlassian public. These days she advises CEOs and CMOs of hypergrowth tech companies including Bill.com, Sprout Social, Tackle.io, Weights & Biases, Matillion and Chronosphere, formerly Miro, 1Password and Segment. Prior to Atlassian, Carilu ran global awareness advertising for Oracle. Ms Dietrich is also a co-founder of Pledge 1%, a nonprofit that encourages entrepreneurs to focus on both company growth and giving. Pledge 1% has unlocked more than $2 billion dollars in philanthropy. Outside of work, Carilu loves hiking, kayaking, skiing and yoga.
Fascinated by software development since his childhood in Germany, Thomas Dohmke has built a career building tools developers love and accelerating innovations that are changing software development. Currently, Thomas is Chief Executive Officer of GitHub, where he launched the world’s first at-scale AI developer tool, GitHub Copilot, and drives the company’s core mission of making GitHub the home for all developers. Before his time at GitHub, Thomas previously co-founded HockeyApp and led the company as CEO through its acquisition by Microsoft in 2014, and holds a PhD in mechanical engineering from University of Glasgow, UK.
As the founding managing partner of Beacon, a London-based VC with pan-European focus, Maria has a keen focus on enterprise tech, ranging from data to DevOps to subscription based applications. Beacon invests in companies with a revenue of £1-10m, providing growth capital and much-needed liquidity for early-stage founders. Prior to founding Beacon, Maria enjoyed a successful career in angel investing, delivering a return of 7x DPI. She sits on multiple company boards and is passionate about the ability of engineering to address the complex challenges that enterprises are facing today. With an MBA and an engineering background, Maria began her professional journey as a management consultant at Andersen and Ernst & Young. She also serves on several committees at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London, which help fund deep tech research and further support engineer entrepreneurs. A strong advocate for diversity within the VC community, Maria is also on the board of Included VC. A Greek native, Maria has spent most of her life in London and when she is not working she enjoys fencing the foil. Touche!
Based in San Francisco, Marie-Elise Droga is Head of Fintech Partnerships, Global and North America at Visa and a member of the company’s North America Leadership Team. Her responsibilities include partnering with innovative Fintechs on relevant solutions that factor in the evolving payments landscape, and leading growth programs with this critical and fast-growing segment of clients. Marie-Elise also spearheads collaboration between Visa’s Venture team and regional fintech heads to identify emerging trends and identify best practices to grow and scale Visa’s fintech portfolio. As a lifelong creative and strategic global business builder, Marie-Elise has deep roots in sales and partnerships. In her prior roles at Western Union, she was at the forefront of strategic efforts to accelerate digital growth and reinvent the company’s approach to distribution. As a leading expert in cross-border payments, she expanded relationships with some of the world’s leading retail and digital brands like Amazon, Airbnb, Google and Walmart. A native of France who has lived and worked on four continents, Marie-Elise earned an MBA from Solvay Brussels School of Economics & Management in Belgium, and a Business Management degree from ESCP Business School in Paris, studying for six months at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, India.
Céline Dufétel
President & COO, Checkout.comCéline Dufetel is the President and COO of Checkout.com, the leading global payments platform serving large-scale ecommerce and services merchants such as Netflix, GE HealthCare, Pizza Hut, Siemens, and Sony; fintech unicorns such as Klarna, Qonto, and WorldRemit; and many of the world’s largest crypto players. Céline oversees the company’s operational and go-to-market teams, as well as all financial, treasury, and strategy functions. Her remit as the COO extends to leading the company’s strategy on all matters involving operations, legal, risk, and regulation. She is also Checkout.com’s executive sponsor of Diversity, Equality, and Inclusivity (DEI). Prior to Checkout.com, Céline was the COO and CFO of Fortune 500 asset manager T. Rowe Price. Before that, she was Managing Director and Global Head of Marketing and Client Service at Neuberger Berman, and started her corporate career as a partner at McKinsey & Company. Céline was named to Barron’s 100 Most Influential Women in U.S. Finance in 2021, and to Fortune’s 40 under 40 in 2020. A native of France, Céline earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in applied mathematics and economics from École Polytechnique in Paris, and a master’s degree in finance from Princeton.
Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins is an American social justice advocate and businesswoman. Phaedra is the founder and CEO of Promise, a payment technology platform that simplifies government debt. Prior to Promise, Phaedra ran revenue and operations at Honor, a home care technology company. Before Honor, Phaedra worked with the musician Prince and led the effort to secure ownership of his masters. She is a labor and community organizer by trade who is committed to making measurable change. Earlier in her career, Phaedra was the Executive Officer of the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council, an organized labor federation representing more than 100 unions and more than 110,000 members in California. She was also Executive Director of Working Partnerships USA, a coalition of community groups, and labor and faith organizations working to address economic disparities in California’s Silicon Valley. She also served as the CEO of the anti-poverty organization Green For All. Over the course of her career, Phaedra has been recognized for her leadership. She was honored by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader, Essence for their 25 Most Influential African Americans, Ebony for their Power 150, The Grio for their 100 History Makers in the Making, Black Enterprise for their 40 Next: Emerging Leaders for Our Future and San Jose Magazine named her one of the 100 most powerful people in Silicon Valley. Phaedra serves on the boards of Honor and Tipping Point.
Joelle Emerson is the founder and CEO of Paradigm, a strategy firm that partners with innovative companies to build stronger, more inclusive organizations.
Debra L. Emmons
Vice President & Chief Technology Officer, The Aerospace CorporationDr. Debra L. Emmons is Vice President and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at The Aerospace Corporation. In this role, she is responsible for providing vital leadership for determining and executing the company’s technology strategy and investments. Emmons leads four offices: eLab, responsible for setting the technical investment strategy and priorities; iLab, responsible for bringing transformational, game-changing concepts to fruition; xLab, responsible for developing, building, and operating prototypes; and the newest Commercial Space Futures (CSF) office, responsible for driving the harnessing of commercial solutions for government missions to advance U.S. space. She also manages the company’s $60M+ internal research and development program and the Aerospace Technical Fellows program, with the company’s top engineers and scientists. Emmons serves as chairperson of the Office of the CTO Roundtable with federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs) and university affiliated research centers (UARCs) to develop and maintain relationships with government and other defense-related research laboratories to identify technology priorities, future requirements, and emerging opportunities.
Beth Esponnette is the co-founder and executive chair of unspun, a startup that makes custom-fit jeans from a body scan using machine learning and 3D weaving.
Ryan Evans built one of the most respected national security media brands, including War on the Rocks before co-founding Bedrock Learning, which is transforming how enterprises learn, think, decide, and act. He sits at the center of an unparalleled network of experts and decision-makers. Ryan previously worked for the Department of Defense in Afghanistan.
Miladys Felix
Senior Sales Executive, Discover Global NetworkMiladys Felix is Senior Sales Executive at Discover Global Network working to enable card programs for companies wanting to enter the payment space. Miladys has over 20 years of payment experience working for a number of payment networks and launching and managing large programs and partnerships in the consumer, gaming, financing, and healthcare industries.
Veronica Fernandez
SVP, Head of Visa Commercial Solutions North America, VisaVeronica is Visa’s Senior Vice President and Regional Head of Visa Commercial Solutions for North America. Visa Commercial Solutions (VCS) enables businesses to thrive through products that provide better cash flow, administrative efficiency, control and acceptance. From small business to large corporate and governments, VCS products cover all forms of business spending, including Small Business, Commercial, and Virtual Cards. Veronica is responsible for the business, strategy and go to market for the U.S. and Canada. Veronica joined Visa in February of 2007, and has led numerous teams across Visa Commercial Solutions, North America Merchant and Prepaid. Prior to joining Visa, Veronica held product management and business development roles at U.S. Bank Corporate Payment Systems in Minneapolis, MN. Veronica earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Minnesota. She is passionate about the advancement of underrepresented at Visa and in Silicon Valley. She serves as executive sponsor of Visa Latinx Connect Employee Resource Group. Veronica also sits on the Advisory Board for Latinas in Tech Bay Area. Ms. Fernandez is a native of Buenos Aires, Argentina and lives with her husband and ten-year-old daughter in the Bay Area.
Mark leads investments focusing largely on fintech and application SaaS. He is especially interested in fintech infrastructure, verticalized payment workflows, and SaaS tools disrupting legacy incumbents. Mark is the board member or lead investor from Index in a number of companies including RevenueCat, Mercantile, and Catch. Prior to Index, Mark helped build and lead business strategy and finance at Stripe from 2015 to 2019, driving key initiatives for sales operations, global growth, and fundraising. He helped the company assess international product market fit, grow from a couple hundred to nearly 2,000 people, and move upmarket into late-stage and enterprise. Before that, Mark was an investor at GI Partners, focusing on vertical SaaS and insurance marketplaces, including the acquisition of MRI Software. He was also an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, and served as a board member of the Stonestown YMCA for three years. Mark graduated from UC Berkeley with a B.S. in business administration. Amongst other hobbies, he’s a certified sommelier and an avid CrossFitter competing in the Open several years running.
Joe Fitzsimons is the founder and CEO of Horizon Quantum Computing, a company committed to advancing quantum computing as a versatile technology capable of addressing some of the world’s most challenging computational problems. Before founding Horizon Quantum Computing in 2018, Joe held a tenured position as an associate professor at the Singapore University of Technology and Design, where he led the Quantum Information and Theory group. He was also a principal investigator at the Centre for Quantum Technologies, contributing to both theoretical computer science and physics through his research. Earlier in his career, Joe spent time as a fellow of Merton College, Oxford, and a senior research fellow in the Materials Department at the University of Oxford. During this time, he co-invented the universal blind quantum computing which has since become recognised as an important enabling technology for securing cloud-based quantum computing. Joe holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford, where his research focused on quantum computing architectures, and a bachelor of science degree in theoretical physics from University College Dublin.
Rick Fox is a serial entrepreneur, philanthropist and three-time NBA champion. During his professional basketball career, Rick captained two of the NBA’s most storied franchises, the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles. Since then, Rick has brought championship-level leadership to the acting and business worlds. After retiring from the NBA, Rick pursued a career in television and entertainment. He has over 200 movie and TV episode credits to his name, either as an actor of producer, and as worked alongside Oscar & Emmy nominated producers, directors and actors. In 2015 he became a pioneer in esports, through his establishment of a gaming franchise that played a major role in shaping the industry. Earlier in his career, Rick worked with top Fortune 500 brands including American Express, Walt Disney, Hewlett-Packard, Asus, AT&T, Comcast, Pepsi, Ford, T-Mobile and Verizon, to name a few, across their global growth initiatives. Currently an Ambassador at Large for The Bahamas, Rick has given his time and energy in creating The Bahamas Relief Foundation and bringing real-estate development opportunities to the region.
Hernan Farruggia
Co-founder & Business Development, KadreI’m a passionate entrepreneur and eager for knowledge in general… I’m a doer, I truly believe there’s nothing you can’t do, just decide what you want in your life, and go for it!
Lacey Frenzl
Vice President, Customer Experience, ISVPay IncLacey is a seasoned professional known for her expertise in driving innovation and successfully launching emerging products in the market. With over 10 years of experience in retail leadership, she has developed a deep understanding of the importance of efficient processes and organizational strategies that accelerate time to market and foster seamless collaboration between customers and internal teams. Lacey’s passion lies in the realm of payments and technology, where she excels in product strategy, implementation, and management. As the Vice President of Customer Experience at ISVPay, Lacey spearheads initiatives aimed at streamlining and optimizing the quality of every transaction and customer interaction. Recognizing the value of staying at the forefront of the rapidly evolving payments landscape, Lacey has been an active member of the Electronic Transactions Association since 2019. This involvement allows her to remain up-to-date with the latest industry trends and advancements, enabling her to drive strategic decision-making and guide ISVPay towards continued success. In 2022, Lacey’s contributions to the payments industry were acknowledged when she was selected as one of the distinguished Young Payment Professional Scholars. This honor reflects her dedication, expertise, and commitment to advancing the field and showcases her ability to make a significant impact within the industry. Lacey’s professional journey is defined by her ability to deliver innovative solutions, optimize processes, and foster exceptional customer experiences. Her passion for bringing new products to market, combined with her strategic mindset and industry involvement, makes her a highly valuable asset in the payments and technology landscape.
Friedrichs serves as Founder and CEO at Pangea, driving the vision and direction of Pangea’s Security Platform as a Service. Friedrichs formerly served as Vice President, Security Products at Splunk. With a record in building four successful enterprise security companies over the past two decades, Friedrichs served as Founder and CEO at Phantom, acquired by Splunk in 2018. Prior to Phantom, Friedrichs founded Immunet, acquired by Sourcefire in 2010 and a key component to Cisco’s acquisition of Sourcefire in 2013; now thriving as Cisco’s Advanced Malware Protection (AMP). Friedrichs co-founded SecurityFocus (Bugtraq) and led DeepSight, the world’s first Internet early warning system, acquired by Symantec in 2002. He also co-founded Secure Networks and led Ballista (CyberCop), one of the industry’s first vulnerability management solutions, acquired by McAfee in 1998. Friedrichs architected and developed a prototype of the first commercial penetration-testing product, SNIPER, acquired by Core Security Technologies in 2001 and further developed into CORE IMPACT. He attended the University of Manitoba and is the co-author of three security books and a recipient of 40 patents in the cybersecurity space.
Noah Gale
Co-Founder, Tribe AINoah Gale is the Co-Founder of Tribe AI, an AI strategy and implementation partner powered by an expert network of 350+ experienced AI researchers, engineers, and data scientists from top technical institutions. Prior to starting Tribe, Noah worked at companies like Expa and Gigster, where he was a part of the founding team. Noah is an angel investor and advisor to over 40 companies with a focus on AI and crypto.
Cathy is a Partner at Sapphire Ventures. As a daughter of a software engineer and a small business owner, Cathy has been immersed in technology and entrepreneurship from an early age. She has experience investing at multiple stages, ranging from buyout to venture capital and has also sat on the other side of the table as a business operator. Her experiences have shaped her passion for deeply understanding business models and working hand-in-hand with entrepreneurs to help scale companies. Through investing, Cathy strives every day to express her core values of conviction, partnership, and passion. For her work, she has been recognized by the Venture Capital Journal as a Rising Star and by Silicon Valley Business Journal as a Woman of Influence.
Lior Gavish
Co-Founder and CTO, Monte CarloLior Gavish is CTO and Co-Founder of Monte Carlo, a data reliability company backed by Accel, Redpoint Ventures, GGV, ICONIQ Growth, and Salesforce Ventures. Prior to Monte Carlo, Lior co-founded cybersecurity startup Sookasa, which was acquired by Barracuda in 2016. At Barracuda, Lior was SVP of Engineering, launching award-winning ML products for fraud prevention. Lior holds an MBA from Stanford and an MSC in Computer Science from Tel-Aviv University.
Brian Gerkey
Director of Open Robotics, IntrinsicBrian Gerkey is Director of Open Robotics at Intrinsic, where he’s helping to democratize access to robotics. Brian was previously co-founder and CEO at Open Robotics, and is a board member of the Open Source Robotics Foundation. He has also worked at Willow Garage, SRI, Stanford, and USC. Brian is a strong believer in, frequent contributor to, and constant beneficiary of open source technology.
Deanna has developed brands for some of the world’s most well-known companies, including Airbnb, Coca-Cola, Pleo, and Glassdoor. Hailing from Australia, she has been in the industry for fourteen years and with Koto for the past five years, including leading the team in London. Having worked at some of the industry’s top branding studios, including Pentagram and DesignStudio, Deanna is a strong and positive force with a passion for big ideas. Her work has been featured in leading publications such as FastCompany, Brand New, It’s Nice That, and Creative Review.
Anastasis Germanidis is a Greek AI researcher, software engineer, and artist based in New York City. He is the CTO and Co-Founder of Runway.
Binny Gill, the Founder and CEO of Kognitos Inc, started the company in 2021 on the belief that more people need to be able to instruct computers in natural language and that such a system must be built with complete auditability and explainability in mind. Prior to starting Kognitos, Binny was the CTO of Cloud Services and Chief Architect at Nutanix. He holds a graduate degree from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an undergraduate degree from Indian Institute of Technology.
Fonta Gilliam, CEO of Wellthi. 10+ years’ finance experience as diplomat and consultant, led White House initiatives, pioneered women’s centers in Africa, innovative financing for global small businesses. Franklin Award recipient, economic development MA, Howard University BA.
Raj Gokal is the co-founder of Solana and COO of Solana Labs. He previously was director of product at Omada Health; an entrepreneur-in-residence at Rock Health; the co-founder of Sano, a minimally invasive glucose sensor company; and an investor at General Catalyst Partners. Raj has a Bachelor of Science in Economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Vitaly M. Golomb is a technology investment banker with over 20 years of experience on all sides of the table as a venture-backed CEO, venture capitalist, M&A advisor. Vitaly is the San Francisco/Silicon Valley Partner at award-winning global M&A investment bank, Drake Star Partners. He has deep expertise in the transportation and mobility sector, in addition to experience in artificial intelligence, software/SaaS, and advanced materials. Vitaly has founded several companies and, throughout his career, was involved in dozens of financing, joint venturing, and M&A transactions across North America, Europe, and Asia. Vitaly served as an advisor to Rimac Automobili (Bugatti Rimac), where he successfully secured its first major financing round and joint venture that established it as world’s top brand in high performance electric vehicles. Some of his other notable clients include Fisker, Taiga Motors, HyperloopTT, Damon Motorcycles, and Polaris.
Sergey Gribov
Partner, Flint CapitalSergey Gribov is Partner at Flint Capital, an early-stage venture fund that invests across Israel, USA, and Europe. Sergey is an investor and board member at Socure, Cyolo, Sensi.ai, Quantori, and others. Sergey is a technology entrepreneur and investor with more than 20 years of experience. Over the years he participated as a founder or top manager in many startups in USA and Israel. Sergey has a lot of experience in IT, across such sectors as software development, cybersecurity, digital health, fintech, and others. Sergey holds an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management and B.Sc. in Computer Science, Cum Laude from Beer-Sheva University.
Katie Gray
Senior Partner, In-Q-TelKatie Gray is the lead investment partner for the Cyber Practice at In- Q-Tel (IQT) where she is responsible for identifying technologies that address challenges faced by the U.S. Intelligence Community. She has led investments in venture-backed startups in the areas of application security, cryptography, cloud security, threat intelligence, security operations, Industrial Control System security, and more. Gray has been on the IQT investment team since 2011 and has led investments in more than 30 companies during her tenure. Before joining IQT, Gray spent more than ten years in product management for mobile consumer electronics products, including the Handspring Treo line of smartphones, mobile phones and tablets at Palm and HP, and an electronic reader at Plastic Logic. Prior to joining Handspring, Gray was a member of the founding team and Vice President of Marketing for Bluelark, a pioneer in mobile web software that was acquired by Handspring. Before moving into the technology industry, Gray worked in Washington, D.C. as professional staff for the U.S. Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee. Gray earned both a bachelor’s degree in human biology and an MBA from Stanford University.
Commander Cullen Greenfield is a Program Manager in the Space Portfolio at the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) and a Navy Surface Warfare Officer. Before joining DIU he served as the Secretary of Defense Executive Fellow at SRI International, an independent non-profit research institute that supports government and industry and develops and commercializes world-changing products, technologies and innovations. In his most recent operational assignment Cullen served as the Commanding Officer of the USS GERMANTOWN (LSD 42). In recent policy and staff roles he served as the Defense Legislative Fellow for Senator Roger Wicker, and as the Aide-de-Camp to the Commandant of the Marine Corps.
Miles Grimshaw is a General Partner at Benchmark, investing across application software, developer tools and consumer. Most recently, Miles led the first financing for and serves on the board of LangChain, the leading framework for LLM orchestration. Prior to Benchmark, Miles was a General Partner at Thrive Capital where he led investments in companies including Github, Slack, Segment, Airtable, Vimeo, Benchling, Lattice, Monzo, Mapbox and more. Miles currently serves on the board of directors of Benchling, Lattice, Glide, LangChain, Supergreat and SphinxBio; he previously served on the boards of Segment and Monzo.
Arvind Gupta co-leads Mayfield’s engineering biology practice and is founder and venture adviser at IndieBio. He is the co-author of “Decoding the World,” published by Hachette.
Daniel Gwak is the Managing Partner of Point72 Private Investments, the institutional private investing business of Point72 Asset Management. He oversees Point72 Ventures’ Defense Tech and Growth investment teams. Before joining Point72, Dan was a Partner on the Investment Team at In-Q-Tel, the strategic investment firm of the CIA and U.S. Intelligence Community. At In-Q-Tel, Dan focused on enterprise analytics and infrastructure companies whose technologies aided the mission of the U.S. intelligence community. Previously, Dan was an investment banking analyst in the M&A group at Credit Suisse, a private equity associate at The Carlyle Group, and a fireteam leader in the United States Marine Corps, where he was awarded the Combat Action Ribbon and Purple Heart for actions in support of Operation Enduring Freedom in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.
May Habib is CEO and co-founder of Writer.com, a generative AI platform for the enterprise.
Brittany S. Hale is the Interim CEO and Chief Operating Officer of digitalundivided, the leading non-profit leveraging data, programs, and advocacy to catalyze economic growth for Latina and Black women entrepreneurs and innovators. A leadership and organizational design expert, Brittany marries her deep expertise in litigation, politics, and risk management with a fiery commitment to dismantling destructive systems of racial and gender bias.Before joining digitalundivided, Brittany served as a Securities Litigation Analyst at Bloomberg LP and eventually began to develop legal marketing strategies for her clients. Her results-oriented approach led her into trial work representing a Fortune 500 company where she obtained a 100% trial success rate in superior and appellate courts. Her multi-hyphenate experience in litigation, politics, and risk management led her to develop BND Consulting Group, which helps company leaders codify, clarify, and elevate values-led leadership to establish a competitive advantage. As Founder and CEO of BND Consulting Group, Brittany supports leaders with operationalizing aspirational values through proprietary methodological offerings for enterprise, government, and startup clients alike. Brittany is a graduate of the Boston University School of Law and a trusted expert in gender equality, human behavior, and organizational leadership. To date, she has been recognized as 2023 Women in Power Fellow with 92Y, served as a co-lecturer at Columbia University’s School of Professional Studies in 2022, been named a Top 20 Millennial in 2021, was appointed by Governor Murphy to the New Jersey Human Relations Council Executive Committee, developed the first municipal Social Justice Committee in New Jersey, and is a former Obama Organizing Fellow.
Kathy Hannun is president and co-founder of Dandelion Energy. Prior to Dandelion, Kathy worked at X, Google Alphabet’s innovation lab. In May 2017, Kathy launched Dandelion as an independent startup. She graduated from Stanford with a B.S. in Civil Engineering and M.S. in Computer Science.
Nathaniel Harding
Managing Partner, Cortado VenturesA born and bred Oklahoman, Nathaniel is an innovator and market maker who has founded, scaled and sold companies. He is a successful investor in energy, biotech and ag tech. Nathaniel was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and a Most Admired CEO in Oklahoma by the Journal Record.
Ruben Harris is a professional cellist and a recovering investment banker who now leads partnerships in San Francisco for Honor, a healthcare startup focused on seniors. He is also a founder of the Breaking Into Startups podcast.
Maryam Hassani
Acting Head of Trends and Innovation, Abu Dhabi Early Childhood AuthorityMaryam Ahmed Hassani is the Acting Head of Trends & Innovation at the Abu Dhabi Early Childhood Authority (ECA). Her current responsibilities within the ECA include designing and implementing strategic innovation projects that focus on the advancement of the early childhood development (ECD) space. Two of the ECA’s flagship innovation projects led by Maryam include Anjal Z and Athar. Anjal Z is a partnerships-driven and experimental program that empowers growth-stage global startups to localize solutions that address critical ECD challenges. While Athar is an in-house design thinking as a service function that equips project teams with the tools to support the continuously evolving needs of the ECD space. Maryam is also a tech startup founder, having launched Zealous in 2022, the UAE’s first networking app for goal-driven individuals to find, meet and stay connected with their communities at their preferred time and place. Zealous reflects Maryam’s passion for connecting people in the tech world as well as her desire to level the playing field when it comes to accessing the region’s growing tech startup ecosystem. Maryam initially entered the innovation space by joining EY as a strategy consultant where she most notably led the Special Olympics Innovation challenge and held a key role in the Mohammed Bin Rashid Innovation Fund (MBRIF) Accelerator Program. Before this, she earned a BA in Political Science at New York University Abu Dhabi. In her free time, Maryam enjoys competing in polo tournaments and exploring marine life through scuba diving.
Tess Hatch hopes to travel to space. In the meantime, she is a venture investor at Bessemer Venture Partners who invests in frontier tech.
Peter Hazlehurst is the CEO and co-founder of Synctera. He is an entrepreneur and philanthropist with nearly 30 years of experience in creating financial products for banks, fintechs and large tech companies.
Ashraf Hebela
Head of Startup Banking, J.P. MorganAshraf Hebela is the Head of Startup Banking at J.P. Morgan, focused on serving startups within the Innovation Economy across Technology, Disruptive Commerce, Life Sciences, Climate Technology and Healthcare IT. Based in San Francisco, Ashraf leads a growing, national team of more than 60 bankers who help founders of pre-seed and seed companies with a range of services including capital raising, strategic advisory and traditional banking services. Prior to joining J.P. Morgan in 2023, Ashraf spent 14 years at Silicon Valley Bank. There he held a variety of roles from product management to strategic analytics and sales operations, and ultimately served as Head of Technology & Healthcare Banking for North America. Before joining SVB in 2009, Hebela held senior positions at NorthStar Systems and Siebel Systems. He is a BUILD mentor, a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designate and a member of the CFA Society of San Francisco. He earned a B.A. in Economics from Harvard University and an MBA in General Management and Finance from Stanford University.
Sandhya Hegde
General Partner, Unusual VenturesSandhya is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures ($1B AUM) where she leads early stage investments in AI and SaaS. Previously, she was an early Executive at Amplitude and helped create the product analytics category resulting in a successful IPO for the analytics company in 2021. An engineer at heart, she started her career as a founder while studying robotics at IIT Bombay. She immigrated to the US in 2011 to spend time at Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures learning the ropes of early stage software investing in Silicon Valley.
Travis Hedge
Co-founder and CRO, Vouch InsuranceTravis Hedge is the Co-founder & Chief Revenue Officer of Vouch Insurance. Vouch Insurance is a new kind of insurance company for startups, built by founders for founders. The company provides insurance products and risk assessment tools to permit digital insurance coverage. Prior to founding Vouch in 2018, Travis was an investor with SVB Capital, focused on early-stage tech companies. Notable investments during his time at SVB include Root Insurance, Earin, and OpenDoor. Travis earned a B.A. from Ohio State University, where he also briefly served as an adjunct professor in startup finance.
Tyson Hendricksen
CEO, Notice.coTyson is an experienced Silicon Valley entrepreneur and FINRA-registered broker. In 2021, he founded Notice.co, a secondary market data and network platform. Notice.co offers real time consensus pricing, advanced analysis tools, and an expert broker network to help all secondary market participants be more successful. Tyson is a graduate of Stanford University and resides in Puerto Rico.
Samara is the Founding Partner of an institutionally backed pre-seed stage fund, Chingona Ventures, focusing on investing in tech and tech-enabled companies across the U.S. The fund has $60MM in AUM and has made over 40 investments across technology sectors in Financial, Food, Future of Learning, and Health/Wellness. Before this, she was an investor at MATH Venture Partners where she led new investment review, diligence, and execution. Samara started her career at Goldman Sachs, where she was continually ranked top 5 in selling financial products, providing market insights, advising on portfolio construction, and consulting business practices. Her career started in the Fixed Income, Currency, and Commodity (FICC) group where she led multiple tech-enhancing projects across global exchanges. She is on the advisory boards for Coolwater, an organization to support the emerging manager community; Camino Financial, a firm helping get loans to Latinx business owners; and VentureFWD, a non-profit working to get more diversity in the venture capital ecosystem. Samara also co-founded the Latinx Founders Collective to bring together Latinx founders, investors, and community leaders to support the entrepreneurial community. Samara earned an Industrial and Operations Engineering degree from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree in Business Administration from Northwestern University. Samara is the Founding Partner of an institutionally backed pre-seed stage fund, Chingona Ventures, focusing on investing in tech and tech-enabled companies across the U.S. The fund has $60MM in AUM and has made over 40 investments across technology sectors in Financial, Food, Future of Learning, and Health/Wellness. Before this, she was an investor at MATH Venture Partners where she led new investment review, diligence, and execution. Samara started her career at Goldman Sachs, where she was continually ranked top 5 in selling financial products, providing market insights, advising on portfolio construction, and consulting business practices. Her career started in the Fixed Income, Currency, and Commodity (FICC) group where she led multiple tech-enhancing projects across global exchanges. She is on the advisory boards for Coolwater, an organization to support the emerging manager community; Camino Financial, a firm helping get loans to Latinx business owners; and VentureFWD, a non-profit working to get more diversity in the venture capital ecosystem. Samara also co-founded the Latinx Founders Collective to bring together Latinx founders, investors, and community leaders to support the entrepreneurial community. Samara earned an Industrial and Operations Engineering degree from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree in Business Administration from Northwestern University.
Mar is Pear’s Founding Managing Partner. After earning a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, Mar developed a groundbreaking technique of optimizing the design of analog semiconductors. Since then, she has accrued over 13 years of founder experience, co-founding three startups in mobile/ecommerce, enterprise software and semiconductor industries and has registered 14 separate patents. As Pear’s co-founder and managing partner, Mar brings operational and technical expertise to the Investment Team. She is in currently a Lecturer for Stanford University, teaching Lean Launchpad, one of the premier entrepreneurship classes at Stanford. Prior to that, she was a Consulting Professor at Stanford teaching the introductory course in Analog Circuit Design for nearly a decade. Mar serves on the board of trustees of Harvey Mudd College and the Advisory Board of the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Carnegie Mellon University. She is a founder of Equity Summit, the premier conference for connecting URM Venture Capital GPs to LPs, and an initial founding member of All Raise. She has been recognized by MIT Technology Review as a Top Innovator Under 35, named a Champion of Innovation by Fast Company, awarded the Digital Automation Conference’s Marie R. Pistil Achievement Award, and recognized on the Forbes Midas List in 2021, 2022, and 2023.
Jomayra is a Partner at Reach Capital, an early-stage venture firm focused on investing in education technology and the future of work. She started her career as an operator at an ed tech startup called BloomBoard and eventually started a career in venture capital first at Emerson Collective, Laurene Powell Jobs’ family office. Before Reach Capital, she was at Cowboy Ventures, where spent a lot of her time working with consumer internet and marketplace companies. At Cowboy and Emerson Collective, Jomayra championed investments in Contra, Career Karma, Handshake, Guild Education, and other companies.
Aaron Holiday is co-founder of 645 Ventures and managing entrepreneurial officer at Cornell Tech.
Katelin Holloway
Founding Partner, Seven Seven SixKatelin is Founding Partner at Alexis Ohanian’s venture capital firm Seven Seven Six, managing the firm’s operations and actively investing in early stage tech companies. Having spent her early career at Pixar Animation Studios, she parlayed her culture-building skills to tech, dedicating over a decade to developing teams as a senior executive at some of the internet’s most influential startups, including Klout and Reddit. As an investor, Katelin is committed to helping founders and the broader venture ecosystem evolve their diversity, equity, inclusion & belonging practices. She is passionate about funding and supporting the people-first companies that will shape the next chapter of technology, with a keen eye on Web3, HealthTech, ClimateTech, and the delicate balance that enables us to thrive.
Katie is the Founder and CEO of Haun Ventures where she and the team raised a $500 million early stage fund and a $1 billion acceleration fund to invest in the future of web3. Previously, Katie was a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) where she co-led the firm’s three crypto funds. She joined in June 2018 as its eleventh general partner and first female general partner. Prior to a16z, Katie spent a decade as a federal prosecutor focusing on fraud, cyber, and corporate crime alongside agencies including the SEC, FBI, and Treasury. She created the government’s first cryptocurrency task force and led investigations into the Mt. Gox hack and the corrupt agents on the Silk Road task force. While with the U.S. Department of Justice, Katie prosecuted RICO murders, organized crime, public corruption, gangs, and money laundering. She also held senior policy positions at Justice Department headquarters in both the National Security Division and Attorney General’s office where her portfolio included antitrust, tax, and national security. While in the private sector, Katie has testified before both the House and Senate on the intersection of technology and regulation. She has taught a course on crypto at Stanford Business School and on cybercrime at Stanford Law School. Katie clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and is an honors graduate of Stanford Law School. She is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Katie currently serves on the board of Coinbase.
Sonya Huang is a partner at Sequoia Capital where she works with companies across a range of industries, including AI, enterprise software, data infrastructure, and fintech. Sonya is on the board of Gong, Glean, and Apollo, and previously served on the board of Streamlit, which was acquired by Snowflake. She has co-led investments in companies such as Hugging Face, dbt, and Tecton. Since 2019 she has worked with a number of AI companies, and in September 2022 she published a seminal piece on generative AI. She also co-hosted Sequoia’s AI Ascent event in March, which brought together 100 of the leading minds in AI.
Charles Hudson is the Managing Partner and Founder of Precursor Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm focused on investing in the first institutional round of investment for the most promising software and hardware companies. Prior to founding Precursor Ventures, Charles was a Partner at SoftTech VC. In this role, he focused on identifying investment opportunities in mobile infrastructure, mobile applications, and marketplaces. In addition to his investment activities, he supports SoftTech portfolio companies on business and corporate development matters. He was also the CoFounder and CEO of Bionic Panda Games, an Android-focused mobile games startup based in San Francisco, CA. Prior to joining SoftTech VC and co-founding Bionic Panda Games, Charles Hudson was the VP of Business Development for Serious Business until the company was acquired by Zynga in February 2010. Prior to Serious Business, he was the Sr. Director for Business Development at Gaia Interactive, an online hangout and virtual world for teens. Prior to Gaia, Charles worked in New Business Development at Google and focused on new partnership opportunities for early stage products in the advertising, mobile, and ecommerce markets. Prior to joining Google, he was a Product Manager for IronPort Systems, a leading provider of antispam hardware appliances that was acquired by Cisco Systems for $830 million in 2007.
Chris Irving is a Navy Veteran, writer, and SaaS founder helping 12K+ families access better after-school enrichment opportunities with School Twist. As a founding member of the Bunker Labs Chapter in Boston, Chris is committed to helping veterans and military spouses start and grow their businesses. He and his partner, Jenn, reside in Boston and have two children, Ryan, a senior in high school, and Alice, a sophomore at The University of South Carolina.
Jessy Irwin is a security advocate and communications professional specializing in information security, privacy and trust.
Jared Isaacman
Astronaut & Commander, Inspiration4 & Polaris ProgramJared Isaacman is a visionary entrepreneur, successful business leader, and accomplished pilot and astronaut. With a remarkable blend of business acumen and a passion for exceeding expectations, Isaacman has made significant contributions to the financial technology, defense, and aerospace industries. As the founder of both Shift4 (NYSE: FOUR) and Draken International, he has spearheaded numerous advancements in commerce technology and national defense strategies. Isaacman founded Shift4 in 1999 at sixteen years old in the basement of his parents’ home. Under his leadership, Shift4 has consistently pushed boundaries, developing cutting-edge payment technologies and solutions that empower businesses across various sectors. In 2022, Shift4 employed over 2,500 people and processed over $200 billion in payments for more than 200,000 customers across the U.S. and Europe. In 2020, Shift4 went public on the New York Stock Exchange. In 2021, Isaacman was named EY Entrepreneur of the Year in recognition of his leadership at Shift4 and demonstrated long- term value through entrepreneurial spirit, purpose, and growth. In addition to running Shift4, Isaacman co-founded Draken International in 2012, a provider of tactical aviation services for all branches of the U.S. Military, Department of Defense, and global allied militaries. With a fleet of 150 tactical fighter aircraft, Draken owned and operated the world’s largest commercial fleet of ex-military aircraft to support military training objectives around the globe. Isaacman sold the company in 2019 to Blackstone. Isaacman’s ambitions have always extended far beyond the corporate realm. He is an accomplished pilot with over 7,500 hours in aircraft ranging from commercial to fighter jets. In 2021, he made history by commanding Inspiration4, the world’s first all-civilian mission to orbit. The SpaceX mission was named Inspiration4 to reflect the crew’s goal to inspire support for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital® and send a humanitarian message of possibility. Inspiration4 represented a new era for human spaceflight and raised over $250 million for St. Jude. Isaacman also holds several world records, including one for a Speed-Around-The-World flight. He used that endeavor to raise money and awareness for the Make-a-Wish Foundation®. He has also flown in over 100 airshows as part of the Black Diamond Jet Team, dedicating every performance to a charitable cause. A passionate supporter of children’s health and science education initiatives, Isaacman also worked to raise awareness for such organizations, including The U.S. Space & Rocket Center’s Space Camp and the DaVinci Science Center. Jared Isaacman’s remarkable journey as an entrepreneur, CEO, and astronaut showcases his relentless pursuit of excellence and his unwavering belief in the power of innovation. Through his leadership at Shift4 and his groundbreaking exploits in aviation and space, Isaacman seeks to inspire individuals worldwide to dream big and reach for the stars. Isaacman resides in Pennsylvania with his wife, Monica, and their two children.
Steve Isakowitz is a recognized leader across the government, commercial, space and technology sectors, who has worked tirelessly throughout his career on behalf of the public good in space. He currently serves as President and CEO of The Aerospace Corporation, a leading architect for the nation’s space programs, where he heads up efforts to outpace threats to the country’s national security while nurturing innovative technologies to further a new era of space commercialization and exploration. With his guidance, Aerospace’s national workforce of more than 4,600 employees provides objective technical expertise and thought leadership to solve the hardest problems in space and assure mission success for space systems and space vehicles. Over the course of his more than 30-year career, Isakowitz has made impactful contributions across a number of prominent roles, including at Virgin Galactic, NASA, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the White House Office of Management and Budget.
Sara Ittelson joined Accel in 2022 and focuses on early-stage consumer and enterprise companies. Prior to joining Accel, Sara spent several years as Head of Strategic Partnerships at Faire. During her tenure, she helped the company go from a $535m valuation to its most recent mark of $12.4B. Before Faire, Sara spent four years on the Global Business Development team at Uber, working first on the ride-share business and then on Uber Eats. With a passion for education, Sara began her operator career in edtech. Sara was also an angel investor, investing in and advising early-stage companies in industries including e-commerce, SaaS, SMB tech, and enterprise tools. Originally from Chico, California, Sara graduated from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Northwestern University.
Erica Jain is the Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder of Healthie, where she builds healthcare infrastructure to power virtual-first healthcare delivery. She works closely with digital health organizations to design solutions that deliver comprehensive and effective modern healthcare solutions. Previously, she was a Healthcare Consultant at The Boston Consulting Group and an Analyst at the Clinton Health Access Initiative. She is a graduate of Duke University with an BA in International Health Disparities and Infectious Diseases and finished her first year at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, as part of the Health Care Management Program.
Sundeep Jain is Chief Product Officer and SVP Engineering, responsible for the company’s global Mobility and Delivery products, including engineering, product management, design, applied/data science, and product operations. Before joining Uber, Sundeep was Vice President of Product Management at Google within the Search Ads group, where he worked on connecting users’ commercial intent with advertisers, including quality, pricing, and user experience. Sundeep also worked on enabling local commerce by connecting users with local advertisers across both maps and search. Earlier in his career, Sundeep was Vice President at Zynga, and a founder of a tech startup that was acquired by FIS, a public company with $100 billion enterprise value. Sundeep earned a Bachelors of Science in computer engineering from UC Berkeley with highest honors and a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker Scholar.
Steve Jang is the founder and Managing Partner at Kindred Ventures, a seed-stage $550M AUM venture capital fund based in San Francisco. In 2023, he was featured in the Forbes’ Midas List of Top Venture Capital Investors. Steve served as an early advisor and angel investor since founding at Uber and is an early venture backer of Coinbase, Humane, Tonal, Postmates, Color Health, dYdX, Zora, and over 80 other startups. Previously, Steve was a software entrepreneur and the co-founder of several companies in the consumer internet space.
Rehan Jalil is currently the CEO of Securiti. He was the SVP and GM for Cloud Security at Symantec, leading research and development for Cloud Security Products. Rehan came into Symantec with $4.7B acquisition of Bluecoat, where he ran cloud security. He came into BlueCoat via the $280M acquisition of Elastica, that he founded and ran as CEO. Elastica innovated CASB and drove it to become an important security category. Prior to that, he was the founder and chief executive officer of WiChours, an innovator in deep packet inspection centered packet core, which was used to deploy some of the earliest 4G networks. WiChorus was acquired by Tellabs for $180M. Previously, he was Chief Architect at Aperto and helped innovate multicore processors at Sun Microsystems. He was named Ernst & Young Entrepreneur finalist in 2010 and Top 25 Disruptor in 2015. He holds an AMP from Harvard Business School, an MSEE from Purdue University and a BS from NED University.
Ash Jhaveri
Vice President of Partnerships, MetaAsh Jhaveri is Vice President of Partnerships, at Meta. In this role, Ash is responsible for developing the ecosystems for Artificial Intelligence and Reality Labs as well as leading strategic partnerships for the company. Ash joined Meta in 2012 and has led the creation of several communities and partnerships in such areas as telco, music, gaming, and messaging. Prior to Meta, Ash led partnerships for Chrome at Google, first based in London and later in Mountain View. He also spent several years at Microsoft in product management Windows and .NET platform as well as enterprise startups MicroStrategy and SnapLogic. A native of Baltimore, Ash now lives in NYC with his wife and two children. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Reed Jobs
Investor, YosemiteReed and his team launched Yosemite in August 2023 to make cancer nonlethal in our lifetime. Yosemite works in late-stage academic research and for-profit company creation to invest in the most promising science from across the world to achieve this mission. Prior to starting Yosemite, Reed was the Managing Director of Health at Emerson Collective for eight years. Reed holds a B.A. in history and international security and an M.A. in history, both from Stanford University.
Peggy Johnson is the Chief Executive Officer of Magic Leap, an immersive augmented reality (AR) technology company. Since joining Magic Leap in 2020, Johnson accelerated the company’s focus on enterprise applications for AR, including overseeing the launch of the Magic Leap 2, its latest AR device targeted toward commercial applications across industries including healthcare, manufacturing and the public sector. Prior to joining Magic Leap, Johnson was Executive Vice President of Business Development at Microsoft where she was responsible for driving strategic partnerships and transactions to accelerate growth for the company and its customers. Previously, Johnson spent 24 years at Qualcomm, where she served as a member of Qualcomm’s Executive Committee. During her time at Qualcomm, Johnson held various leadership positions across engineering, sales, marketing and business development, and ran the Qualcomm Internet Services business unit. She also worked as an engineer for General Electric’s Military Electronics Division early in her career. Johnson earned her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from San Diego State University. She currently serves as a board member for BlackRock.
Rebecca is the CEO and Co-Founder of DealMaker, winner of Lexpert’s Top 40 Under 40, named one of North America’s most innovative lawyers by the Financial Times, a finalist for 2022’s EY Entrepreneur of the Year and one of Canada’s Top 100 Most Powerful Women. After a decade of practicing securities law, she took an ambitious leap from her partnership at the world’s largest law firm and founded DealMaker to build a system that would combat the costly inefficiencies that plague the traditional capital raise process. She is the force behind building DealMaker into Canada’s 3rd Fastest Growing Company and Fast Company’s 2nd Place Best Workplaces for Innovators. With her vision and drive, Rebecca has become a leader and trailblazer in the intersection of the capital markets and tech, who is committed to driving change and doing business the right way. In only 5 years, DealMaker has powered over $1.84 Billion USD in capital raised, more than double any leading US counterpart in less than half the operating history. Rebecca currently serves as a Board Member for the Crowdfunding Professionals Association (CfPA) to help shape the future of this new and emerging segment of the capital markets.
Ritika Kalia is an engineering manager at Runway, an applied AI research company that’s building the next creative suite. Prior to that, she led the experimentation team and the metrics platform team at Twitter. At Apple, she built and led the power and performance data infrastructure team as part of Core OS.
Susan Karlin
Regular Contributor, Fast CompanySusan Karlin, based in Los Angeles, is a regular contributor to Fast Company, where she covers space science, the future of aviation, autonomous vehicles, and tech design. She has also reported for The New York Times, NPR, Air & Space, Scientific American, IEEE Spectrum, and Wired, among others, from such locations as the Arctic and Antarctica, Israel/West Bank, and Southeast Asia. Additionally, she contributed to the bestseller, “The Human Face of Big Data.”
Alex Katouzian
Senior Vice President & General Manager, Mobile, Compute, & XR (MCX), Qualcomm, Inc.Alex Katouzian currently serves as Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Mobile, Compute and XR (MCX) Business Unit, including Voice & Music and Wearable businesses of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. In this role, Katouzian is responsible for the business unit strategy, chipset and software portfolios, P&L, customer relationships, ecosystem business development, and oversight of all program mangement and execution for the Snapdragon platforms. His responsibilities include a focused expansion into creating premium, end-to-end experiences across handsets, earbuds and headsets, wearables, tablets, PCs, XR, gaming and security. Katouzian is also responsible for driving the Application Processor Technologies roadmap across all Business Units.
Simon leads the brand strategy team at Koto’s New York studio, bringing an insight-led approach to every partnership and project. With a background in research and innovation, Simon ensures that we build brands from a place of deep understanding and empathy for both the customer and client. Over his 15 years of experience, he has defined strategy for businesses including Coinbase, Google, DailyPay, Meta, and Samsung.
Amy Keller Laird
Founder, MentalAmy Keller Laird is the founder of Mental, a digital platform that empowers women to better manage their mental health through early-intervention lifestyle solutions. Amy is an award-winning journalist and brand strategist, the former editor-in-chief of Women’s Health, and a thought leader in mental health and wellness. She has appeared as an expert on Today, Good Morning America, CNN, and Entertainment Tonight.
Brendon oversees Samsung Next’s investments made in early stage founders building in the technology areas of AI, blockchain, fintech, healthtech, infrastructure, and mediatech. He has over 20 years experience investing in early stage technology companies and previously served as a founding general partner of Altos Ventures where he was an early investor in Roblox and Coupang. Prior to Altos Ventures, he was a strategy and management consultant in the media, consumer and technology industries.
Ralph Koker
Global Head of Market Expansion Visa Direct, VisaRalph Koker is Vice President and Head of Market Expansion Globally for Visa Direct. Ralph leads all got to market and solutioning efforts to scale the Visa Money Movement business throughout the world based in Miami, Florida.
Dave Korsmeyer
Deputy Center Director (Acting), NASA Ames Research CenterKorsmeyer earned his bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering from Pennsylvania State University in State College, Pennsylvania, and both his master’s and doctorate in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Texas in Austin. He is a Sloan Fellow with a master’s degree in Management from the Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and is active in the International Astronautical Federation, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.
Ofir Krakowski is the co-founder and CEO of Deepdub. He has 30 years of experience in computer science and machine learning, including founding the Israeli Air Force’s machine learning and innovation department which he led for 25 years. During this time, he was awarded the Ministry of Defense’s Medal for Tech Excellence. Ofir has a B.Sc in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology. He previously served as the chairman of the board of the Technion Student Association and Chairman of the Board of the IDF Ofek unit’s alumni association.
Christie H. Kristensen is an experienced API marketing and growth leader and has a track record of how to successfully do more business through APIs. She is passionate about data intelligence, behavioural analysis and performance marketing which drives impact. Christie was the former CMO at one of the leading European open banking aggregators, aiia, which got acquired by Mastercard in late 2021 and in September 2022 recruited to lead global DevRel. In the very short time, her DevRel team has increased website traffic by 40% and impacted API adoption.
Daniel Krivelevich
AppSec CTO, Palo Alto NetworksCyber Security expert and problem solver, Enterprise Security veteran with a strong orientation to Application & Cloud Security. After an extensive service in 8200, held multiple position in the AppSec domain spanning across offensive, defensive and consulting positions. After having led Application Security and Cloud Security with Israeli IR firm Sygnia for four years, working with 100+ enterprises on optimizing Cyber resilience, Daniel co-founded Cider Security as the company’s CTO, leading the company’s product and technology all the way from inception to acquisition by Palo Alto Networks. Today, Daniel serves as AppSec CTO for Palo Alto Networks.
Abdulahad Kuchkarov
Executive Director, IT Park UzbekistanAbdulahad Kuchkarov has an extensive background in business, with over 4 years of experience as the Executive Director and COO at IT Park Uzbekistan. He is responsible for the overall management and direction of the company, including strategic planning and partnerships, financial management, and staff supervision. Under his management, IT Park has launched a startup incubator and accelerator, and IT-Centers all over the Republic of Uzbekistan, and established successful partnerships with many international organizations. Before his current position, he was the CEO of Groundzero, where he built a system, wrote regulations and quality standards, and scaled up the coworking network. Abdulahad holds a Master of Business Administration in IT management from IUBH Internationale Hochschule and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the National University of Uzbekistan.
Kotryna Kurt
CEO & Founder, LinkedistKotryna Kurt is the founder and CEO of a consulting/SaaS company Linkedist, that helps other businesses grow with the power of LinkedIn marketing, advertising, and sales. She is also an active contributor and a thought leader on LinkedIn, where she talks about entrepreneurship, leadership, sales, and marketing. For the last 7 years, Kotryna has delivered +400 company and public workshops and helped different European accelerators (including Startup Wise Guys, Swiss EP, F10, and more) educate their startups about marketing, sales, and personal branding. Within the last few years, she has shared her knowledge at events like TechBBQ, TechChill, Login, Growth Marketing Conference San Francisco, Sales Formula, and worked with brands like LEGO, Accenture, Danske Bank, and more.
Thomas joined Google in November 2018 as the CEO of Google Cloud. Prior to Google, Thomas spent 22 years at Oracle, where most recently he was President of Product Development. Before that, Thomas worked at McKinsey as a business analyst and engagement manager. His nearly 30 years of experience have given him a deep knowledge of engineering, enterprise relationships, and leadership of large organizations. Thomas’ degrees include, an MBA in Administration and Management from Stanford University as an Arjay Miller Scholar and a BSEE in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University where he graduated Summa Cum Laude. Thomas serves as a member of the Stanford Graduate School of Business Advisory Council and Princeton University School of Engineering Advisory Council.
Sandy Lacey
Executive Director, Howe Innovation Center, Perkins School for the BlindSandy K. Lacey is an executive leader who’s all about building things that matter. As the Director of Innovation at the Perkins School for the Blind, Sandy is catalyzing and convening key players to drive innovation in accessible products and services for the blind, visually impaired, and multi-disability communities. She is also a lecturer at MIT Sloan’s School of Management, where she teaches Building an Entrepreneurial Venture. As an executive dedicated to making a difference, Sandy has extensive innovation experience in corporate, government, and academic settings, and excels in startup environments. Sandy is a 3x early startup employee, working at Emerging Energy Research (acquired: IHS), CB Insights, and Drafted (acquired: Instawork). Serving the Commonwealth of Massachusetts under Governor Deval Patrick, she wrote state policies, programs, and drove infrastructure investments to grow the state’s emerging climatetech innovation cluster. As a corporate executive, Sandy built and led the engineering, design, and product management teams at the Innovation Lab for a Global 500 financial services company. In this role, she also spearheaded the company’s advanced technology practice including blockchain and voice-activated devices. She loves studying how technology and design can be leveraged to improve the human experience. Sandy has a Master’s from the Fletcher School at Tufts University and a B.A. cum laude from Georgetown University.
Chris Lattner
Co-Founder & CEO, ModularChris Lattner is a co-founder and the CEO of Modular, which is building an innovative new developer platform for AI and heterogenous compute. Modular provides an AI engine that accelerates PyTorch and TensorFlow inference, as well as the Mojo🔥 language, which extends Python into systems and accelerator programming domains. He has also co-founded the LLVM Compiler infrastructure project, the Clang C++ compiler, the Swift programming language, the MLIR compiler infrastructure, the CIRCT project, and has contributed to many other commercial and open source projects at Apple, Tesla, Google and SiFive.
Considered one of the most influential women in robotics, Dr. Tessa Lau is an award-winning CEO and roboticist whose most recent venture, Dusty Robotics, is revolutionizing the construction industry. Dusty automates the BIM-to-field layout process through a robotic FieldPrinter, eliminating costly errors and speeding up construction schedules. Prior to Dusty Robotics, Dr. Lau was co-founder, CTO, and Chief Robot Whisperer at Savioke (Relay) Robotics, where she automated hotel delivery and orchestrated the global distribution and management of consumer-facing robots. Dr. Lau was also an early member of Willow Garage, the legendary research lab and technology incubator known as one of the most influential forces in modern robotics.
Elizabeth Lawler is the founder and CEO of AppMap. A serial entrepreneur, she previously was Vice President, DevOps Security at CyberArk (CYBR) responsible for CyberArk strategy and execution. She founded Conjur (acq. CyberArk), which was the first product in the market to address Privileged Account Security gaps for DevOps, cloud and container native software. Elizabeth was also Chief Data Officer at Generation Health (acq. CVS Caremark) and held national leadership positions in research at the Department of Veterans Affairs. She is a data scientist and programmer by training and holds a doctorate and a masters from Boston University.
Danielle Lay is a Partner at NEA. She joined the firm in New York in 2017. Danielle invests in companies at all stages and is focused on consumer social and commerce infrastructure businesses. Her investments include Fizz, Patreon, Goody, Pair Eyewear, and Prime Financial Technologies. In addition, she was involved with NEA’s investments in Desktop Metal (NYSE: DM), Framebridge (acquired), Block, Burrow, Enigma, Formlabs and Wizard. Danielle is also a member of NEA’s Asia investing team and was involved with NEA’s investments in Gravel, Super and Zuoyebang, among others. Prior to joining NEA, she was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs advising clients in the financial technology and payments sectors on M&A and IPO transactions. Earlier in her career, she was the founder of a web development agency called DesignWorks. Danielle earned her Bachelor’s at Northwestern University in Economics, Business Institutions and Chinese.
S. Ko-yung Lee
Investor and Coach, Launch Lab/Fika VenturesFormer founder turned coach + investor in ambitious teams and novel technologies which make the world more awesome + help more humans realize fully lived lives. Coach to leaders/founding teams/aspiring leaders at seed-to-pre IPO companies, across industries. Scout for Fika Ventures.
Wendy Cai-Lee is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Piermont Bank, a full-service commercial bank that provides an unprecedent banking experience blending the best of banking and technology. As a successful entrepreneur and banking executive, Wendy has over 28 years of management and business-building experience in commercial and consumer banking, mergers & acquisitions, and cross-border investment advisory services at Fortune 500 financial organizations as well as start-up companies. Prior to building Piermont Bank, she was an Executive Vice President at East West Bank, responsible for its Commercial and Consumer Businesses in the U.S. Prior to East West, Wendy was a Managing Director at Deloitte LLP, where she managed its U.S./China cross-border M&A business. She started her banking career with JP Morgan Chase and held various management positions at both Chase and Citi. Wendy is named Digital Banker of the Year in 2022 and an honoree of The Most Powerful Women in Banking to Watch by the American Banker. Wendy is a member of New York State Department of Financial Services’ Charter Advisory Board and CDFI/MDI Council. In addition, Wendy is an Emeritus member of the Board of Friends of UNFPA. She also serves on the Dean’s Advisory Board at Douglass College. Wendy received a bachelor’s degree in economics from Rutgers University.
Chris is the Chief Strategy Officer of Haun Ventures. He is also a member of Coinbase’s Global Advisory Council. Prior to joining Haun Ventures, Chris served on the executive management team of Airbnb and led the company’s policy and communications work from 2015 to 2021. Previously, Chris co-founded Fabiani & Lehane, a strategic consultancy that advised political, corporate, technology, entertainment, and professional sports clients. In the 1990s, he served in various positions in the administration of President Bill Clinton, including as Press Secretary to Vice President Al Gore and Special Assistant Counsel to President Clinton. Chris has also served as a Lecturer in Management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Chris holds a B.A. from Amherst College an
With an innate sense of humor and unparalleled unflappability, Chrissy handles client/creative concerns, project management, and everyday resource needs. His experience spans agencies such as Saatchi & Saatchi, Frank Collective, and 72andSunny, leading relationships with clients such as Google, Activision, and Toyota. First to crack a joke and brighten the room, he channels this energy into every relationship, creating an atmosphere of friendly professionalism, and a collected sense of calmness
Qi Li
Physician Executive, InterSystemsQi Li, M.D. oversees product innovation for the InterSystems HealthShare health informatics platform. In this role, Dr. Li shapes the global product direction to meet provider organizations’ needs around high performance, patient safety, quality improvement, and cost control. Dr. Li will also lead strategic initiatives in areas such as genomics and national healthcare informatics solutions for developing countries.
Rodrigo Liang is SambaNova’s Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer leading the company’s vision for a new era of pervasive AI built on full-stack purpose-built AI platforms. Prior to SambaNova, Rodrigo led the hardware engineering team at Oracle where he was responsible for the design and development of state-of-the-art processors and ASICs for its enterprise servers.
Herbert Lin
Senior Research Scholar, Hank Holland Fellow, Stanford UniversityHerbert Lin is senior research scholar and Hank J. Holland Fellow at Stanford University. His research interests focus on the policy-related dimensions of security in cyberspace, including offensive operations in cyberspace as instruments of national policy, information warfare and influence operations, and emerging technologies. He is also Chief Scientist, Emeritus for the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies and a member of the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. In 2016, he served on President Obama’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity. In 2019, he was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2020, he was a commissioner on the Aspen Commission on Information Disorder. Prior to his NRC service, he was a professional staff member and staff scientist for the House Armed Services Committee (1986-1990). He received his doctorate in physics from MIT.
Robin Liu
CEO, OnePlus North AmericaRobin Liu is CEO of North America for OnePlus. He joined OnePlus in 2018, initially leading OnePlus’ India sales prior to being appointed CEO of North America. Liu has more than a decade of Go-To-Market experience and a proven track record of leading sales and marketing teams across a diversity of consumer electronics products. As CEO of North America, Liu oversees OnePlus’ North American business, including marketing and branding, sales and channel strategy and product. As Sales Head of OnePlus India from 2019-2021, Robin helped grow sales to become the second most-selling premium smartphone brand in the country. Additionally, Liu built and expanded the OnePlus ecosystem in India, successfully launching audio, wearable, TV and IoT products within the country. In 2021, he oversaw the OnePlus Nord series launch, achieving 80% YoY sales growth the same year. Other India accomplishments include setting sales records on Amazon.in while also overseeing the development of OnePlus’ global flagship retail store. Prior to OnePlus, Liu worked in the TV and display industry for more than 10 years, honing his skills in market strategy and supply chain management. Liu was instrumental in the founding of OnePlus’ TV business in India, overseeing global marketing, sales, supply chain and go to market strategies in 2018. Under Liu’s leadership, OnePlus’ first-gen TV was launched in 2019, becoming the third most-selling TV brand in India by 2022.
Zhenni Liu is a Partner at MaC Venture Capital, a seed-stage fund that invests in startups leveraging shifts in cultural trends and behavior, While the fund invests in all industries and founders, Zhenni always strives to promote diversity and investing in women, BIPOC, and Gen Z founders. Zhenni was born in China and immigrated to the Bay Area when she was five. After graduating from the University of Southern California with a double major in Business and Accounting, she returned to San Francisco to work as a private equity management consultant at Bain & Company. Zhenni started her career driving significant strategic and operational value for Fortune 500 companies in tech and retail. As an operator, she worked on Sephora’s transition into an omnichannel org focused on delivering experiential retail, and developed huge consumer empathy and insights while working evenings and weekends on the sales floor at Outdoor Voices and Athleta. Prior to MaC, Zhenni was an early-stage investor at Commerce Ventures and Peterson Ventures, where she focused on consumer and enterprise SaaS investments including unicorns Allbirds, Lucid, Ethos, and SmartAsset. Outside of work, Zhenni launched the Utah Female Founder Office Hours, and also the Salt Lake City chapter of SoGal, the largest global platform for diverse entrepreneurs and investors. She went from knowing no one in Utah to being named one of Utah’s 30 Women to Watch in 2019 for her contributions to the Utah startup ecosystem.
Rebecca Liu-Doyle is managing director at Insight Partners, a global private equity and venture capital firm. Her focus areas include high-growth software, marketplaces, and consumer internet.
Sal Lo, Co-Founder and CEO of Jorie Healthcare Partners, is a seasoned entrepreneur with a strong background in healthcare. With a Series 7 broker license, Sal has consistently demonstrated his ability to grow businesses and innovate in the healthcare industry. He co-founded Voice & Data Group, a telecommunications powerhouse, and later established Signature Healthcare, the parent company of Diamond Dialysis. After founding and selling Victory Specialty Surgical Hospital, Sal now leads Jorie Healthcare Partners, specializing in revenue cycle management, robotic process automation, and practice and change management services. Sal’s passion for excellence and innovation leaves a lasting impression on healthcare executives and inspires curiosity about his future endeavors.
Bob Lord is SVP of Worldwide Ecosystems and Blockchain at IBM. He is responsible for infusing emerging and open technologies across the business, overseeing IBM’s blockchain business and drives the company’s key ecosystems across developers, global systems integrators and independent software vendors.
Rebecca Lynn is co-founder and general partner of Canvas Ventures.
Ran Ma is the CEO and co-founder of Siren. She is a biomedical engineer from Johns Hopkins, and at Northwestern she worked at the department of plastic surgery on a project to create a biomask to regenerate the human face for burn victims and war veterans. She founded Siren, where they embed small electronics directly into fabric to make machine-washable fabric. Their first product is Siren Socks, which help people with diabetes and neuropathy avoid foot ulcers and amputations. Over 100,000 legs are lost to diabetes each year in the US and this costs the healthcare system over $80bn/year. Their latest study shows a 68% reduction in ulcers and 82% fewer amputations. Leveraging the success of this study, they have an expanded follow-up study with 350+ patients in progress, the largest study of its kind to date. Siren Socks are covered by Medicare and Siren is now working on a partnership with the VA and is launching a pilot soon with one of the largest IDNs in the country. They are also partnering with multiple large regional and national payers and are in talks with strategic partners that are looking to expand their product lines beyond traditional episodic care.
Emily is a Partner at Primary, leading early-stage investments in fintech and enterprise software companies. She loves going deep into unsexy industries and partnering with determined founders who are challenging the status quo. Before Primary, Emily was at Redpoint Ventures investing across early and growth stage companies. She started her career as a hedge fund analyst at Point72 before helping build Point72 Ventures, the early-stage venture practice. Emily earned her BA from Columbia University where she graduated summa cum laude.
Gary Marcus
Founder Robust.AI & Geometric.AI; Emeritus Professor Psychology & Neural Science, NYUGary Marcus is a leading voice in artificial intelligence. He is a scientist, best-selling author, and serial entrepreneur (Founder of Robust.AI and Geometric.AI, acquired by Uber). He is well-known for his challenges to contemporary AI, anticipating many of the current limitations decades in advance, and for his research in human language development and cognitive neuroscience. An Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU, he is the author of five books, including, The Algebraic Mind, Kluge, The Birth of the Mind, and the New York Times Bestseller Guitar Zero. He has often contributed to The New Yorker, Wired, and The New York Times. His most recent book, Rebooting AI, with Ernest Davis, is one of Forbes’s 7 Must Read Books in AI. (edited)
Bill Marczak is a Senior Researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. Bill’s work focuses on documenting and attributing novel technological threats to Internet freedom, including new censorship and surveillance tools. Bill’s expertise is in Internet scanning, digital forensics, and open source research. Coverage of Bill’s work has been featured in Vanity Fair, the New York Times, the Washington Post, on CNN, and on Larry King and 60 Minutes.
Craig Martell
U.S. Dept. of Defense Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer, U.S. Department of DefenseDr. Craig Martell is the inaugural Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer (CDAO) in the US Department of Defense and reports directly to Deputy Secretary of Defense, Dr. Kathleen Hicks. He previously held the roles of Head of Machine Learning at Lyft and Head of Machine Intelligence at Dropbox. At LinkedIn, Dr. Martell led a number of machine-learning teams, as well as the development of the LinkedIn AI Academy. Dr. Martell was a computer science professor and Director of the NPS Natural Language Processing Lab at the Naval Postgraduate School. He has a PhD in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania.
World Economic Forum 2020 Delegate; Founder @LSA Global; 4X Startup Founder, Founder @Latinx_startups; Founding Partner @Resolved Ventures; Venture Partner @VamosVentures; Founder @Aggies in Tech Global
Hilary Mason is the co-founder and CEO of Hidden Door. Prior to Hidden Door she was General Manager of the Machine Learning business unit at Cloudera. She previously founded Fast Forward Labs, an applied machine learning research and consulting startup which Cloudera acquired in 2017. Additionally, she was Data Scientist in Residence at Accel Partners, co-founded HackNY, and was Chief Scientist at bitly. Hilary has received numerous awards, is a regular keynote speaker, and has advised startups, corporations, and governments.
Ashley Mayer is the co-founder and GP of Coalition Operators, an early stage venture fund that has pioneered a new model to bring top women operators onto cap tables at scale. Ashley’s first startup job was at enterprise software company Box, where she led communications for six years, from 50-person team through IPO. She then joined venture capital firm Social Capital, where she led comms and marketing, launching new capital products and helping founders tell their stories. Before starting Coalition with her three co-founders, she was VP of comms at Glossier, a NY-based beauty startup. She’s also on the board of Climate Draft, a coalition of climate tech startups and VCs, along with Mixing Board, a community of comms and marketing leaders. She lives in Brooklyn and tweets too much.
Co-Founder at Sunshine. Board of Director at Walmart.
Cameron is the Co-founder CEO of Nominal, a software company that builds tools and data infrastructure for complex hardware development and testing. Prior to Nominal, Cameron was Head of Defense at Saildrone, a maritime data company and commercial provider of uncrewed surface vehicles (USVs) and an Investor at Lux Capital where he focused on the intersections of emerging technology, venture capital, and national security. Prior to Lux, Cameron was a product manager and growth lead at Anduril where he led a team of software engineers to develop cutting edge defense technology. Before Anduril, Cameron served as a Congressional Liaison for the Navy and contributed to the 2020 Future of Defense Task Force report. Cameron served in the US Navy as a fast attack submarine officer with 450+ days underwater. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and an SB and SM in Physics and Nuclear Engineering from MIT.
Ian McCubbin
Startup and VC Program Manager, Jet Propulsion LaboratoryOver the last 25 years, Ian McCubbin has watched the commercial space, climate observing systems and climate mitigation technologies evolve. For the last four years, he has served as Program Manager and Lead Mentor for JPL’s startup and VC engagement program. Here he has developed mentorship skills in collaborating with new start-up companies for the commercialization of Space Economy, Earth observing and climate change related technologies.
With over 30 years of industry experience, Jim McCullen is Chief Information Officer at Century Supply Chain Solutions, a tech-focused global logistics service provider trusted by Fortune 100 companies, North American retailers, wholesalers, distributors, and manufacturers for its comprehensive supply chain visibility technology combined with expert partnership. With rich experience in Origin Cargo Management and PO Management supply chain technology development, Jim and his team curated the groundbreaking supply chain optimization and real-time transportation visibility platform, VIZIV, which launched this year at TPM23. Combining the latest technology capabilities including predictive AI and decades of industry experience, VIZIV powers Century’s customers’ supply chains to ensure they are a step ahead of the competition. Jim is a Certified Information Security Manager and is a committee member of the Freight Logistics Optimization Works (FLOW) initiative.
Shrav Mehta
Founder & CEO, SecureframeShrav Mehta is the founder and CEO of Secureframe, which empowers thousands of businesses to build trust with customers by automating security and compliance. Secureframe has raised over $80m and is backed by investors including Kleiner Perkins, Accomplice Ventures, and Gradient Ventures.
Lindsey S. Mignano represents emerging and small businesses in the Bay Area. She provides businesses with counseling and transactional services, including business formation and expansion into US markets, M&A, commercial contracts/technology transactions, and venture financing matters. Prior to launching SSM, Lindsey practiced law in the San Francisco office of an international law firm. Lindsey has been recognized as a “Rising Star” by Super Lawyers every year since 2016, an honor awarded to only 2.5% of attorneys under the age of 40. Separate from her law practice, Lindsey speaks often about diversity issues in the fields of law, tech, and venture. In 2023, Lindsey founded Venture Betches and Syndicate Betches, a venture fund of fund and real estate syndicate fund of fund, respectively. Both embody a social justice mission to bring investment opportunities to historically underrepresented accredited limited partners who identify as female and/or BIPOC/minorities, and fund other venture or real estate syndicate funds led by historically underrepresented general/managing partners who identify as female and/or BIPOC/minorities.
Nik Milanovic is a fintech and financial inclusion enthusiast, with a decade of work across mobile payments, online lending, credit and microfinance. The opinions expressed in his articles do not reflect those of his employer(s).
Helen Min is the Managing Partner of Phenomenal Ventures, a venture capital firm she co-founded with Meena Harris in 2022. The firm invests in top early-stage technology companies building the future of enterprise software, fintech, and commerce. Before Phenomenal Ventures, Helen spent 14 years leading marketing teams at AngelList, Plaid, Quora, Dropbox, and Facebook. She is an angel investor and advisor to over 35 startups. Helen started her career in the advertising industry in San Francisco, managing automotive and technology clients for Venables Bell & Partners and Young & Rubicam. Helen holds an MBA from UC Berkeley and an MS and BS in Communications from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has been an adjunct professor at Northwestern Medill School of Journalism for the past five years. Helen lives in San Francisco with her family.
Nicholai Mitchko
Sales Engineering Manager, InterSystemsNicholai Mitchko is the manager of OEM sales engineering at InterSystems supporting pre and post commercial data initiatives and software solutions. Nicholai’s background is in machine learning and marketing.
Jon Moeller
COO, BlocPowerJon Moeller is chief operations officer at BlocPower. Previously, Jon was CEO and board member at MACH Energy, a sustainability SaaS provider that served more than half a billion square feet in commercial buildings. Jon has spent a decade in investment banking and corporate finance at Banc of America Securities, Cowen and StorageTek, completing more than $20B in transactions. He is currently on the development committee for an affordable housing project in San Francisco. Jon is also a member of ULI’s National Sustainable Development Council. Jon has an MBA from NYU and a BSc from University of Northern Colorado.
Alex is the Managing Director of the brand strategy and design studio, Koto New York. Alex has over fifteen years of experience in brand and advertising in both London and New York. He has led rebranding efforts for some of the biggest and most complex companies in the world, including American Express, Delta Air Lines, Grubhub / Seamless and Wells Fargo. Alex partners closely with all of Koto New York’s clients to ensure that they get the very best of the studio at every turn.
Rachel Morford is a principal director at The Aerospace Corporation, where she has made significant contributions to both the aerospace industry and critical national security space programs over the last 15 years in a variety of roles from launch systems to international partnerships to satellite production programs. Currently, she manages a team responsible for looking across the space enterprise to ensure that warfighter needs are met, exploring how existing purpose built and commercial systems can contribute to closure of kill chains and identifying critical technology needs. She previously led the Aerospace team supporting the integration of multiple space and ground programs supporting missile warning systems. In prior roles, Morford led the Aerospace team supporting the production, launch, and on-orbit testing communication satellites; provided technical leadership and supported strategic development of international agreements between the U.S. Air Force and other nations; and spent several years as a systems engineer working on national security launches. Morford has led the Aerospace Women’s Committee, served on the Aerospace Diversity Action Committee, and has been recognized with the Aerospace Commitment to Our People Diversity and Inclusion award. Morford is a past President and senior life member of the Society of Women Engineers. She is a senior life member of AIAA, serving on the AIAA Space Systems Technical Committee. She is a member on the USC Viterbi Emerging Leaders Board and on the USC Alumni Association Board of Governors. In 2021, she was recognized with the USC Alumni Association Young Alumni Merit Award.
Saam is a General Partner at Greylock Partners where he partners with entrepreneurs at the seed and early stages who are focused on building companies in AI, cybersecurity, and SaaS. Since joining Greylock in 2016, Saam has built a promising portfolio spanning enterprise software, serving on the boards of security companies such as Abnormal Security, Apiiro Security and Opal Security, AI companies like Adept AI, Cresta, Predibase, Snorkel, and others still in stealth. Prior to joining Greylock, Saam founded Guru Labs, a machine learning driven startup, and previously worked in product management at RelateIQ, one of the first applied AI software companies. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University where he was a Mayfield Fellow.
Vaikkunth is the CEO and Co-Founder of DynamoFL. He spearheads the AI/ML research team at DynamoFL and is an expert in privacy-preserving machine learning. Vaikkunth received his SM and Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT.
GV General Partner Dave Munichiello leads the firm’s digital investing team, spanning its consumer, enterprise, and frontier practice areas. He prioritizes time spent building long-term relationships with technologists who peak in curiosity, drive, and vision. Dave is himself deeply curious about data platforms, data science, developer tools, infrastructure, and enterprise software. His investments include Bugsnag (sold to SmartBear), Cockroach, CoreOS (sold to RedHat), DeterminedAI (sold to HPE), GitLab (IPO Nasdaq: GTLB), Jet.com (sold to Walmart), Lattice.io (sold to Apple), Modular, Pixie (sold to NewRelic), Plaid, RedPanda, SambaNova, Segment (sold to Twilio), Slack (IPO, then sold to Salesforce), Snorkel, Upbound, and Wonder. Before GV, Dave built and led enterprise software product, sales, and operations teams for highly-technical products under pressure in rapidly-changing markets. As an early executive at Kiva Systems, he helped grow its enterprise-enabling robotics and software platform from pre-PMF to $120 million in annual revenue before it was purchased by Amazon and became Amazon Robotics. Dave is a combat veteran and former paratrooper who served as a Captain in the U.S. military’s most elite units before his startup career. Dave’s military leadership roles ranged from running an Air Force technology organization; to serving as an Aide de Camp to the Four Star General running U.S. and NATO Air Forces; to deploying with elite special operations teams worldwide, ensuring they were enabled by the world’s most advanced technologies. Dave holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a B.S. from Emory University in mathematics and computer science.
Tara Murphy Dougherty is the CEO of Govini. Prior to this, she served as Govini’s President, where she led strategy and growth and oversaw Govini’s work with all federal clients. She has held leadership positions in technology across industry, government, and nonprofit sectors, including at Palantir Technologies, and she served as chief of staff for Global Strategic Affairs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, among other senior roles. She holds a bachelor’s from Georgia Tech and a master’s from Georgetown University. She serves on the Board of Directors for the National Defense University Foundation, the Board of Advisors for the Center for Government Contracting at George Mason University, and the Board of Directors of AFCEA DC.
Aine Nakai
ATLAS Deputy Director, Space System CommandMs. Aine Nakai is the Deputy Director of Atlas Corps, Space Systems Command, providing critical mission support functions across all mission areas including Command resourcing and talent management, contracting, financial management, innovation, and logistics. Prior to this role, Ms. Nakai was the Director of Guardian Generation overseeing recruiting, hiring, outreach, and interservice transfers for the United States Space Force. Previously, she was the Director of Talent Management for Space Systems Command, formerly the Space and Missile Systems Center, Los Angeles Air Force Base, California. She established the Talent Management Organization to oversee the career development, training, recruitment, hiring, retention, and engagement for SMC and geographically separated units in Peterson AFB and Kirtland AFB. In her role, she was responsible for monitoring the career of nearly 5,000 military and civilian personnel in the Contracting, Finance, Program Management, Engineering, Cyber, Security, Human Resources, and Logistic career fields. Ms. Nakai entered the Air Force as a commissioned officer when she graduated from Officer Training School in 2000. She earned her contracting warrant and was stationed at Langley AFB, Air Combat Command prior to being stationed at Yokota AB, Japan where she served as a Flight Commander for the 374th Contracting Squadron. Her final assignment as an Active Duty officer was at LA AFB where she managed the EELV Launch Capability contract, procured the $3 billion Spacelift Range modernization, and deployed to Kandahar, Afghanistan. Ms. Nakai worked as an Acquisition Manager in the Space Superiority Systems Directorate at LA AFB where she served as a business advisor on various classified programs with a portfolio of over $30 million. Prior to moving to Enterprise Talent Management, she served as the Contracting Directorate Division Chief for Resource Management & Force Development. In that role, she was responsible for recruiting, retention, personnel & career development of more than 250 contracting professionals.
Ritu Narayan is the founder and CEO of Zum, a technology company modernizing student transportation. An accomplished entrepreneur with 20+ years of experience as a tech industry leader, Narayan has been named one of Inc.’s Top 100 Female Entrepreneurs, recognized as one of Entrepreneur’s 100 Women of Influence, and received the 2023 Power of Women Award from Global Silicon Valley and Arizona State University. Prior to Zum, Narayan led teams at Oracle, Yahoo, IBM and eBay. A Sloan Fellow and graduate of the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Narayan earned her undergraduate degree in computer science at the Delhi Institute of Technology. She lives in San Carlos, California, with her husband and two children.
Nat (Rajesh) Natarajan is G-P’s chief product and strategy officer. An accomplished business leader with a proven track record of developing highly innovative products and spearheading growth and transformational change, Nat brings more than 25 years of experience disrupting sectors including SaaS, collaboration, consumer tech and fintech. At G-P, Nat is responsible for leading the company’s strategy and product vision, with a focus on delivering innovative SaaS solutions on our industry-leading platform and innovating and leading G-P’s global team of world-class technologists. Nat has extensive experience delivering growth at scale and leading multi-billion-dollar portfolios. Prior to joining G-P, he served as executive vice president and general manager of product and technology at RingCentral where he led product strategy and a global team of more than 3,500 people. Nat also held senior leadership roles at innovative technology companies including Travelocity.com, TurboTax, Ancestry, Intuit and PayPal.
Jaclyn Rice Nelson is the CEO & Co-founder of Tribe AI, a network of the world’s top technologists that builds advanced AI solutions for companies of all sizes. In addition to Tribe, she co-founded Coalition Operators, an early-stage venture fund and top women’s operator network. Prior to starting Tribe and Coalition, Jaclyn spent the majority of her career at Google partnering with enterprise companies and incubating new businesses. She was an early employee at CapitalG, Alphabet’s growth equity arm, where she built a 50K-person expert network to advise growth-stage tech companies like Airbnb and Stripe.
Deon Nicholas is the CEO and Co-Founder of Forethought, the Generative AI for Customer Support company. Forethought has raised $90M+ in venture capital, was recognized as one of G2’s Best Software Products for 2023, was named to CNBC’s 25 Top Startups for the Enterprise in 2022, and won TechCrunch Disrupt in 2018. Before starting Forethought, Deon built products and infrastructure at Facebook, Palantir, Dropbox, and Pure Storage.
Turner is the founder of Banana Capital.
Emeka Nwachinemere
Chief Executive Officer, Kitovu Technology CompanyNwachinemere Emeka is a passionate entrepreneur committed to transforming Africa’s food system. He is a graduate of Mechanical Engineering from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and has received specialized training in Business and Entrepreneurship from the Enterprise Development Center, Pan African University, Lagos, as well as Financial Innovation for Economic Development at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the founder of Kitovu Technology Company, a start-up that focuses on building climate-smart farming and post-harvest infrastructure for African agriculture. In addition to his entrepreneurial endeavors, the proud husband to Miracle, and dedicated father to Salvation, Blossom, and Wealth, is also a writer and public speaker with an interest in governance and advocacy and has a dream of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger in Africa and the world.
Shaquille O'Neal
NBA Superstar & Philanthropist, EntrepreneurNBA superstar, philanthropist, and renowned successful business entrepreneur SHAQUILLE O’NEAL – known around the world as Shaq – is a true cultural icon who brings his inspiring story and unbeatable lessons in leadership and business to life at every smash-hit event. After spending nearly two decades racking up accolades in the NBA (15x NBA All-Star, 4x NBA Champion, and a 3x NBA Finals MVP), Shaq is heralded for his tremendous business savvy – he got his MBA back in 2005 – and his insights and advice on business success and diversification have been featured in Forbes, Inc., Entrepreneur, Money, and more. O’Neal has become a bona fide mogul, investing in companies like Google, Apple, and Ring, and becoming the second-largest individual shareholder of Authentic Brands Group, as well as franchising storefronts like Big Chicken, Papa Johns and Krispy Kreme, among a myriad of notable entrepreneurial ventures.
Jillian Ochs
US Market Lead, Abu Dhabi Investment OfficeJillian Ochs is a native Californian and has been working in FDI space for over 15 years. She was awarded DCI’s 40 under 40 in International Economic Development in in 2017 and completed the International Economic Development Certification Courses. Jillian leads the San Francisco office for Advise Global currently leading the Abu Dhabi Investment Office US team. She has extensive experience representing European and Middle Eastern countries as well as several American States in addition to supporting private companies expand abroad. Jillian holds a Masters degree in Global Business Management from University of Antwerp Management School (UAMS) and Bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Entrepreneur, Investor, Event host & Conference Speaker
MK Palmore currently serves as Director, Office of the CISO, for Google Cloud. His responsibilities include support of strategic customers engaged in a digital transformation journey. Prior to joining Google Cloud, MK served as the Field Chief Security Officer (Americas) for Palo Alto Networks. MK spent an extensive career in the U.S. Federal Government prior to entering the private sector. In a 22-year career in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), MK provided leadership and conducted investigations in a number of areas including Cybersecurity, Crisis Response/Management, Risk Management Advisory, and Counter-Terrorism. MK’s cybersecurity certifications include the CISM, CISSP, GCCC and the Carnegie Mellon University CISO Certification. He earned a B.S. from the United States Naval Academy and an MBA from Pepperdine University. MK began his professional career as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Marine Corps.
Kaustubh Pandya
Partner, Brick & Mortar VenturesKaustubh Pandya, P.E. is a Partner at Brick & Mortar Ventures, a global early stage investor in solutions for the built world. Prior to Brick & Mortar Ventures, Kaustubh was with McKinsey & Company advising engineering & construction firms, investors, construction technology providers, and owners. He also contributed to and co-authored research in construction technology at McKinsey. Before joining McKinsey & Co, he worked as a forensic structural engineer assessing catastrophic failures and improving building resilience. Kaustubh holds a B.S. in Civil Engineering from U.C. Berkeley, a M.S. in Design Construction Integration from Stanford, and an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management.
Andy Parsons is the Senior Director of the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) at Adobe, which is creating the open technologies for a future of verifiably authentic content of all kinds. With collaborators across hardware, software, publishing and social platforms the CAI is empowering creators with secure provenance. For information consumers, this important work restores trust and transparency to the media they experience. Throughout his career, Andy has worked to empower creative professionals with innovative technologies. Prior to joining Adobe, Andy founded Workframe (acquired in 2019), the pioneering visual project management platform for commercial architecture. Andy previously served as CTO at McKinsey Academy, McKinsey’s groundbreaking educational platform and he co-founded Happify, the world’s leading mobile platform for digital therapeutics and behavioral health.
Nikki Pechet
Co-founder & CEO, HomeboundNikki Pechet is the Co-Founder and CEO of Homebound, a Series C stage technology-enabled home builder backed by Khosla, Atomic, Thrive, Google Ventures and more, with over $150M in venture capital and hundreds of millions in debt raised to date. She started her career in real estate in New York City, spent almost a decade at Bain & Company, and was an early executive at Thumbtack before founding Homebound. Nikki also serves on the Board of Directors for Thrivent Financial, a Fortune 500 financial services company, and is an investor in a range of early-stage technology companies. She makes her home in the Bay Area with her husband and three small kids.
Alessandra Pecoraro
Sr. Manager, Performance Marketing & Analytics, VericastAlessandra Pecoraro is a Brazilian-born digital marketing strategist with an MBA in Market Intelligence. With over 10 years of experience developing and managing social media strategies for B2C and B2B companies. Currently, she’s heading up the Paid Social media execution team for Vericast, managing over $25M YoY in media buyy for social platforms.
Tanya Pemberton is senior vice president of the National Systems Group at The Aerospace Corporation. Pemberton is responsible for the company’s support to the national security space and intelligence community in the acquisition, launch, and orbital operation of advanced technology space systems and their supporting ground systems. She assumed this position in September 2019. Prior to joining Aerospace, Pemberton was the chief information officer and director of Information Technology (IT) Services for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). There, she led and directed NGA’s mission and enterprise IT development and operations, transforming NGA’s technical infrastructure into a modern, cloud-based, data-centric architecture to better serve the geospatial intelligence needs of the nation. As CIO, she also oversaw strategy, policy, implementation, and governance of NGA’s IT investments. Pemberton has more than 30 years of experience in both industry and the federal government, delivering large-scale technical systems and working problems across multiple business sectors to include space systems, mission ground systems, information technology, and analytic organizations. Over the past decade, Pemberton served in a number of senior executive assignments to include chief of staff, associate deputy director for Science and Technology, and director of the intelligence community’s Open Source Center. Earlier in her government career, she served at the National Reconnaissance Office leading and managing the acquisition and development for a variety of technical initiatives and programs in the Geospatial and Signals Intelligence Directorates. Most notably, she served as program director for a next-generation, multibillion-dollar imaging satellite system, managing acquisition, development, and delivery.
Zach Perret is CEO and co-founder of Plaid, the technology platform powering the future of money. After realizing how difficult it was to build a personal finance application, Zach and his co-founder William Hockey started Plaid in 2013 to give developers easy and secure access to a financial data network capable of powering any digital financial service. Today, 1 in 3 people with a US bank account have used Plaid to connect to a financial application. Prior to founding Plaid, Zach was a consultant for Bain and graduated with degrees in Physics and Chemistry from Duke University.
John Plumb
Assistant Secretary Defense, Space Policy, Department of DefenseDr. John F. Plumb was confirmed in March 2022 as the first Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy. In this role he is responsible for the overall supervision of policy for the Department of Defense for space warfighting. His policy portfolio encompasses the Department’s strategic capabilities for integrated deterrence: space, nuclear weapons, cyber, missile defense, electromagnetic warfare, and countering weapons of mass destruction. He also serves as the Principal Cyber Advisor to the Secretary of Defense. Dr. Plumb has served in various national security roles both in and out of uniform for nearly three decades. As an active duty US Navy submarine officer, he served on a fast attack Los Angeles-class submarine and as an instructor at the Navy’s nuclear power school. He then transitioned to the Navy reserves, commanding eight different reserve units over 20 years. As a civilian he held previous roles in the Senate, the Pentagon, and on the National Security Council staff at the White House. Prior to his confirmation he spent several years working for Federally Funded Research and Development Centers, first as a Senior Engineer at the Rand Corporation, and then as Principal Director, Chief of Government Relations for the Aerospace Corporation.
Will Pomerantz
Executive Consultant, Space Workforce 2030William Pomerantz is an aerospace executive with two decades of experience in the entrepreneurial and non-profit sectors. He has served as Vice President for Special Projects and Employee #001 at Virgin Orbit; as Vice President for Special Projects at Virgin Orbit; and as Senior Director of Space Prizes at the XPRIZE Foundation, among other roles. He is passionate about ensuring that talented people from all walks of life have the ability to participate in and contribute to the eaxploration of space. Pomerantz is a Co-Founder of both the Brooke Owens Fellowship and the Patti Grace Smith Fellowship, two award-winning mentorship and work experience programs focused on enabling more female, non-binary, and Black undergraduates to pursue successful aerospace careers. For many years, he served as the Chair of the Board of Advisors of SEDS-USA, the world’s largest student space organization. Currently, Pomerantz is an Executive Consultant for the Space Workforce 2030 program, helping chart the future of the nation’s largest and most comprehensive effort to inspire, prepare, and employ the aerospace workforce of tomorrow. Pomerantz holds a bachelors degree in Earth and Planetary Sciences from Harvard and a masters degree in Space Studies from the International Space University. He is also a graduate of the NASA Academy, NASA’s premiere leadership training program for undergraduate and graduate students. Pomerantz has served on two US Federal Advisory Committees: the Federal Aviation Administration’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee and the National Academies of Science and Engineering’s Committee on Building a Better NASA Workforce.
Andy is the Chief Business Officer of OAK’S LAB, where he currently oversees the product teams of 10 different pre-seed to Series A venture-backed startups. OAK’S LAB is a technology partner for startups and over the past 6 years has built products for 35 startups with a total valuation of $1.5B. Andy specializes in product strategy and go-to-market for early-stage startups. Prior to joining OAK’S LAB, Andy was leading Sales as part of the founding team of an event-technology startup as it grew from pre-seed to Series B. Andy is passionate about helping non-technical founders build successful companies and is also an angel investor and advisor in multiple pre-seed startups.
Chris Power is Founder and CEO of Hadrian, a manufacturing technology company focused on building the most efficient precision component factories in America. Chris believes deeply in enabling Space & Defense manufacturers to iterate faster at a fraction of the cost, creating meaningful employment in manufacturing and ensuring democracy prevails by combining the best of Silicon Valley technology with the country’s manufacturing experts to rebuild and automate the defense industrial base.
Gill Pratt
Chief Scientist, Toyota Motor CorporationDr. Gill Pratt believes that technology should enhance our quality of life — not diminish it. As the Chief Scientist and Executive Fellow for Research, Dr. Pratt guides research strategy for the Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC). Dr. Pratt also serves as the CEO of Toyota Research Institute (TRI), where he directs research to advance robotics, energy and materials, machine learning, and human-centered artificial intelligence. Previously, Dr. Pratt led a number of robotics research programs for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where he served for five years as a program manager in the Defense Sciences and Tactical Technology Offices.
Matthew Prince is co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks, which spans more than 275 cities in over 100 countries. Matthew is a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, winner of the 2011 Tech Fellow Award, and serves on the Board of Advisors for the Center for Information Technology and Privacy Law. Matthew holds an MBA from Harvard Business School where he was a George F. Baker Scholar and awarded the Dubilier Prize for Entrepreneurship. He is a member of the Illinois Bar, and earned his J.D. from the University of Chicago and B.A. in English Literature and Computer Science from Trinity College. He’s also the co-creator of Project Honey Pot, the largest community of webmasters tracking online fraud and abuse.
Michel Protti leads product and engineering teams focused on Meta’s privacy efforts. Previously, he led product marketing for Meta’s Partnerships businesses and product groups including Media, Games, Workplace and Connectivity teams. Prior to that, he led emerging business strategy and planning across Meta’s Global Marketing Solutions organization. Prior to joining Meta, Michel was SVP Strategy and Operations at Guggenheim Digital Media and spent 4 years at Yahoo in several leadership positions including Country Manager of Yahoo Canada and Chief of Staff to the CEO. Michel began his career in the Tech, Media and Telecom practice at McKinsey and Company. He is a graduate of Queen’s University in Canada and holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management.
Marc Raibert
Executive Director, The AI InstituteMarc Raibert is the executive director of The AI Institute, a new Hyundai-owned research lab devoted to advancing both the intelligence of robots and their physical skills. He is also the chairman of Boston Dynamics, which he founded in 1992. Prior to Boston Dynamics, Raibert was a professor of computer science at CMU and MIT, where he created the Leg Laboratory, a lab that helped establish the scientific basis for highly dynamic robots. Raibert is a Founding Fellow of AAAI, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, was named Pioneer in Robotics in 2022 by IEEE and received the Engelberger Award in Technology. Two of Raibert’s robots, the One-legged Hopper and BigDog, were inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame.
John Scott-Railton is a Senior Researcher at the Citizen Lab, a research group based at the University of Toronto’s Munk School School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. John leads investigations into targeted threats against civil society, including mercenary spyware and disinformation. This has included collaborative investigations of operations attributed to Russia, Iran, Syria, China, and ISIS, among many others, as well as investigations into the abuse of commercial “mercenary” spyware around the globe. These collaborations, conducted in close partnership with at-risk dissidents, journalists, and human rights defenders, have resulted in the discovery of hundreds of targets of sophisticated hacking, and to the uncovering of zero day exploits against Apple and Microsoft products, among others, resulting in patches to billions of devices worldwide. John has testified to the The House Permanent Select Committee On Intelligence, the European Parliament’s Committee of Inquiry to investigate the use of Pegasus and equivalent surveillance spyware (PEGA), and the Parliament of Poland’s inquiry into Pegasus spyware. He has been a fellow at Google Ideas and Jigsaw at Alphabet. Previously he founded The Voices Projects, collaborative information feeds that bypassed internet shutdowns in Libya and Egypt.
Rajeev Rajan is the Chief Technology Officer at Atlassian where he oversees Atlassian Engineering, IT, Security and Trust, and the Technical Program Management teams. As CTO, he is focused on cloud transformation and continuing to grow Atlassian into a world-class engineering organization. Rajeev previously acted as the Vice President and Head of Engineering for Meta and spent over two decades at Microsoft, where he held a number of roles, including building and leading the team responsible for Office 365’s cloud infrastructure.
Prashanthi Raman has nearly 15 years of experience navigating challenging, highly charged, and complex political environments. As the Vice President of Global Government affairs for Cruise, an all-electric, autonomous vehicle company, she oversees public policy and regulatory issues for the company worldwide. Prior to Cruise, Prashanthi served as Head of State and Local Government Relations at Lyft, where she played a pivotal role in creating and expanding the ridesharing industry across North America. She is a graduate of Northwestern University and Chicago-Kent College of Law and received her Masters in Public Health from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Guillermo Rauch
Creator of Next.js, Founder & CEO, VercelGuillermo Rauch is the founder and CEO of Vercel where he leads the company’s mission to enable developers to create at the moment of inspiration. Prior to founding Vercel, Guillermo co-founded LearnBoost and Cloudup where he served the company as CTO through its acquisition by Automattic in 2013. Originally from Argentina, Guillermo has been a developer since the age of ten and is passionate about contributing to the open source community. He has created a number of JavaScript projects including socket.io, Mongoose.js, Now, and Next.js.
Robert is an Investment Parter at Maven Ventures, a Seed venture fund specializing in consumer software and emerging consumer trends best known for its early investments in companies like Zoom, Embark Trucks, and Cruise Automation. Robert joined Maven as its first Associate in 2015 and has spent nearly a decade investing in and supporting bold consumer founders bringing their visions to the world. He works closely with the passionate founders of Daybreak Health, CoPilot, House Numbers, and Validity. His current areas of investment interest are consumer AI, fintech, proptech, and longevity. Robert graduated from Duke University where he studied Economics and Finance, and currently teaches a Capstone course in the Masters of Financial Technology program.
Vijay Reddy
Partner, MayfieldVijay is a Partner at Mayfield and focuses on investments in AI. He brings over a decade of inception and early-stage investing experience in from Clear Ventures and Intel Capital. Vijay has invested across the AI stack from silicon, systems, infrastructure software, data, middleware & tools and applications. Some of his past investments include Avaamo, AEye (Nasdaq: LIDR), BabbleLabs (Acquired by Cisco), Common Sense Machines, DataRobot, Hypersonix, Joby (NYSE: Joby), Landing.ai, Lilt, Opaque, and SambaNova. A Kauffman Fellow, Vijay received his MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and has a BS & MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering with top honors from University of California, Irvine.
Yuval Refua has over 15 years of experience managing and scaling product organizations and developing products that excite users. Yuval joined Navan in 2019 to launch and direct the Navan Expense and Payment products. Prior to Navan, Yuval ran digital payments at American Express, was the SVP of product at NAM, CPO at Syp and Aris Genuine Solutions, and held several product leadership roles at Thomson Reuters and Noise. Yuval earned his MBA from Columbia Business School.
Torsten Reil
Co-founder & Co-CEO, HelsingTorsten Reil is Co-founder and Co-CEO of Helsing, a new type of security and defence company focused on AI and software capabilities. Originally a biologist, Torsten previously founded NaturalMotion, an Oxford University spin-off and one of the UK’s most successful games and technology start-ups. In 2014, NaturalMotion was acquired by Zynga for $527m. He is an active technology and biotech investor and has spoken at TED, TED Global, Google Zeitgeist and the Apple iPhone 5 keynote. Torsten was included in MIT’s Top 100 Innovators and is a member of the Munich Security Conference Innovation Board.
Megan is an investor with Vertex Ventures US, an SF-based fund specializing in enterprise software. Megan joined the fund this year to set up their office in NYC and to continue investing in early-stage B2B SaaS, devtools and infrastructure software companies. She’s been investing for the last 5 years, previously with Crane Venture Partners and Entrepreneur First in London. Before her career in Venture Capital, Megan was a GTM operator at an early-stage FinTech start-up in London and started her career investing in public market tech companies in Hong Kong with Aberdeen Asset Management.
Robby is a seed investor at Cowboy Ventures focused on software infrastructure investments. She works with companies such as Drata, Elementary Data, SVT Robotics, Mobile.dev, Mutiny, and Byteboard. She also co-hosts the Open Source Startup Podcast where she’s conducted 70+ interviews with open source founders from companies like HashiCorp, Vercel, MongoDB, Kong, Chronosphere, and Starburst Data. She’s also an active member of All Raise and founded the Modern Angels community of 250+ female & non-binary angel investors.
Dan Roesbery is Vice President, Fintech Business Development, leading new strategic and commercial partnerships with North America and Global Fintechs, eCommerce, Social, and Crypto companies. Dan’s team helps emerging and growing platforms across these important segments navigate business opportunities with Visa in order to launch new payments solutions. Dan brings 15 years’ experience in payments and Fintech, where he has held sales, partnerships, operations, product, and strategy leadership positions with Blackhawk Network, Kash, and Visa for the last 5 years. He brings a pedigree of problem solving and unlocking growth areas to help fintech and digital commerce players continue to push boundaries and innovate within Visa’s ecosystem. Dan holds a Bachelor’s from Boston College, an executive MBA from Quantic Business School, and serves as Growth Advisor to the Financial Club.
Emily Rogers leads the First Gigaton Captured program at Third Derivative, RMI’s global climate tech accelerator. First Gigaton Captured is a cohort of startups focused on carbon dioxide removal. Emily coordinates with industry experts, startups, and funders to address hurdles for startups to scale. Previously at BCG and Ebb Carbon, an ocean carbon removal startup, Emily combines her technical and business skillsets to support the carbon removal ecosystem. Emily holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Environmental Engineering from Dartmouth and an MBA and Master of Science in Environment & Resources from Stanford.
Paul Rosen
Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Investment Security, U.S. Department of the TreasuryPaul Rosen serves as the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Investment Security. Nominated by the President and confirmed with bipartisan support by the United States Senate on May 23, 2022, Mr. Rosen leads all operations and activities of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the interagency Committee authorized by Congress to review certain foreign investment into U.S. businesses for national security risks. He oversees the review of hundreds of transaction filings each year often amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars in investment activity and is responsible for managing the Committee’s recommendations to the President to suspend or prohibit transactions that threaten to impair the national security of the United States. He also guides the Committee’s policy and international relations activities as well as the monitoring, compliance and enforcement of national security agreements executed to mitigate national security risk. Mr. Rosen has more than 15 years of experience in national and homeland security and law enforcement matters. Prior to joining Treasury, Mr. Rosen served as a partner at an international law firm where he led the firm’s national security practice and counseled on cybersecurity, privacy, and government investigations matters. Before joining private practice, Mr. Rosen served in public service for over a decade in senior roles in the federal government, including as Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security and in various roles at the Department of Justice, including as a federal prosecutor in the Criminal Fraud Section, where he investigated and prosecuted financial crimes. For this work, Mr. Rosen was recognized by the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency with the Investigative Award of Excellence. Rosen started his legal career as Counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee after clerking in the Central District of California for United States District Judge Gary Allen Feess (Ret.). Rosen received his J.D. from the University of Southern California where he graduated Order of the Coif, and his bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, from the University of Colorado.
Nicole Sahin is the founder and chief executive officer of G-P, the leading employer of record company that created and defined the category with its industry-leading SaaS-based Global Growth Platform™. Nicole founded G-P in 2012 and changed the rules of international business by enabling organizations to unlock their full business potential and making it possible to hire anyone, anywhere in the world within minutes. As the author of The Wall Street Journal Bestseller, Global Talent Unleashed: An Executive’s Guide to Conquering the World, Nicole credits her success and that of G-P to an exceptional team with global expansion in their DNA, and to her philosophy of the triple bottom line –building a business in a way that is good for customers, employees and shareholders. Nicole and G-P are regularly recognized with industry, leadership and product awards. Among them, she was named one of Goldman Sachs’ most intriguing entrepreneurs of the year, and Inc. Magazine named her a Top 100 Female Founder. The Financial Times ranked G-P as one of the fastest-growing companies in America, while industry analyst firms NelsonHall and Everest Group named the company Employer of Record Industry leader in 2022. G-P was also selected as a Member of the World Economic Forum, Global Innovators Community in 2023.
Rex Salisbury is the founding partner of Cambrian Ventures, a $20M fund to back early-stage fintech founders. Founded in 2016 as a passion project outside of Salisbury’s day job as a software engineer at a fintech startup, the Cambrian community has grown to over 15,000 subscribers, 4,000 meetup attendees, and a Slack community with over 1,500 fintech founders. In 2019, Rex joined Andreessen Horowitz as a founding member of its fintech practice, where he co-led the fintech vertical and made early investments in Deel and Tally, companies he had previously encountered through his work with Cambrian.
Surbhi Sarna is a Group Partner at YC. She was the founder and former CEO of nVision Medical, which developed a first-in-kind microcatheter for the detection of ovarian cancer. After raising $17M in venture funding, completing three clinical trials, and obtaining two first-in-class FDA approvals, nVision was acquired by Boston Scientific (NYSE: BSX) for $275M, more than 15X money-in. Surbhi stayed at Boston Scientific for two years, running the 150+ person commercial organization in preparation for launch. She sits on both private and public company boards.
Marietje Schaake
Internnational Policy Director Stanford Cyber Policy Center, Stanford UniversityMarietje Schaake is the International Policy Director at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and a Fellow at the Institute for Human-Centered AI. She is a columnist for Financial Times and serves on a number of not-for-profit Boards. Between 2009-2019 she served as a Member of European Parliament where she worked on trade-, foreign- and tech policy.
Jim Scheinman
is the founding managing partner of Maven Ventures.
Sascha Segan
Sr. Manager of Public Relations, Qualcomm IncorporatedSascha Segan is a Sr. Manager of Public Relations at Qualcomm. For almost 20 years, he was the head of mobile at PCMag.com, covering the mobile industry from 2G to 5G and reviewing more than 1,500 products. He is also an award-winning travel writer. Sascha lives in Queens, NY.
I’m a co-founder and partner at defy. My passion is working with entrepreneurs as a confidante to help them bring their visions to reality – from acquiring their first customers, to growing their team, to successful capital raises and exits and hopefully changing the world. I’ve served on more than 40 company boards, developed a broad network from industry experience, backed repeat entrepreneurs multiple times and returned significant capital to investors. Prior to building defy, I was a managing director at General Catalyst Partners for 12 years. Before joining General Catalyst, I was a managing director at TimeWarner Investments and a founding member of AOLTW Ventures, where I led investments. I’m always game to connect with passionate souls and kindred spirits. Previously, Neil led Mergers and Acquisitions for CMGI, a diversified technology operating company and venture capital firm. Prior to that, he was with Goldman Sachs & Co. and was a senior consultant with Accenture, where he managed project teams on technology-focused strategic and process initiatives for Fortune 500 companies. In addition, Neil was an early employee at Goldenvoice Presents, a diversified media company that manages artists, is a major concert promoter and created Coachella which has since become one of the largest concert festivals in the world. As a Managing Director of General Catalyst Partners, Neil invests in both new and existing technology businesses. His areas of special interest include: Internet and new media; software; commerce; and network infrastructure. He is based in the firm’s Palo Alto office. Current Board Memberships: Cozy, DECA, Elemental Technologies, Flite, Highwinds Network Group, Listia, NatureBox, The Honest Company, This Technology and StyleSaint. Board Observer for RAMP and Visible Measures. Former Board Member on Boxee (acquired by Samsung in July 2013), Tremor Video (NYSE: TRMR), and Vitrue (acquired by Oracle in June 2012; Neil and GC co-founded the company). Former Board Observer for Hot Potato (acquired by Facebook in August 2010).
Richie Serna is the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Finix. Finix is on a mission to create the most accessible financial services ecosystem in history by building the global operating system for fintech, starting with payments. Before Finix, Richie was an engineer at Balanced, the first developer-friendly payment API for online marketplaces and other P2P services, and a consultant at Booz & Company. He earned his B.A. in government at Harvard University.
Amit Serper is a seasoned cybersecurity professional currently serving as the Director of Security Research at Sternum, an Internet of Things (IoT) security firm. His role at Sternum involves leading a team of experts in research aimed at transforming the IoT defense paradigm by conducting cutting edge vulnerability and security research. Prior to his work at Sternum, Amit led research roles in Akamai, Guardicore, and Cybereason and the Israeli government. Throughout his career Amit published numerous research papers about malware, vulnerability research and exploitation, and security flaws in Windows, Linux, macOS and IoT platforms. Amit is a frequent speaker at cybersecurity conferences and his work was covered numerous times by the media.
Dana Settle is a Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Greycroft. As a member of Greycroft’s management committee, she is responsible for the firm’s operations, investment strategy, and vision. Dana is on the investment committee for all Greycroft funds and has been involved in all phases of Greycroft’s growth. Dana’s active investments include Acorns, Anine Bing, Avaline, Bird, Citizen, Cloud Paper, data.ai, Goop, HamsaPay, Happiest Baby, Merit Beauty, Mountain Digital, Pacaso, Seed Health, Tapcart, Thrive Market and Versed. Her notable exits include Bumble (IPO), Maker Studios (acquired by Disney), Pulse (acquired by LinkedIn), The RealReal (IPO), Trunk Club (acquired by Nordstrom), and WideOrbit (interest sold to company management). Dana is a Board Director to IMAX Corporation and the National Venture Capital Association. She is a founding member of the non-profit Baby2Baby and the female mentorship collective, All Raise. She is also a member of the Fast Company Impact Council. Prior to Greycroft, Dana spent several years as a venture capitalist and advisor to startups in the Bay Area, including six years at Mayfield, and investment banking at Lehman Brothers. Dana holds a BA in Finance and International Studies from the University of Washington and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Mo is the CEO and Co-founder of Aptos, the safe and scalable layer 1 blockchain. He is a 3x founder with over a decade of multinational financial services and blockchain/crypto experience. In the past, Mo has led blockchain Strategic Partnerships for Novi, Facebook’s wallet. As a first-generation immigrant, raised by a taxi driver and housewife on Welfare in Brooklyn, creating an accessible financial system for all is personal to Mo. Blockchain is essential to this path. Mo was the Founder and CEO of Meridio, a ConsenSys-backed, blockchain-based company that issued the world’s first fractional share of real estate. Mo also led ConsenSys strategy as an early employee and founded the ConsenSys’ Middle East Office. He has consulted the World Economic Forum on their global blockchain strategy including Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDCs). Prior to Meridio, Mo also consulted Sovereign Wealth Funds, energy, and telecom companies with BCG’s Private Equity practice.
Nikita is a Partner at Khosla Ventures. He is passionate about deep tech, data infrastructure, and system software. Prior to Khosla Ventures, Nikita co-founded SingleStore, a unicorn data and analytics company valued over $1.3 billion. He served as a founding CTO and then CEO, successfully scaling the company to over 40 million in ARR and near profitability. For the first nine months, Nikita lived in the office coding next to the servers. Prior to founding SingleStore, Nikita worked as a senior engineer at Facebook, and before that at Microsoft on the SQL Server product. At KV, Nikita is incubating Neon – a new database company building serverless Postgres – that raised $108 million in its Series B rounds. Nikita has a Ph.D. in computer science from St. Petersburg. During college years Nikita received a bronze medal in ACM ICPC, and international student programming competition.
Emmalyn is a co-founder and managing partner of Flourish Ventures, an early-stage global venture capital firm that invests in mission-driven entrepreneurs and industry influencers working towards a fair financial system. Emm leads the firm’s US investment team. Her current portfolio of disruptive fintech companies includes Brigit, Chime, Clerkie, Cushion.ai, EarnUp, Jetty, Kin, Mantl, Propel, Skipify, Steady, TrueBiz and Unit. Emm is an industry thought leader and advocate for transforming the US financial system to help create better financial health. She is a believer in working with marginalized communities and leads her firm’s DEIJ+ efforts. Emm has 23 years of tech investing experience from her roles as a Partner at Omidyar Network and a Venture Partner with Oak Investment Partners. She started her career as a tech investment banker with Morgan Stanley. Emm holds an MBA degree from Wharton and a BA degree from UC-Berkeley where she graduated summa cum laude.
Damion Shelton
Co-founder & CEO, Agility RoboticsDamion Shelton is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Agility Robotics, makers of Digit, the first commercially available bipedal robot made for real-world logistics work. Damion is a multifaceted roboticist focused on building automation solutions that solve real world challenges, starting with improving logistics and warehouse operations. Prior to Agility, Damion co-founded threeRivers 3D, where he served as CTO and designer of a low-cost, high-volume laser scanner for novice users in the healthcare space. Damion holds a Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University.
Actor / Producer, Tye Sheridan has emerged as one of Hollywood’s most exciting leading men, making his on-screen film debut in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, which won the Palme d’Or at the 2011 Cannes Film festival. Since then, Sheridan has amassed an impressive resume of intense, nuanced, and thoughtful characters, alongside some of the most creative filmmakers of our time, including Steven Spielberg, Paul Schrader, George Clooney, Jeff Nichols and David Gordon Green. Holding three patents, Sheridan is as creative and innovative off-camera as he is on. In 2017, alongside Nikola Todorovic, he co-founded Wonder Dynamics, whose mission is to revolutionize the production and post-production process by leveraging state-of-the-art AI. They are striving to democratize the use of high-end CGI and VFX which will pave the way for the next generation of filmmakers. That mission attracted some of the most influential individuals in both the film and tech industry. The startup is backed by Epic Games, Horizons Ventures, Founders Fund, Samsung Next and has a heavyweight advisory board that includes Joshua Baer, Rhea Films’ Terry Dougas, UC Berkeley assistant professor Angjoo Kanazawa, Avengers: Endgame co-director Joe Russo, director, producer, and screenwriter Steven Spielberg, Head of AI at MIT, Antonio Torralba and Film Finances president Gregory Trattner.
Gary is the Firm’s National Automotive Industry Leader, as well as the Global Lead Partner for Ford Motor Company. Gary has 25+ years of business experience, including over 17 years in the automotive industry. For the past eight years he has focused on the intersection of technology and the automotive industry with groundbreaking research on Self-Driving Cars, connectivity and mobility demand services. He has also worked on some of the most iconic, complex and strategic transactions in the industry. In particular, Gary has worked as an advisor to Ford Motor Company on its three most recent divestitures: Aston Martin, Jaguar/Land Rover, and Volvo and it’s recent multibillion AV Joint Venture with Volkswagen. Mr. Silberg has also advised Chrysler Corporation as part of its transaction with Fiat and now is working on the Peugeot/Fiat Chrysler transaction. He also has extensive knowledge and experience working with tier 1 automotive suppliers.
Arianna Simpson is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz where she invests in crypto. Prior to joining Andreessen Horowitz, Arianna founded Autonomous Partners, an investment fund focused on cryptocurrencies and digital assets. She also helped launch Crystal Towers Capital, an early-stage fund investing primarily in YC companies, in 2015. Arianna previously spent time working in sales and product roles at Facebook and BitGo, an enterprise security company for bitcoin and other digital currencies. Arianna earned dual degrees in International Politics and Spanish from the Schreyer Honors College at Penn State University. She grew up in Milan, Italy.
Michael Sindicich is the EVP and general manager of expense at Navan, an all-in-one travel and expense management solution.
Navrina Singh is the Founder and CEO of Credo AI, an AI governance platform that empowers organizations to deliver and embed artificial intelligence responsibly by proactively measuring, monitoring and managing AI risks. Before founding Credo AI, Navrina spent nearly two decades building products in mobile, SaaS and AI at companies like Microsoft and Qualcomm. She is a member of the U.S. Department of Commerce National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee (NAIAC), which advises the President and the National AI Initiative Office, is also a young global leader with the World Economic Forum and served as an executive board member of Mozilla, supporting its trustworthy AI charter. She lives in Palo Alto with her family.
Sukh leads the demonstration and independent evaluation of cutting-edge technologies, wether they are developed here in the US or abroad, and manages Innovation Challenges – opportunities for students to tackle technology gaps identified by first responders with mentorship from industry partners. He supports researchers and students take their first steps into entrepreneurship as they spin the results of their hard work into an innovations. Sukh is also a key member of the development team for FIRE Foundry, a revolutionary workforce development program built in collaboration with Marin County and Marin Fire Department, aimed at bringing underrepresented groups into fire service careers. Through FIRE Foundry and the UC Berkeley Disaster Lab, he has had the opportunity to work hand-in-hand with leadership from fire service, community organizations, and innovative leaders across the Department of Defense.
Melissa Smith
Co-Head Innovation Economy; Head of Specialized Industries, Commercial Banking, J.P. MorganMelissa Smith is the Co-Head of Innovation Economy (IE) and Head of Specialized Industries (SI) for the Middle Market Banking & Specialized Industries (MMBSI) business within J.P. Morgan Commercial Banking. She leads a team of national bankers with deep industry expertise who support startups, high-growth companies and venture capital firms in the Innovation Economy across Technology, Disruptive Commerce, Life Sciences, ClimateTech and Healthcare IT, as well as clients in specialized industries such as Healthcare Services, Not-For-Profit Healthcare, Higher Education, Agribusiness, Apparel, Beverage, Franchise, Media & Entertainment and Multinational Companies. Starting her career at the firm in 1998 in Public Finance, Melissa spent much of her career in the Corporate & Investment Bank (CIB), including as the Head of EMEA Investment Grade Finance in London. Prior to her move to London, she spent 14 years in the Debt Capital Markets group in New York as the Head of the Consumer, Retail, Healthcare and Chemicals team. Melissa is a member of the Commercial Banking Executive Committee and Operating Committee and helps lead Commercial Banking’s DE&I strategy. She serves as an advocate and mentor, and is passionate about elevating female and diverse talent within the firm. Melissa received a B.A. in Political Science from American University and a master’s degree in Public Policy from the University of Chicago. She is a Fellow of the Aspen Institute’s Finance Leaders Fellowship program and has served as a member of the American Ballet Theatre’s Board of Trustees since 2009.
Window Snyder is pioneer and longtime leader in the security industry. She is the founder and CEO of Thistle Technologies, a builder of security tools, libraries, and services for device developers. Previously Ms. Snyder was the CISO/CSO/CSSO at Intel, Fastly, Square, and Mozilla and also held security leadership roles at Apple and Microsoft.
Laura Spiekerman is the co-founder and chief revenue officer of Alloy, an identity-decisioning platform for banks and fintech companies.
As vice president of developer and performance technology at NVIDIA, John Spitzer directs the group which helps game developers make the most out of NVIDIA AI and graphics technology. Previously, he led development of NVIDIA’s gaming platform, GeForce Experience. John holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from Rice University, and has been at NVIDIA since 1999.
Loren is a General Partner at Bowery Capital, based in San Francisco. She focuses on supply chain, B2B marketplaces, and generally enterprise resource planning. Prior to joining Bowery Capital, Loren was at Goldman Sachs in the Investment Banking Division where she participated in a number of equity, debt and M&A transactions, predominantly in the enterprise software and internet sectors. Prior to Goldman Sachs, Loren worked at Groupon in the Corporate Finance Division where she built and led the initial Investor Relations department and subsequently ran Financial Planning & Analysis for the company’s 12 countries in APAC. Loren started her career at Activision Blizzard in the Investor Relations department. Loren has a B.S. in Communication from Boston University.
Prior to founding Redwood, JB Co-founded Tesla and spent fifteen years as Chief Technology Officer where he built one of the best engineering teams in the world and, among many topics, led cell design, supply chain and the first Gigafactory concept through the production ramp of the Model 3. JB had a direct role in both R&D, team building and operational expansion from prototype cars through to mass production and GWh-scale.
Aaron Stein is the Chief Content Officer at War on the Rocks
Erik Swain
Co-founder & CEO, RespondologyAn experienced digital media professional, Erik has more than 25 years of experience building digital media and ad tech companies, with three successful exits — spanning the early days of AOL to DataLogix to SpotX and now Respondology. As co-founder and CEO of Respondology, Erik is passionate about removing hate, abuse and spam from social media and making the online world a safer place, and in creating a collaborative environment for his team members. Outside of his work life, Erik enjoys playing and watching both US and European football, surfing, and spending time with his wife, children and dogs.
Amanda has built her career at the intersection of risk, compliance, and innovative financial service solutions. She brings with her over 20 years of experience as a bank examiner, consultant, BSA officer, and compliance officer. Prior to joining Unit, Amanda led a team of compliance and risk professionals at Sunrise Bank where she served as the Chief Risk Officer. During her time at Sunrise Bank, Amanda helped transform the organization into a highly regarded sponsor bank, serving clients like Remitly, Gusto, and Self Lender. Amanda is a regular speaker at fintech conferences, including LendIt and FINEXT.
Kevin Systrom is an American entrepreneur who co-founded Instagram, the photo and video sharing social networking platform. Born in Holliston, Massachusetts, Systrom graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Management Science and Engineering. He started his career as an intern at Odeo, which later became Twitter. He would then work on various consumer teams at Google and in quantitative marketing. In 2010, Systrom co-founded Instagram with Mike Krieger, and within a few years, the app had hundreds of millions users. Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, and Systrom continued to lead the company until 2018, when he resigned to pursue research for his next company. In January of this year, Systrom launched Artifact, a personalized news and content reading application driven by the latest advances in machine learning. He is passionate about the next chapter of social media being driven by artificial intelligence and has dedicated the last few years to building this company.
Parisa Tabriz is a technology leader and cybersecurity expert, currently responsible for engineering, product, and design of Google Chrome. Tabriz has worked on product development and information security at Google for over a decade, starting as a “hired hacker” software engineer for Google’s security team. Outside of Google, Parisa worked with the White House U.S. Digital Service to enhance security of government technology and consults with entertainment writers to help them understand the world of technology so they can create and depict more accurate, diverse stories.
Al Tadros
Chief Technology Officer, RedwireAl Tadros is the Chief Technology Officer of Redwire. In this role, he is focused on making strategic investments that support Redwire’s customers, advancing technology development and commercialization, and maintaining a nimble and collaborative technical culture. With nearly three decades of experience as an aerospace executive, Al is a thought leader in in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing with a proven track record in maturing satellite and space systems programs for exploration, national security, and commercial innovation. Previously, Al was Chief Growth Officer and Executive Vice President of Space Infrastructure at Redwire. In this role, he oversaw the company’s long-term growth strategy and business development activities, and was responsible for advancing development, increasing adoption, and building momentum for Redwire’s mission-enabling capabilities within the civil, defense, and commercial space sectors. Prior to Redwire, he served as Vice President of Space Infrastructure and Civil Space at Maxar Technologies, where he led significant innovation in next-generation spacecraft design and space infrastructure, integrating robotics and in-space satellite manufacturing, servicing, and assembly capabilities. Over the course of his career at Maxar, Al contributed to 13 missions and launch campaigns, many of which deployed cutting-edge communications and remote sensing systems. Al has worked with both commercial enterprises and government agencies to develop space systems for communications, satellite servicing, remote sensing, and exploration. An authority in in-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing, Al holds patents in the field of attitude control systems and was responsible for early telerobotics research for the International Space Station. He holds a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Everette Taylor is CEO of Kickstarter, the premier crowdfunding platform for bringing creative projects to life. Everette is a creative entrepreneur who is passionate about art, supporting creators, and making creativity accessible to all. He is deeply experienced in building and growing successful businesses as a founder, CEO, and chief marketing officer. Before joining Kickstarter, Everette most recently served as the CMO of Artsy, the world’s leading marketplace for buying and selling fine art. During his time at Artsy, he was recognized on The Forbes Entrepreneurial CMO List and named by Forbes as one of the World’s Most Influential CMOs. Previously, Everette founded ET Enterprises in 2013, overseeing a diverse portfolio of companies that includes ArtX and GrowthHackers and serving as CEO of MilliSense and PopSocial where he was recognized as Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2018. As a marketing executive, Everette has helped several companies reach new levels. He led on-demand rental car startup Skurt as CMO to a successful acquisition and led marketing at the business software company Qualaroo which also saw a successful exit. He also helped e-commerce company Sticker Mule see its largest growth as a company as their youngest CMO ever at 25 and oversaw growth strategy for new social products for a division of Microsoft China. Outside of the world of business, Everette also serves on the Chisenhale Council for Chisenhale Gallery, a nonprofit that supports artists in making innovative and highly ambitious work. Additionally, he sits on the advisory board for Art at a Time Like This, which works with artists and curators to create art that responds to current social and political events, and presents it in public spaces. In 2019, Everette received an honorary doctorate degree from Shaw University upon recognition of his “meritorious contributions to human society and welfare for humanity.”
Vlad Tenev is a Co-Founder of Robinhood and, since November 2020, has served as Chief Executive Officer and President of Robinhood. Tenev is also Chair of the board of directors. In 2013, Tenev co-founded Robinhood with Baiju Bhatt to democratize finance. From 2013 to November 2020, Tenev served alongside Bhatt as Co-CEO and Co-President. Prior to his role at Robinhood, Tenev started two finance companies in New York City. Tenev holds a degree in Mathematics from Stanford University and an M.S. in Mathematics from UCLA.
Delores Terry leads Business Development for Visa’s Inclusive Client Partnerships on the North American Digital partnerships team. In this capacity she is responsible for securing partnerships with minority lead/founded financial technology platforms. She and her team are dedicated to identifying and developing partnerships with mission driven fintech platforms that are dedicated to making a more equitable financial system. The team works to remove barriers in the payments ecosystem that minority founders often face such as funding and access to community. Prior to this position, Delores has held various roles within Visa including issuer sales, product, and business strategy and planning. Delores is a proud alumna of Howard University and now resides in the nation’s capital of Washington, D.C.
Sabrina Tharani
Senior Vice President, Global Fintech Programs, MastercardSabrina is a senior vice president of global fintech programs at Mastercard. She leads the award-winning global startup engagement program, Start Path, which works with select later-stage startups and helps them to scale, leveraging a customized combination of Mastercard’s technology, expertise and channels. These companies cover a diverse set of areas including payments, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, wearables, logistics and financial inclusion. Prior to Start Path, Sabrina worked in Mastercard’s digital payments organization, where she helped build and commercialize several new payment technologies such as Mastercard’s tokenization platform and Mastercard Send. Sabrina received a B.A. in Economics from the University of Michigan and an MBA from Cornell University with concentrations in technology and entrepreneurship. She has been a volunteer with The Resolution Project since 2014.
Laura Thomas is the Chief of Staff at global quantum technology and manufacturing company, Infleqtion. She is a key advisor to the CEO and is responsible for the alignment and execution of the company’s strategic priorities. Laura is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) case officer and Chief of Base who built and led sensitive programs at CIA Headquarters and abroad in multiple international assignments, to include high-risk and high-ambiguity environments. She has served over 18 years in national security and leadership roles, working extensively across industry, the U.S. intelligence community, National Security Council, U.S. Department of State, U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Congress, and with foreign partners. After leaving U.S. Government service in spring 2021, Laura began addressing university, industry, and other government audiences on leadership, national security, and emerging technology issues. This includes lectures at MIT, Harvard, Purdue, George Washington University, and various think tanks and U.S. Government seminars. Laura is a Visiting Fellow at the National Security Institute at George Mason University, an alumna of the Aspen Institute’s Aspen Tech Policy Hub, an advisor to the Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue, and an advocate for LGBTQ+ issues in both government and industry. She currently writes at https://www.lauraethomas.com.
Andrea Thomaz
CEO, Diligent RoboticsAndrea Thomaz is the CEO and Co-Founder of Diligent Robotics and a renowned social robotics expert. Her accolades include being recognized by the National Academy of Science as a Kavli Fellow, the US President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Tech, MIT Technology Review on its Next Generation of 35 Innovators Under 35 list, Popular Science on its Brilliant 10 list, TEDx as a featured keynote speaker on social robotics and Texas Monthly on its Most Powerful Texans of 2018 list. Andrea’s robots have been featured in the New York Times and on the covers of MIT Technology Review and Popular Science. Her passion for social robotics began during her work at the MIT Media Lab, where she focused on using AI to develop machines that address everyday human needs. Andrea co-founded Diligent Robotics to pursue her vision of creating socially intelligent robot assistants that collaborate with humans by doing their chores so humans can have more time for the work they care most about. She earned her Ph.D. from MIT and B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UT Austin.
Rachel Tobac
Friendly Hacker & CEO, SocialProof SecurityRachel is a hacker and the CEO of SocialProof Security where she helps people and companies keep their data safe by training and pentesting them on social engineering risks. Rachel was also 2nd place winner of DEF CON’s wild spectator sport, the Social Engineering Capture the Flag contest, 3 years in a row. Rachel has shared her real life social engineering stories with NPR, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, The New York Times, CNN, NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, and many more. In her remaining spare time, Rachel sits on the CISA Technical Advisory Council and is the Chair of the Board for the nonprofit Women in Security and Privacy (WISP) where she works to advance women to lead in the fields.
Atul Todi is the founder of 10Times, a growing startup in the business event & networking domain. 10Times aims to drive human collaboration and intelligence, by leveraging AI and power of events. Currently 10Times serves over 50 million professionals and 50,000 organizing companies on an annual basis. Hailing from Kolkata (India), Atul honed his skills in the US, where he pursued a Masters degree from Purdue University and immersed himself in the American business culture for a decade. He returned to India to embark on an entrepreneurial journey. Despite several setbacks, his unwavering resolve guided him toward creating 10Times. Atul’s vision for 10Times transcends conventional event management. In 2023, he spearheaded the launch of curated communities within the platform, aiming to nurture innovation, collaboration, and meaningful human connections. As a growing startup, 10Times is navigating its path towards driving global business collaboration under Atul’s leadership.
Stephen is the co-founder and CEO of Zellic, a blockchain security and auditing firm. Zellic secures over $3B+ of on-chain TVL for clients including LayerZero, Aptos Labs, Mysten Labs, and the Solana Foundation. Stephen was inspired to start Zellic after hearing countless reports of subpar audits from founders and builders. Before Zellic, Stephen hacked iPhones as a vulnerability researcher at Dataflow Security. He is an expert in low-level systems engineering and security. Separately, he also worked at the trading firm Two Sigma. His aim is to provide the best blockchain security services in the world to Web3 builders, investors, and users.
Top 100 Digital Shaper Swiss Bilanz, Web3 Technology Advocate, and Shaper. She initiated her Web3 exploration in 2015 by co-founding Giveth, the first donation-tracking platform on Ethereum. With a continued passion for purpose-driven projects, she co-founded Blockchain for Humanity, a foundation that supports projects applying cutting-edge Web3 tech to enable a positive impact. She has supported and worked closely with multiple projects in the web3 space, and most recently, she joined the Polygon Labs team, where she leads the zkEVM product. Executive MBA from EPFL, Business Management Specialist focusing on Market, Partnerships, and Product Development. Passionate about Purpose-Driven Brands and Community building. Grace lives in Switzerland and enjoys hiking.
Jorge Torres is CEO and co-founder of MindsDB, an open source AI layer for existing databases.
Dave Tremper
Deputy Assistant Secretary Defense, Aquisition Integration & Interoperability, Office of the Secretary of DefenseDave Tremper is currently serving as the DASD for Acquisition Integration and Interoperability (AI2), a position he has held since October 2022. In this position, he is responsible for deriving cross-service strategies for the development, acquisition and fielding of joint force system-of-systems capabilities in support of the Combatant Commanders’ joint operational needs. Dave was appointed to the Senior Executive Service (SES) in June 2020 as the Director for Electronic Warfare (EW) in OUSD (A&S). In this prior role, he was the U.S. Department of Defense’s senior leader providing guidance and advocacy for U.S. development and acquisition of EW capabilities and systems. Prior to coming to the Pentagon, Mr. Tremper served as a program manager at the Defense Applied Research Project Agency (DARPA) from 2017-2020 and at the Office of Naval Research (ONR) from 2008-2017. Within both organizations he created and managed applied research programs in the areas of Electronic Warfare, Counter-Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C-ISR) and Positioning, Navigation and Timekeeping (PNT) for both stand-alone and networked systems applications. He led the development and successful transition of new capabilities into ships, submarines, aircraft and ground vehicles for anti-ship missile defense (ASMD), C-ISR, suppression of enemy air defense (SEAD), counter-improvised explosive device (C-IED), and platform protection, including both manned and unmanned platforms.
Tomasz Tunguz is the Founder of Theory Ventures.
Colonel Wallace Turnbull
Deputy Director, Space Systems Integration Office, Space Systems CommandColonel Wallace “Rhet” Turnbull III is Deputy Director, Space Systems Integration Office, Space Systems Command, Los Angeles Air Force Base, California. The Space Systems Integration Office defines and manages an integrated, threat-based, system-of-systems space enterprise to deliver warfighting capabilities. Colonel Turnbull entered the Air Force in 1995 as a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy. He has led at the Materiel Leader and Senior Materiel Leader levels and has served in a variety of operations and acquisitions positions, including spacecraft engineer, program manager and chief engineer. Colonel Turnbull has deployed in support of Operation ENDURING FREEDOM as Ministerial Engagement Officer at International Security Assistance Force Afghanistan Joint Command, Kabul, Afghanistan. Colonel Turnbull has served in staff assignments at the Joint Functional Component Command for Global Strike and at Headquarters, U.S. Strategic Command. Prior to his current assignment, the colonel served as the Director, Cross-Mission Ground & Communications Enterprise, Los Angeles AFB, California. He transferred to the United States Space Force in 2021.
Dr. Uma Valeti is the CEO and Founder of UPSIDE Foods, the world’s leading cultivated meat company. UPSIDE Foods was the first company focused on growing meat directly from animal cells and has led the industry ever since. Since 2015, UPSIDE Foods has achieved numerous industry-defining milestones, including being the first company to produce multiple species of cultivated meat (beef, chicken and duck), to partner with the existing meat industry, and to receive the world’s first green light from the U.S. FDA for a cultivated meat, poultry, or seafood product. UPSIDE Foods has raised over $600 million from a diverse coalition of investors including Richard Branson, John Mackey, Bill Gates, Temasek, ADG, Softbank, Threshold, Baillie Gifford, Norwest, Cargill, Tyson Foods and Whole Foods. Uma’s vision is to enable people around the world to eat the meat they love, while transforming the food system to become more sustainable and humane. Uma has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Aspen Ideas Festival and SXSW. In 2019 he was named a “Global Thinker of the Decade” by Foreign Policy magazine. Uma is a Mayo Clinic-trained cardiologist and an adjunct professor in Cardiovascular Medicine at Stanford University.
Inara Valiyeva
Acting Chairperson of Innovation and Digital Development Agency, Innovation and Digital Development Agency of AzerbaijanInara Valiyeva serves as the Head of Innovation and Digital Development Agency for less than a year. She previously worked for local G-Cloud provider Azintelecom as Deputy Director, Ders Evi – local education provider as Deputy CEO and huge MNC – Procter & Gamble as Marketing Director. She is an exceptional business leader, coach, mentor, and is driving innovation ecosystem development and digital transformation of Azerbaijan by applying her expertise in organization building, change and people management. Her passion for capacity building and coaching has inspired countless professionals to achieve their full potential.
Monica Varman is a Partner at G2 Venture Partners, a venture and growth equity firm investing in transformative technology companies at their inflection points to build a sustainable future. She focuses in particular on companies digitizing and decarbonizing the power, agriculture, and retail sectors. Monica previously worked at Tesla, McKinsey, and Zola Electric, an off grid solar company in Tanzania and Rwanda. She has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA from Columbia University.
Mandy Vaughn
CEO and Founder, GXO, Inc.Mandy is one of the most innovative and influential leaders in the US space industry. She founded GXO in 2021 to drive innovation, unlock new opportunities, and address emerging threats by working across the space technology sector & the acquisition community to increase adoption of commercial space opportunities in national security missions. She is also the Operating Partner for Embedded Ventures, a cutting-edge VC firm supporting the same technical thesis. Prior to founding GXO, Mandy was an active duty officer in the US Air Force as an aerospace engineer and program manager in some of the most innovative and compelling space missions. She worked at General Dynamics Mission Systems and was the President of VOX Space (Virgin Orbit subsidiary) with a specific focus on the national security launch market. Mandy holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering and an MS in Aeronautics and Astronautics, both from MIT. She is a member of the National Space Council User’s Advisory Group and member of the Defense Science Board.
Emilia Vicini
HR & Talent Acquisition Lead, We Are KadreMy name is Emilia, and I’m an HR Analyst & IT Recruiter with a background in Clinical Psychology. I have over 8 years of experience in end-to-end recruitment processes. For the past 2 years, I’ve been leading Kadre’s talent acquisition efforts to help startups identify, attract, and hire top talent. Throughout my career, I’ve worked with software factories and IT companies, gaining insight into their needs and getting used to working in fast-growing environments. Collaborating with senior management roles and clients on their hiring requests has helped me anticipate upcoming needs, understand the importance of exchanging data-driven information and feedback, strategize pipelines, stay updated on the latest market trends, and track hiring metrics and blockers to design an action plan accordingly. I believe that building strong relationships with clients is key to helping them achieve their business goals. After conducting many HR interviews and getting to know the people behind roles and technologies, I strongly advocate for creating a positive candidate experience in each step of our recruiting process, from providing transparent information and feedback during the process to truly listening to each candidate’s career path intentions. I’m convinced that investing in a positive experience for both clients and candidates can build teams that will strive for success.
Kyle Vogt is the CEO, CTO, president, and co-founder of Cruise, which he has scaled to over 3,000 employees (and counting!) with heavy-hitting backers like GM, Honda, Microsoft, and Walmart. An engineer at heart, Kyle has more than a decade of experience designing and deploying large-scale distributed systems, infrastructure, and complex robots that serve hundreds of millions of users. Before Cruise, he co-founded Twitch, which Amazon acquired for over $1B.
Dmitry Volkov
Founder & CEO, Social Discovery GroupDmitry Volkov is a serial entrepreneur, investor, founder and CEO of Social Discovery Group — the 3rd largest social discovery company in the world. Dmitry’s life goal is to enhance human longevity, mental well-being, quality of life, and help people fight loneliness. He invests in and builds technology that redefines the way we interact and thrive in the 21st century. Dmitry has invested with more than 20 VCs, including Khosla Ventures and New Enterprise Associates. Under Dmitry’s leadership, Social Discovery Group has expanded to encompass over 40 brands with 250M users all over the world. The company continues to develop and invest in IT products focused on connecting people and designing Social Life 3.0. Dmitry has completed Executive Education programs at Harvard Business School and the University of California, Berkeley. He also has a Ph.D. in philosophy and is the author of two books on problems of consciousness and free will in analytical philosophy. Dmitry is a true digital nomad with European citizenship.
Vlad Voroninski is the co-founder and CEO of Helm.ai, a software company building the next generation of AI technology for autonomous driving. BEfore founding Helm.ai, Vlad’s proficiency in mathematics and research earned him a prestigious academic career. After receiving his B.S. and M.A. degrees at UCLA, Vlad earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics at UC Berkeley. Throughout his tenure in academia Vlad published over 20 research articles in applied mathematics/machine learning and received multiple awards for his research, including the SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize and the NeurIPS Oral Presentation (top 30 out of 5000 papers). His research interests in computer vision, phase retrieval and deep learning later secured Vlad a faculty position at MIT in the Math Department, where he served for three years. In 2014, Vlad got his first taste of technology ventures as the founding Chief Scientist at Sift Security, a machine learning cybersecurity startup later acquired by the software company Netskope. In 2016, Vlad co-founded and became the CEO of Helm.ai. Under Vlad’s stewardship, Helm.ai has seen numerous successes, including growing to over 70 employees, raising more than $80M in venture capital and leading the vanguard of scalable deep learning technology for autonomous driving and robotics. Helm.ai has since attracted the attention of the likes of Honda Motor Company and other global companies in the automotive space, as well as earned its place at the forefront of machine learning technology.
Job is the CEO and co-founder of Remote. Job previously worked as a neuroscientist before leaving academia to become the VP of Product at GitLab, the world’s largest all-remote company, where he hired talent in 67 different countries. Job is a sought-after presenter, speaking on topics related to scaling a remote-first startup, remote culture, and the future of work. Job has two kids and five hundred hobbies.
Amir is a recognized payment thought leader and serial entrepreneur. His entrepreneurial journey began when he founded Innovative Private Limited (Avanceon) in 1987. In 2001, he founded i2c to modernize financial technology. As CEO, Amir sets the strategic direction to realize his vision of a global, unified banking and payment platform that delivers unparalleled flexibility and agility while providing security and reliability.
Kyle Wallgren is a successful entrepreneur with a proven track record of building and selling multiple small businesses, having started 13 companies and sold 10 of them. He recently focused on Edsoma, which he founded after experiencing the challenges of Covid-related school closures and wanting to address the literacy issues faced by millions of Americans. With a mission to stamp out illiteracy around the world, Kyle is a visionary leader who is committed to making a positive impact through his work.
Matthew Walker
Managing Director, Food and Agriculture, S2G VenturesMatthew Walker is a Managing Director at S2G Ventures. He has over 10 years of experience in venture capital, investment banking and securities law. As Managing Director, Matthew’s efforts are focused on making investments, managing portfolio companies, and serving on various portfolio company boards. Before joining S2G Ventures, Matt was an investment banking Associate at Perella Weinberg Partners in New York focused on M&A and restructuring transactions across a range of industries. Prior to that role, he was a securities attorney in the Funds, Regulation, and Equity Derivatives practice at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, LLP in New York. Matthew has an MBA from The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, a J.D. from New York University School of Law, and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan. Matthew is a member of the Illinois Board of Trustees of The Nature Conservancy.
Casber Wang is a partner at Sapphire Ventures, where he focuses primarily on security, enterprise infrastructure, and data and analytics.
Richard Ward
Chief Design Officer, Otter.aiRichard Ward is the Chief Design Officer at Otter.ai, where he heads design for world’s leading tool for meeting transcription, summarization, and collaboration tool. Before Otter, Richard was the CEO of Meta Lab.
Faye Wattleton co-founded quantum computing company EeroQ in 2017 after a decades-long career as a non-profit CEO and a leader in multi-sector board governance and public policy. She leads EeroQ’s advocacy and engagement for multi-disciplinary consensus on ethical principles, standards, and practices for the quantum industry. Faye has served on over 30 corporate, academic, and foundation boards of directors, including Columbia University, Estée Lauder, and Empire Blue Cross & Blue Shield. She holds 14 honorary degrees and was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1993. Prior to EeroQ, she was a Managing Director at Alvarez & Marsal, and earlier served as the first African American, youngest, and longest tenured President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Libby is a business and technology leader with experience research, product development, entrepreneurship, corporate strategy, and venture capital. Libby served as the Global Director of Innovation for GE’s Ecomagination strategy, in which GE invested over $20B in clean innovation and generated over $300B in revenue. In this role, Libby led the development of physical and digital products, new business models, and global partnerships to address challenges in water, energy, and transportation. Libby also led strategy development for GE in the energy sector, and commercial development for the GE Ventures energy portfolio. Prior to GE, Libby served as the Director for the U.S. Department of Energy, Clean Energy Manufacturing Initiative, where she worked with the White House and across the Department to establish a portfolio of new advanced manufacturing research and Manufacturing Innovation Institutes. Earlier in her career, Libby developed solar energy technologies at SunPower and Alion Energy, and co-founded a company focused on energy and cold-chain infrastructure in Africa and India. Libby has served as an ex-officio member of the Secretary of Commerce Manufacturing Council, co-founded the MIT Energy Club, and serves on the founding board of the Boston Chapter of the Women’s Energy Network. Libby holds a BS & MS from MIT.
Dr. Brian Weeden is the Director of Program Planning for Secure World Foundation and has more than 20 years of professional experience in space operations and policy. Dr. Weeden directs strategic planning for future-year projects to meet the Foundation’s goals and objectives, and conducts research on space sustainability issues. He is a member and former Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Council on the Future of Space Technologies, a former member of the Advisory Committee on Commercial Remote Sensing (ACCRES) to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the former Executive Director of the Consortium for Execution of Rendezvous and Servicing Operations (CONFERS). Prior to joining SWF, Dr. Weeden served nine years on active duty as an officer in the United States Air Force working in space and intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) operations.
Yana is CEO and Founder of Kraftful – an AI assistant that helps product teams build better products by listening to users at scale. Before starting Kraftful, she led product teams at multiple tech companies and personally experienced the challenge of trying to involve millions of users in the product development process. At Kraftful, she built a team of Meta, Slack, and IFTTT alumni, backed by Y Combinator, Google, Samsung, and other exceptional investors and entrepreneurs. Yana is also a Stanford fellow and has been invited to give talks at the White House, the UN Internet Governance Forum, Yale, NYU, and many product events and podcasts over the years.
Erica Wenger is a serial entrepreneur with an exit under her belt and a passion to help founders doing it for the first time. Her angel investing track record, founding/operating experience, and community building experience (TEDx, national podcast) has sparked a differentiated access point amongst entrepreneurs looking for a true partner at the earliest stages. At Park Rangers Capital, we invest in pre-seed/seed stage software startups that turn their customers into members and their companies into communities or as we like to call them: elephant companies.
Wendy Tan White
CEO, IntrinsicWendy Tan White is the chief executive officer of Intrinsic, a robotics software and AI company at Alphabet. Intrinsic aims to unlock the creative and economic potential of industrial robotics for businesses, entrepreneurs and developers by making industrial robots easier to use and train. Intrinsic became an Alphabet “Other Bet” in July 2021. Prior to becoming CEO at Intrinsic, Wendy was a vice president at X, the moonshot factory, where she coached a variety of teams and leaders on how to chart their path to the moon, including sustainability projects Mineral and Tidal. Before joining X, she was a partner at BGF Ventures, a £2.5bn growth capital fund, and general partner at Entrepreneur First, a global technology talent investor in AI, robotics and biotech. Early in her career, Wendy was CEO and co-founder of Moonfruit, the world’s first Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) website builder platform. She also helped launch Zopa.com, the first European peer-to-peer lending site, and Egg.com, the UK’s first internet bank. Wendy holds a bachelor of engineering in computer science from Imperial College, a masters in material futures design from Central Saint Martins, and an honorary doctorate from Salford University. In 2016, Queen Elizabeth II awarded Wendy an MBE for her services to technology and business. Wendy currently lives in California with her husband and two children.
Meredith Whittaker is Signal’s President. She has over 17 years of experience in tech, spanning industry, academia, and government. Before joining Signal as President, she was the Minderoo Research Professor at NYU, and served as the Faculty Director of the AI Now Institute which she co-founded. Her research and scholarly work helped shape global AI policy and shift the public narrative on AI to better recognize the surveillance business practices and concentration of industrial resources that modern AI requires. Prior to NYU, she worked at Google for over a decade, where she led product and engineering teams, founded Google’s Open Research Group, and co-founded M-Lab, a globally distributed network measurement platform that now provides the world’s largest source of open data on internet performance. She also helped lead organizing at Google. She was one of the core organizers pushing back against the company’s insufficient response to concerns about AI and its harms, and was a central organizer of the Google Walkout. She has advised the White House, the FCC, the City of New York, the European Parliament, and many other governments and civil society organizations on privacy, security, artificial intelligence, internet policy, and measurement. And she recently completed a term as Senior Advisor on AI to the Chair at the US Federal Trade Commission.
Chris Wallace
Founder & General Partner, Dunbar CapitalChris Wallace is an early-stage operator & investor. He founded a global microfund (Pre-Seed/Seed) backed by leading VC funds (Bain Capital, Greycroft, Quiet Capital) and FinTech CEOs (Public, Alloy, Tagomi, Provide, and MANTL). He invests in FinTech, B2B Software, Vertical SaaS, Marketplaces, and Commerce Enablement across the US and EMEA. To date the fund has made 20 core investments including b2b infra (Caliza), fee-free smb payments (Hopscotch), ecomm payments infra (Kasheesh), and alternative investing (Poolit). Check sizes range from $50-100K. Chris previously spent 3.5 years at Greycroft ($2B AUM) focused on early-stage FinTech & Crypto (Seed/Series A) and worked in Product Strategy at Orum ($86mm raised), a B2B real-time money movement & payment orchestration API. He started his career in Product at Bank of America. He graduated from Columbia University (BA, Economics) and took an LOI from Harvard Business School to focus on entrepreneurial pursuits.
Peter Wegner
Chief Strategy Officer, BlackSkyDr. Peter Wegner is chief technology officer at BlackSky, where he implements BlackSky’s vision for technology across all aspects of the company’s capabilities and systems. He leads BlackSky’s efforts to develop a world-class multi-sensor geospatial intelligence engine. Peter oversees the company’s engagements with strategic stakeholders, ensuring customer needs are aligned with BlackSky’s business imperatives and investments. Prior to BlackSky, Peter was the director of advanced concepts at Utah State University’s Space Dynamics Laboratory, where he directed investments in new technologies. He also served as director of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Operationally Responsive Space Office at Kirtland Air Force Base, where he directed the creation of a national strategy to develop new and innovative techniques to design, build, test, and operate space systems. Peter also served as the technical advisor to the Air Force Space Command Directorate of Requirements and a research engineer with the Air Force Research Laboratory Space Vehicles Directorate, where he developed key innovations such as the ESPA ring. Peter holds a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Wyoming. He also holds a Master of Science Degree in Aerospace, Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering from Stanford University and a Bachelor of Science Degree in Aerospace, Aeronautical and Astronautical/Space Engineering from the University of Arizona.
Sam Wiener co-founded Techsetters podcast with Jenny Wang and Karlie Kloss with the aim of inspiring the next generation of leaders in tech. She was Head of Product Engineering at Saturn, a social calendar for high school, and prior to that, she led engineering for Reels at Instagram. She works with early stage startups and helps them scale and build their engineering teams.
Jillian Williams is a partner at Cowboy Ventures focused on investing in Seed stage founders with a specialized focus on fintech and vertical SaaS. Prior to joining Cowboy, Jillian was an investor at Anthemis, an early-stage fintech focused venture firm, focused across North America and Europe. She also serves as the head of BLCK VC NYC, the NY arm of BLCK VC. She received her BA from Yale.
Julie Willoughby
Chief Commercialization Officer, CircJulie pioneers innovation at Circ, driving the company toward partnerships with like-minded brands and strengthening Circ’s position as it develops a truly circular solution to fashion waste. Before joining Circ in November of 2019, Julie used her talents to help drive innovation at Nike Headquarters in Oregon. She began working with the apparel giant’s Explore team, where she was responsible for shaping major initiatives centered on transitioning groundbreaking material science into product, hiring scientists, and developing a state-of-the-art polymer synthesis laboratory. From there, Julie moved on to work in the Coatings Department for the Manufacturing Innovation team, helping map out the technology and business model for the brand’s footwear manufacturing, all while keeping an eye on sustainability. Prior to Nike, Julie led new barrier coating developments for a leading packaging company, MeadWestvaco (now WestRock). Julie has also been a faculty member at the prestigious Wilson College of Textiles at her alma mater, North Carolina State University. While there, she delved into fibrous materials that took her to Africa and beyond as a recipient of a Bill & Melinda Gates Grand Challenge Exploration’s award for a novel cellulosic material designed to protect crops from infestation (now in a commercialization phase in Kenya and Nigeria). Prior to her time at NC State, Julie cut her teeth as a young engineer scaling chemical technologies, running manufacturing operations, and commercializing products at Dow Corning Corporation.
Andrew Wilson
Quantum Physics Division Chief, National Institute of Standards & TechnologyDr. Wilson is the Chief of the Quantum Physics Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and is the technical lead of Quantum Information Science program, one of four critical emerging technology areas at NIST. The research program spans quantum computing, sensing, networking, enabling technologies, and fundamental science, and is a aligned with the U.S. National Quantum Initiative, a coordinated Federal program to accelerate quantum research and applications. Dr. Wilson engages in interagency activities that provide government support for the development of quantum technologies with transformative potential for the economy and quality of life. He is also the NIST Program Official for the Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C), working to enable and grow the U.S. quantum industry, and represents NIST on its Steering Committee. Dr. Wilson is based at JILA, the joint institute of NIST and the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the NIST research program at the institute. Before his leadership roles at NIST, Dr. Wilson was a research physicist at NIST, working on trapped-ion quantum computing and related technologies.
Melonee Wise is the CTO of Agility Robotics. Melonee has a deep history in developing autonomous robots and advancing the robotics industry as we know it today. Prior to joining Agility in 2023, Melonee was the Vice President of Robotics Automation at Zebra Technologies. She was CEO of Fetch Robotics until its acquisition by Zebra Technologies in 2021. Melonee was the second employee at Willow Garage where she led a team of engineers developing next-generation robot hardware and software, including ROS, the PR2, and TurtleBot. Melonee serves as the Chair of the IFR Service Robot Group, as a robotics board member for A3, and on the MHI Roundtable Advisory Committee. Melonee has received many accolades and awards including the MIT Technology Review TR35, Silicon Valley Business Journal’s Women of Influence and 40 Under 40, Supply & Demand Chain Executive’s 2021 Supply Chain Woman of the Year, the 2022 Engelberger award, and as one of eight CEOs changing the way we work by Business Insider. Melonee received a BS in Mechanical Engineering and Physics Engineering and a MS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois.
Sam Wong
Startup Coach & Fractional Founder, Fundable StartupsSam is CEO of FundableStartups.com, a startup training academy that also provides idea validation and pitch development services to help entrepreneurs build healthy, fundable companies BEFORE they start fundraising. Sam served as CEO, CTO, or technical VP for five startups, resulting in three acquisitions and has also advised two other startups that were acquired. Sam is the author of 21 Secrets of Successful Startups, a book about startup execution. Sam has been featured in Fortune Magazine, served as a pitch judge dozens of times, and has spoken at conferences including TechCrunch Disrupt, The Lean Startup Conference, The Houston Tech Rodeo, and San Diego Startup Week.
Monique Woodard is the founder and managing director of Cake Ventures.
Rocio Wu
Principal, F-Prime CapitalRocio Wu is a principal at F-Prime Capital. She focuses on early-stage investments in fintech and enterprise software investments in the U.S. and LatAm.
Ellie Wu
VP, Sales & Customer Success Center of Excellence, Insight PartnersEllie leads the post-sales advisory for growth-stage companies at Insight Partners where she evaluates, builds, and unlocks the potential of commercial teams. Her experience across hyper-growth SaaS and global scaleups where she drove innovative engage-ments to connect customer insights with market trends and business opportunities. Ellie’s built custom-er lifecycle frameworks (implementation, enablement), operationalized analytic capabilities (customer success, support), and launched customer loyalty programs that became key contributors to company value. Prior to joining Insight, Ellie led Customer Experience at a cybersecurity startup, SAP Concur and TEDxSeattle. She is also a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP), a graduate from Stan-ford Graduate School of Business’ LEAD program and serves on the Board of Advisors for Women in Cloud.
Hussein Yahfoufi is a seasoned technology executive and entrepreneur with a passion for revolutionizing personal finance. As the founder and former CEO of Money Minx, Hussein successfully bootstrapped the company, raising funds from angel investors and leading it to an acquisition by Arta Finance. He now serves as a Product Manager at Arta Finance, a digital family office, where he works on solutions to help more people access the financial superpowers of the ultra-wealthy across public and private investments. Before Arta Finance, Hussein was the CTO at eCapital, where he launched a mobile and web platform that expedited payments to truckers across America and Canada. Prior to that, he served as CTO at OneRoof Energy, where he developed one of the first online applications for designing and purchasing solar panels for residential homes. Hussein has been featured in TechCrunch multiple times for his work at Money Minx and previous endeavors. He is also the co-founder of GPT Hacks, a newsletter for tech-savvy professionals seeking to enhance their skills using ChatGPT and other Generative AI tools. Outside of his professional life, Hussein has recently discovered a love for tennis and enjoys sharing this passion with his family, (hopefully) turning them into a dedicated tennis clan.
Anatoly Yakovenko is the co-founder of Solana and CEO of Solana Labs. He has almost two decades of experience building high-performance operating systems, including leading OS development at Qualcomm and holding engineering roles at Dropbox and Mesosphere. Yakovenko has a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Rick joined NEA in 2007 and is the head of the firm’s consumer investing practice. His main focus is on fintech and consumer investments. Growing up as a nerdy gamer, he also has a particular interest in gaming and esports. Rick partners closely with founders, building a collaborative and trusted relationship at the earliest stages of a company. Some of his current investments include Bestow, Drop, Gen.G, Genies, MasterClass, Omio, Plaid, PlayVS, and Robinhood (NASDAQ:HOOD). Historically, he was involved with Braintree (acquired by PayPal), Gaikai (acquired by Sony), Opendoor (NASDAQ:OPEN), and Pure Energies (acquired by NRG). Rick also serves on the Board of Stanford Athletic Department’s investment fund and the Stanford Engineering Venture Fund. He is also an All Raise VC Champion and mentor for BLCK VC. Prior to joining NEA, Rick worked at Credit Suisse, where he advised on and executed a number of strategic financing initiatives for leading public and private tech companies as part of the Technology Group. Rick earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University, where he was also a varsity swimmer.
Sam Yen
Chief Innovation Officer for Commercial Banking, J.P. MorganSam Yen wanted to be an astronaut growing up. Although his first pair of glasses disqualified that possibility, he followed his passion and obtained aerospace degrees at Cornell and Stanford, before stints at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A lot has happened between then and now … Sam joined JP Morgan Chase & Co. in 2018 as Head of Digital Transformation for Commercial Real Estate, in Commercial Banking. In 2021 he expanded his responsibilities as the Head of Innovation for Commercial Banking. Elevated to Chief Innovation Officer in October 2022, Sam manages the process of innovation for the bank focused delivering delightful end to end digital experiences for clients. Prior to JPMC, Sam was the Managing Director for SAP Silicon Valley and was SAP’s first Chief Design Officer responsible for driving SAP’s Design and User Experience strategy and execution across the company. Sam holds a Ph.D. from Stanford’s Design program and continues to teach both at Stanford’s Institute for Design (the “d.school”) and Graduate School of Business as a Consulting Associate Professor on topics of creative cultures in organizations.
Rujul is the cofounder & CEO of Zip, the world’s leading Intake-to-Procure solution. Zip has raised $181M in financing, most recently at a $1.5B valuation. Previously, he led the search product and platform teams at Airbnb.
Celeste Ford
Managing Director, Stella Ventures
Askar Zhambakin
Deputy Minister, Digital Development, Innovation and Aerospace Industry of the Republic of KazakhstanMr. Zhambakin was appointed as Vice Minister of Digital Development, Innovations and Aerospace Industry of the Republic of Kazakhstan in 2020. His responsibilities are digital development strategy; Government Digital Transformation; Data Management. Previously he has worked as an adviser to the Deputy Prime Minister of Kazakhstan and worked in different roles and companies in Tech Industry. He holds Management and Information Systems MSc from the University of Manchester.
Xi Zeng is the Creative Director for Product at OnePlus, where he leads the creative direction and development of OnePlus products. With extensive experience in product design and a deep understanding of users, Dr. Zeng has led the development of OnePlus’s burdenless product design philosophy. Dr. Zeng previously served as the head of software UX design and product innovation at OnePlus, where he was responsible for developing the critically acclaimed OxygenOS. He also led the product design of the OnePlus Concept One and several other co-branded products. In addition to his work at OnePlus, Dr. Zeng has also been serving as the Director of Software Product at OPPO since 2021, where he is leading the design and planning of OPPO’s proprietary operating system, ColorOS. Dr. Zeng holds a PhD in Art from the University of Barcelona and is a guest professor at the European Design Institute and China Academy of Art. He has also been an active visiting scholar at the Royal Academy of Arts.
Henry Scott-Green is co-founder and CEO of Context.ai, the evaluation and analytics platform for LLM applications.
Michelle Zatlyn is co-founder, President, and COO of Cloudflare, the Internet security, performance, and reliability company on a mission to help build a better Internet. Cloudflare is a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: NET). Prior to co-founding Cloudflare, Michelle held positions at Google and Toshiba and launched two successful startups. Michelle currently serves on the board of directors for Atlassian and the World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders Foundation. Michelle has been named to Fortune’s 40 Under 40 list and was part of Marie Claire’s 7th Annual New Guard. She holds a B.S. degree, with distinction, from McGill University, and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where she was awarded the Dubilier Prize for Entrepreneurship.
Luciana Leuci Garcia
Trainer | Mentor | HR Project Manager & Scrum Master., JOBPONTHi, I’m Luciana, an HR trainer, Mentor, and Scrum Master with over 15 years of experience & specializing in the IT industry. For the past 11 years, I’ve been part of the HR development at ITX Corp, a remote company with a start-up heart that focuses on creating a people-oriented workplace with a strong culture and innovative environment. During my time at ITX Corp, I have contributed to expanding the team across 16 countries while ensuring that our company culture remains consistent across all locations. Currently, I’m focused on team development and managing HR projects to implement new initiatives. As the founder of JOBPONT, my goal is to train and develop strategic HR leaders who can help organizations create great places to work and generate value for both employees and businesses. I’m passionate about fostering healthy work environments that prioritize work/life balance for team members and positively contribute to society. With my extensive experience and expertise, I’m thrilled to help create the organizations we all aspire to be part of.
Tarin Ziyaee
Neural Interfaces Research Manager, Facebook Reality LabsTarin is a technologist and entrepreneur w/ 20+ years of experience in deep-tech applied R&D. Previously, Tarin led and developed autonomous vehicle (AV) technology for Apple, US Army Research Labs, and as CTO of Voyage (acquired by Cruise). Tarin’s previous DoD work included RADAR / SONAR simulation, imaging, and perception algorithms, along with jamming / anti-jamming adaptive systems for US Army and Naval Underwater Warfare Center (NUWC). Concurrently as CEO of Neurosys, he worked on developing neural spike-sorting algorithms for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to better understand the biological basis of the brain’s encoding of visual information. More recently, Tarin led the research engineering team at Meta’s Reality Labs designing neural interfaces, and was previously Director R&D at CTRL-Labs (acquired by Meta) where he and his team developed biophysics constrained neural interface decoding algorithms and systems. Tarin holds a BSEE from George Mason University (2004) and an MSEE from George Washington University (2007).
Eugenio Zuccarelli
Data Science Manager, CVS HealthEugenio is an AI Leader working at CVS Health, a Fortune 500 company and the #1 healthcare company in the world. He is a Forbes Under 30, TEDx Speaker, WEF Global Shaper, and studied across MIT, Harvard, and Imperial College. Eugenio’s analyses helped develop policy recommendations for The White House, CEOs and leading research institutions to take action in key situations, such as the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. He is a regular contributor for several news outlets including HBR, Forbes, and Fortune as well as multiple journals, and is a Keynote Speaker and Guest Lecturer. Eugenio is the recipient of 15+ honors and awards, including the John McCarthy Award for contributions to AI, Nova Talent of the Year, and the ISPI / BCG Future Leaders Award. Featured in Forbes, Fortune, HBR, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, The Financial Times as well as several TV programs, radio shows, and podcasts.
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