Behind Company Lines: Recent Episodes
Mike Townsend
Behind Company Lines is a podcast that explores the stories that go on behind the scenes at some of the most exciting tech startups. We explore origin stories of startups, how founders built their teams, and what's new in the hyper connected world of remote companies. If you're running or thinking of starting a startup, this is the podcast for you. We give you a feel for what it's really like so you can learn and someday be on the show!
Navigating the intricate world of hedge funds is akin to maneuvering through a maze of complexities, as Kevin Fu, CEO of Repool, illustrates in this episode of Behind Company Lines. Fu shares his journey from an unexpected entry into the hedge fund domain to becoming a startup founder, emphasizing the value of early-stage company involvement. He discusses Repool's mission to streamline hedge fund operations, tackling challenges within the traditionally conservative industry. Fu's insights underscore the necessity of perseverance and a clear vision for startup success. From lowering tech barriers to adapting to regulatory changes, this conversation offers a glimpse into the realities and strategies of innovating within specialized fields.
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In a world focused on saving the Earth, hydrogen fuel emerges as a vital solution. Join us as we explore its potential with Gary Ong, CEO of Celadyne Technologies.
In this episode of Behind Company Lines, host Julian Torres talks to Gary Ong, the CEO driving hydrogen innovation at Celadyne Technologies. They discuss the crucial role of science in green technology, emphasizing the need for creativity and rigorous methodology. Gary shares Celadyne's mission to make hydrogen fuel efficient and viable, along with insights on team trust, customer needs, and the ethical imperative to combat climate change.
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Richard White's Distribution-first mindset to company building serves as the backbone of his entrepreneurial journey, a philosophy that Julian Torres explores in a captivating episode with the visionary Founder and CEO of Fathom. From his early days of selling drawings in school to his current venture with Fathom, White's evolution is marked by a relentless pursuit of innovation. In their conversation, White emphasizes the importance of hypothesis testing and feedback aggregation, drawing parallels between gaming and business, while also revealing his inclinations, such as a love for remote work and a deep passion for sci-fi and gaming.
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In the bustling world of online information, finding the good stuff is like hunting for treasure. Behind Company Lines ventures into the heart of innovative solutions with host Julian Torres.
In this episode, Julian interviews Alex Fink, the CEO of Otherweb, Inc. Fink discusses his journey from being an engineer to becoming a founder and CEO. He highlights the challenges of transitioning from a world of positive feedback as an engineer to one where negative feedback is more common as a founder. Fink also shares insights into the founding of Otherweb and its mission to improve information consumption by filtering out low-quality content using artificial intelligence. Additionally, he touches on the evolution of the company's business model and the importance of being intentional about what one consumes.
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In this episode of Behind Company Lines, Julian engages in a comprehensive conversation with his guest, Sean Cann, the co-founder and CEO of Onespot. He shares insights on why mobile apps captivate his attention, their market development, and how they're used to strengthen customer relationship. Discussing his journey from being a software engineer to founding Onespot, Sean underscores the importance of mobile apps, especially for businesses and organizations aiming for enhanced engagement with their members or customers. The conversation diverges to explore his interest in virtual reality and the potential of 'no-code' platforms in simplifying app creation. Sean envisages a future where app creation becomes so easy that it ceases to impress. Towards the end of the conversation, he talks about the challenges he faces, especially around prioritization and defying the monopoly of Apple and Google.
Listen now!
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In this episode of Behind Company Lines, Julian Torres dives into the realm of Family Tech (Fam Tech) with our guest Zoya Lehrer, the Co-Founder and CEO of Orgo. Zoya shares her journey from the corporate world into the entrepreneurial space, her inspiration for creating Orgo, and the challenges she faces as a female founder. She also discusses the rising trends in Fam Tech and Orgo's integration of AI in maintaining family logistics. Stay tuned till the end to hear her anecdotes about balancing entrepreneurship and parenting.
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Join host Julian Torres as he sits down with Avante Price, the CEO of POSH, for an insightful conversation on entrepreneurship, event management, and the journey from nightlife to niche communities. Avante shares valuable insights into building a startup, overcoming challenges, from navigating NFT failures to envisioning billion-dollar dreams, and the importance of staying true to your vision.
Don't miss out on this inspiring discussion – listen now!
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In this riveting podcast episode of Behind Company Lines, Julian Torres chats with Christopher Gray, Founder & CEO of Scholly. In 2023, Scholly was acquired by leading education and student solutions company, Sallie Mae (NASDAQ: SLM). They deep dive into Christopher's journey from college to a successful acquisition, discussing his experiences along the way including his Shark Tank journey, the evolution of education, and the future of Scholly. Christopher shares his insights about the landscape of entrepreneurship, particularly for people of color, and discusses the changes he'd like to see. He also throws light on his future plans involving angel investing and the AI space.
Don't miss this candid conversation with a seasoned entrepreneur who has navigated the complexities of the business world.
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Episode 307: Karthik Rranganathan, CTO & Founder of Yugabyte
Join us on this exciting episode of Behind Company Lines as Julian Torres sits down with Karthik Ranganathan, the visionary CTO and Co-Founder of Yugabyte. This remarkable conversation takes you on a journey from Karthik's foundational role in building distributed databases at Facebook to the impressive rise of Yugabyte, now a unicorn company with over $1 billion in valuation. Yugabyte is on its series C and to date has raised $291M in funding. Its last round was a big one -- $188M.
Discover the secrets of startup value discovery, hear about bold moves by tech titans, and gain insights into Facebook's innovative culture. Karthik shares invaluable lessons on scaling success and navigating challenges, all while revealing the dynamic world of data scaling and showcasing innovative use cases for Yugabyte. Don't miss this episode filled with candid discussions about the founder's day-to-day challenges, the power of open-source, and the influential books and people that shaped Karthik's incredible journey. Tune in to uncover the hidden gems behind the tech industry's curtain, and get inspired by the stories and strategies that drive success in today's dynamic landscape.
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Episode 306: Rakesh Yadav, CEO & Founder of Aidaptive
Welcome to another captivating episode of Behind Company Lines! Join host Julian Torres as he delves into the world of cutting-edge technology with the remarkable Rakesh Yadav, the CEO and founder of Aidaptive.
In this engaging conversation, Rakesh Yadav takes us on a journey through his impressive career, including his 14-year tenure at Google, where he led groundbreaking machine learning platforms. Get ready to discover the driving force behind Aidaptive, a company on a mission to democratize access to machine learning for enterprises worldwide. From insights into the ever-evolving landscape of AI to the future of e-commerce and hospitality industries, Rakesh covers it all. If you're eager to glimpse into the AI future and gain invaluable industry insights, hit play and tune in now!
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Episode 305: Hiram Vazquez, CEO & Founder of LALA
In this captivating episode of Behind Company Lines, we sit down with the visionary CEO and Founder of LALA, Hiram Vasquez. LALA has taken the entertainment industry by storm with its digital collectible marketplace, empowering fans to own a piece of their beloved movies and TV shows like never before. Join host Julian Torres as he delves deep into Hiram's early career experiences, the inspiring journey that led to the creation of LALA, and how this revolutionary platform is reshaping the fan experience.
Prepare to be enthralled as Hiram shares exclusive insights into the entertainment industry's inner workings, and how LALA's unique approach is changing the game for both fans and creators. If you're passionate about movies, TV shows, or simply intrigued by groundbreaking innovations, this episode is a must-watch. Get ready to explore the world of LALA, where storytelling and fandom converge in an entirely new and thrilling way. Don't miss out on this opportunity to be part of the future of entertainment!
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Episode 304: Jon Keidan, Founder & Managing Partner of Torch Capital
Join host Julian Torres in this exciting episode of Behind Company Lines as he sits down with Jon Keidan, the founder and managing partner of Torch Capital. Torch Capital, an early stage venture fund, is at the forefront of understanding how technology is revolutionizing consumer behavior and investing in mission-driven consumer technology companies. In this candid conversation, Jon takes us on his incredible journey from the music business to McKinsey, the startup world, and eventually finding his calling in venture.
Discover the fascinating parallels between managing talent in the music industry and partnering with founders as a venture capitalist. Jon shares invaluable insights on how artists build their audience and reveals how founders can apply these principles to cultivate their own customer and consumer base. Don't miss out on this episode filled with eye-opening revelations and expert advice. Tune in now to gain a unique perspective on the ever-evolving world of technology and venture!
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Episode 303: Katie Butler, Co-Founder of Distractive
Join Julian Torres in this captivating episode of Behind Company Lines as he delves into the world of Distractive with special guest Katie Butler, the co-founder of this groundbreaking marketing team. Discover the unconventional structure of their company and its fascinating relationship with Moonbeam, a smart contract platform revolutionizing decentralized applications across blockchains. Katie shares her valuable insights on building trust, offering value, and navigating the challenges of marketing in an era of digital misdirection. Uncover the secrets behind their success and explore the emerging crypto channels that are transforming the marketing landscape. Don't miss out on this enlightening conversation that will expand your understanding of marketing in the Web 3.0 era. Click now to listen to the full episode and gain exclusive access to the wisdom of Katie Butler and the Distractive team.
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Episode 302: Jonathan Rackoff, VP & Head of Global Policy, The HBAR Foundation
Join host Julian Torres in this captivating episode of Behind Company Lines as he sits down with Jonathan Rackoff, VP & Head of Global Policy at The HBAR Foundation. Together, they delve into the world of blockchain technology and its role in creating a sustainable network. They explore the fascinating concept of utilizing blockchain for carbon credits and discuss the latest innovations in the carbon market. The episode also sheds light on the crucial question of who audits the carbon credits, ensuring their integrity. Additionally, Rackoff highlights the profound impact that Hedera is making by spearheading the development of sustainable markets. Don't miss this insightful conversation that uncovers the challenges of Rackoff's job, his alternative career choices, and the books and individuals that have influenced him the most. Tune in now to discover where you can find Rackoff and stay connected with the cutting-edge work of The HBAR Foundation.
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Episode 301: Danny Morrow, Co-Founder & CTO of Extend
In this episode of Behind Company Lines, host Julian Torres sits down with Danny Morrow, Co-Founder & CTO of Extend, to delve into the fascinating world of transforming the B2B landscape with consumer-focused design principles. Danny shares insights on how Extend brings the best of consumer experience into their B2B products, highlighting the significance of user-centric design and the extraction of valuable insights from user experiences. The conversation unfolds with a focus on the evolution of virtual cards, from their initial use in travel expenses to solving tail spending challenges. Along the way, Danny offers perspectives on navigating growth challenges, the long-term vision of the company, and the importance of hiring good talent. With a candid and engaging discussion, this episode of "Behind Company Lines" invites listeners to gain valuable knowledge and inspiration from the success story of Extend and its innovative approach to streamlining spend and empowering businesses.
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Episode 300: Kurt Donnell, President and CEO of Freestar
Join Julian Torres in this gripping episode of Behind Company Lines as he sits down with Kurt Donnell, the President and CEO of Freestar. As the CEO of Freestar, an industry leader in maximizing ad revenue for publishers, e-commerce sites, and app developers, Kurt holds a wealth of knowledge and experience. In this revealing interview, Kurt sheds light on his extraordinary transition from a lawyer to a business guy. Prepare to be captivated as he unravels the secrets behind being a hired gun CEO and shares invaluable insights on building a thriving corporate culture that defines a company.
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Episode 299: Jonathan Padilla, CEO & Co-founder of Snickerdoodle Labs
Welcome to another exciting episode of Behind Company Lines! In this episode, our host Julian Torres sits down with Jonathan Padilla, CEO and co-founder of Snickerdoodle Labs, a pioneering data company bridging the gap between Web2 and Web3. Get ready to embark on a journey of transformation and empowerment as Jonathan shares his rabbit hole experience into the world of Web3, emerging from a career in government. Brace yourself for a mind-blowing discussion about the future of data ownership, where individuals reclaim their role as the chief source of data, challenging the dominance of giants like Google and Facebook.
Join us as we delve into the possibilities unleashed by Web3, where the power dynamics of data ownership are forever altered. Discover how Snickerdoodle Labs is spearheading this revolution, empowering individuals like you to take control of their own data destiny. Don't miss out on this eye-opening conversation that will leave you with a fresh perspective on the potential of Web3 and how it can shape a more equitable and decentralized future. Click play now and join us on this remarkable journey!
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Episode 298: Brandy Burch, CEO at benefitbay
In this episode of Behind Company Lines, host Julian Torres dives deep into the groundbreaking concept of ICHRA (Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangements) with special guest Brandy Burch, CEO at benefitbay. Discover how companies are breaking free from the limitations of traditional healthcare plans and empowering their employees with the ability to choose their own healthcare coverage. Get ready for a paradigm shift in employee benefits that promises increased satisfaction, savings, and control over healthcare decisions.
If you're tired of cookie-cutter healthcare solutions and crave personalized options, this episode is a must-watch. Don't miss out on the opportunity to revolutionize your healthcare experience. Click now and embrace the future of employee benefits!"
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Episode 297: Mark Long, CEO of Shrapnel
Join host Julian Torres as he sits down with Mark Long, CEO of Shrapnel, in this exciting episode of Behind Company Lines. Discover the captivating journey of Shrapnel, from its humble beginnings to its position as a trailblazer in the gaming industry. Mark shares insights on gaming's transformation from a lone wolf experience to a cinematic revolution, highlighting the importance of diversity and exhilaration for the evolving gamer.
Get inspired by the company's commitment to expansive creativity and learn about the challenges they face in the ever-changing landscape of game development. Dive into the virtual gaming future and uncover the books and people that have influenced Mark's remarkable journey. Don't miss out on this engaging conversation that delves into the authentic pursuit of happiness and the exciting vision for the future.
Visit shrapnel.com to learn more about this groundbreaking company.
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Episode 296: Jack O'Holleran, CEO of SKALE Labs
In this mind-blowing episode of "Behind Company Lines," host Julian Torres delves into the innovative world of blockchain technology with special guest Jack O'Holleran, CEO of SKALE Labs. Prepare to have your understanding of gas fees shattered as they unveil a groundbreaking solution that revolutionizes transaction costs forever!
They discuss the challenges they faced, the engineering marvels they created, and the paradigm-shifting ideas that led to a new era in the blockchain. Discover how they tackled the problem of gas fees by allowing application developers and companies to pay in advance, relieving end users of this burden. Don't miss this episode filled with eye-opening insights and the secrets behind a gas-free future!
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Episode 295: Keith O'Briant, CEO of Hydrinity
Get ready for an extraordinary episode of Behind Company Lines, hosted by Julian Torres. In this captivating interview, Julian sits down with Keith O'Briant, the visionary CEO of Hydrinity, a revolutionary skincare brand. Brace yourself for a fascinating discussion as Keith shares his remarkable journey and unveils the groundbreaking regenerative skin science behind Hydrinity. Discover the secrets behind their exceptional products that have transformed the lives of countless individuals worldwide.
Keith and Julian dive deep into the innovative advancements that have propelled Hydrinity to the forefront of the skincare industry. Prepare to be amazed as they discuss the company's origins, its cutting-edge research, and its unwavering commitment to making your skin healthy.
Don't wait any longer – click now and join us for an enlightening conversation that will revolutionize your skincare routine.
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Welcome to Behind Company Lines!
Get ready to dive into the captivating world of Per Diem, the revolutionary white-label mobile app solutions transforming the restaurant industry. In this episode of Behind Company Lines, host Julian Torres interviews Tomer Molovinsky, the CEO and co-founder of Per Diem. Discover how Per Diem evolved from Tomer's previous experiences at OpenTable and Resy, and how they seized the opportunity to create a Starbucks app-like service.
Explore the incredible traction Per Diem has gained, with over a hundred stores, including renowned establishments like Chip City in New York. Gain insights into the risks they face in today's ever-changing world and learn about their ambitious long-term vision. Don't miss this enlightening conversation that will challenge your perspective on the future of the restaurant industry.
Tune in now to unlock the secrets behind Per Diem's success!
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Welcome to Behind Company Lines!
Get ready for a jaw-dropping episode of Behind Company Lines as Julian Torres sits down with Antti Nivala, the visionary founder and CEO of M-Files, the groundbreaking metadata-driven document management platform. In this captivating interview, Antti reveals his incredible journey from zero to a hundred million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) as a SaaS business. Discover the challenges he faced, the lessons he learned, and the secrets behind M-Files' skyrocketing success.
Don't miss out on this exclusive interview with Antti Nivala, the man who turned M-Files into a game-changing industry leader.
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Chai Nadig has a bias for action and is skilled at building tangible tech for good products. His expertise in software and logistics, and keenness for social impact make him the perfect candidate to found a company such as LiquiDonate. LiquiDonate is a sustainable social impact solution for retailers and businesses to donate unsellable goods to nonprofits.
Diz Petit is the Founder and CEO of LiquiDonate, a sustainable social impact solution for businesses and nonprofits. She received her BA in Organizational Communication and her MBA in Sustainable Social Impact.
LiquiDonate combines Diz's years of experience working with tech companies to implement social impact programs that leverage their existing business model and evolving technologies with her love for the work and people of nonprofits. With an ambitious mission, Diz set out to reduce landfill waste and enable circularity by connecting retailers’ excess, unsold, and returned inventory to nonprofits via seamless technology with the founding of LiquiDonate.
Prior to founding LiquiDonate, Diz was employee 15 at Postmates, spoke at the UN on Food Security, and won the Time Magazine Invention of the Year award for one of the social impact products she helped build.
Lee Blaylock is the co-founder of ConstructionBevy, GolfBevy, and Annandale Capital.
Starting his career at Dell (badge #244) for 7 years mostly in R&D, Lee was their 2nd ex-pat and worked two years in London and Frankfurt. He then went to Oracle, where he left as a consulting group Practice Director.
The first company he started, ServiceLane, was venture backed and sold to NYSE:OC. He is the co-founder and former Managing Director of Annandale Capital, a Financial Times 300 Registered Investment Advisor managing $1.2b in institutional and private client assets.
He is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, was named by D Magazine as a Top 20 Entrepreneur, has been the volunteer Dallas Chapter Director for StartUp Grind since 2012 and serves on several civic boards, mostly focused on helping entrepreneurs.
After starting out as a CPA at Deloitte, Brett Turner worked in a financial reporting & GAAP specialist in Controller roles prior to his time at Amazon managing SEC reporting. After leaving Amazon, Brett developed a strong track record for building, financing, and growing tech startups as a CFO. Prior to starting Trovata in 2016, he raised over $100M through equity and debt financings with successful exits at 3 enterprise startups generating over $500M in shareholder value.
A serial entrepreneur, Mike Jacobs excels at inventing new technologies for the restaurant sector. Through founding Tap.in2, Ordermark, Nextbite, and Team Kitchens he honed his expertise in combining high-tech with experiential marketing for food, sports, and entertainment brands to create new business modalities. He brings to KDS a commitment to innovation and fostering a positive company culture, accompanied by skills in product development and marketing. Mike enjoys getting in the trenches, particularly digging into KDS’ underlying data science. Indeed, his background with the FBI gives him a unique vantage point on data-driven tech: as a counterintelligence analyst, he was responsible for a task force that worked with the U.S. DoD & Intelligence Community. For this service, he was nominated for the Director of National Intelligence’s National Counterintelligence Award. Mike is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley.
Meade Lewis is an Eagle Scout with a passion for the environment and a hardware and sensor expert. As the CEO of mIQroTech, he leads the team in predicting oil and gas pipeline leaks before they occur. With a background as the Chief Information Technology Officer (CITO) of multiple successful oil and gas firms, as well as experience in "Big Data" analytics, Meade also knows the value of intelligence gathering and the capabilities of massive analytic platforms on that data. Over $30 Billion worth of products is lost due to oil and gas pipeline leaks. With those, irreparable damage is done to the environment. What they are accomplishing at mIQrotech isn't just saving their customers these billions of lost dollars, they are helping protect the environment and changing the world.
Learn more about his work using the links below:
www.mIQroTech.com
www.miqroaware.com
www.miqt.com
Here is a link to his TEDx Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/meade_lewis_teaching_old_industries_new_tricks
Ravi Parikh is a 2x founder with over a decade of experience building and scaling B2B SaaS startups from the ground up. Ravi is currently the Co-Founder and CEO of Airplane, the developer platform for building internal tools. Prior to co-founding Airplane, Ravi co-founded Heap, a digital insights platform, in 2013 with a former classmate from Stanford. During his time at Heap, he led go-to-market efforts and helped scale the company to a $960M valuation and 350 employees. Before building Heap, Ravi started his career as a musician with several published tracks.
Mike Molinet is the co-founder of Branch, the mobile linking and measurement platform powering 100,000 of the world's top apps, including Spotify, Uber, Robinhood, Strava, Adobe, and more. Last valued at $4 Billion, Mike helped grow the business from an idea in early 2014 to over $100M in annual recurring revenue as COO and President. Success came only after failing with six previous startups between his 2007 graduation and 2014. Mike is also co-founder of a Seed-stage company, Thena (thena.ai), that helping modernize business communication over messaging platforms.
Chat Joglekar is an experienced executive and the CEO and co-founder of Baton, a data-enabled marketplace that empowers small business acquisitions. Baton's innovative platform allows owners to unlock liquidity in their most valuable asset, while also providing serious buyers access to a vast but fragmented asset class. Baton's goal is to become the go-to platform for SMB acquisitions, much like Zillow is for real estate.
Prior to founding Baton, Chat served as an executive at Zillow for over five years. During his tenure, he launched and grew the company's New Construction marketplace, generating over $100 million in revenue. He has also played instrumental roles in scaling iconic companies such as Spotify and Google from their earliest stages and has held leadership positions at various early-stage startups.
With the support of investors such as Bloomberg Beta, Giant Ventures, and others, Baton is excited about the potential to create the next great asset class while also supporting small businesses, which are the backbone of our economy. Baton is committed to continuing its mission to enable small business acquisitions and provide a platform for growth and success for all its users. Chat currently resides in New York City with his wife and three children.
Nicolas Mendiharat is a repeat founder and CEO with 25 years of experience building tech-enabled startups. He specializes in early-stage consumer markets and marketplaces.
After launching the online travel venture Skihorizon.com, which achieved $100m in revenues and 300k customers, he decided to focus on one of his passions: wine. He has been since revolutionizing the industry with 2 ventures—Palate Club & WineChain.
WineChain is a wine NFT marketplace where the world's most coveted wineries use blockchain technology to sell their wines directly to wine lovers worldwide.
Palate Club is focused on the premium segment, creating a much better consumer experience that uses AI and data science to match wines to your personal taste via blind tasting.
As a French-German citizen, Nicolas launched his career in Europe. Since 2015, he now splits his time with the United States, where his ventures are based. Nicolas likes radical new ideas, fast movement, innovative mindsets, and above all, gathering the best talents to build a new project.
Tushar Makhija has over 10 years of experience spanning revenue & growth leadership, product, and customer success. He was the founding Sales leader at two SaaS companies, Helpshift and Airbase, and helped them grow ARR to eight figures, respectively. In 2021, he co-founded TeamOhana with a vision to empower growing companies to unify around their most important and expensive asset: people. TeamOhana brings collaboration, visibility, and control of headcount to all key stakeholders in a single integrated platform, ensuring that you build a team in the best way possible: as a team.
Troy Bannister is the Founder of Particle Health, shaping the new standard for healthcare data exchange with a user-friendly API platform. After spending 15 years in healthcare in multiple capacities — as an EMT, medical student, clinical researcher, and early-stage investor — Troy found a disturbing gap in patient rights & paper processes the digital solutions could fill. Troy is incredibly optimistic about the future, particularly as it relates to legislation and emerging data standards.
Past experience: Mount Sinai Health System, StartUp Health, IEEE, and a graduate of Georgetown University.
Vasily Nikonov is the Founder of Velvet.Capital - a DeFi Asset Management protocol that helps people & institutions create diversified financial products on-chain: tokenized funds, yield farming strategies, and other structure products.
Prior to Velvet.Capital he was a venture builder incubating Blockchain & Crypto startups at LongHash Ventures (e.g., Xanpool and Astar raised ~$50m+)
Vasily was also a Project Leader at BCG and launched digital products for clients (incl. a WealthTech start-up, a SaaS for financial advisors, and other fintech)
He holds an MBA from INSEAD and BSc & MSc in Applied Mathematics from MIPT.
Don Burton has an extensive career at the cutting edge of education innovation and technology, launching, scaling, and exiting companies as well as being a thought leader on the topic of the Future of Education.
He is a strategic advisor, Don worked with McKinsey & Co. consulting on strategies to launch interactive media business units and how to create open innovation within large corporations such as Apple, IBM, Sony, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, Cox Cable, Viacom, and Disney, and with Goldman Sachs advising on exits and acquisitions.
As an intrapreneur, he has built education startups within large companies such as the Walt Disney Company and Kaplan.
Don, as an entrepreneur, has built multiple EdTech startups on his own as a founder, with a major exit to Kaplan/Washington Post.
Don was an angel investor before running EdTech Startup Accelerator programs with Techstars and for his own company, graduating three cohorts who have raised more than $100 million in financing and have an estimated market cap of more than $1 billion. He is currently co-founder and managing partner of LearnStart, a seed-stage venture capital fund focused exclusively on learning, education, and talent with a portfolio of more than 30 startups and excellent fund performance.
Brandon Schulz has been building in the e-commerce space for over a decade, first as a founder, then creating new concepts for Starbucks, Softbank Robotics, John Deere, and others. In 2017 Brandon co-founded Violet, an e-commerce infrastructure company that powers universal native checkout for emerging e-commerce channels. Brandon's passion for making messy and complex challenges clean and transformative has helped fuel Violet’s success. The company raised a $10M Series A led by Klarna and has grown quickly over the past year. Brandon resides in Seattle, Washington with his fiance, Brenna, and their puppy, Huckleberry. When not hard at work building the future of e-commerce, you can find Brandon training for a triathlon or at a concert.
Archie Ravishankar is the Founder and CEO of Cogni. Prior to Cogni, Archie was an Investment Director at Manor Estate Family Office, a Board Member at GP Pacific Engineering and Construction PNG, and a Director of Partnerships and Strategy at Hudooku Solutions. Archie is currently a Forbes Finance Council Member, an Investor of ni2o, a Board Member of Howard Brain Sciences Foundation, and a Board Member of C4ADS (Centre for Advanced Defense Studies)
Jon Ferrara is a serial entrepreneur and noted speaker about social, sales, and marketing. He has re-imagined CRM by building Nimble - The Simple CRM for Microsoft 365 & Google Workspace. Ferrara is best known as the co-founder of GoldMine Software Corp, one of the early pioneers in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for Small to Medium-sized Businesses (SMBs). He has been recognized by Forbes as one of the Top 10 Social CEOs, Top 10 Social Salespeople In The World, and Top 100 Marketing Influencers.
Jim Dries is the founder and CEO of PILYTIX.ai, a provider of AI technologies for revenue professionals primarily in sports, entertainment, and university fundraising. PILYTIX.ai empowers its users to effectively leverage the mountains of customer data their organizations generate to drive efficiencies that improve revenues without increasing costs. The vision at PILYTIX, is simple, as Jim shares, “We want to help organizations exceed their revenue targets by working smarter.”
Prior to founding PILYTIX.ai, Jim’s career spanned leadership roles in finance, product development, sales, and marketing. Jim is a graduate of Yale University and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Kunal Agarwal is the founder of dope.security, the fly-direct Secure Web Gateway (SWG). Prior to dope, he led product & engineering teams at major legacy SWG players, first Symantec then Forcepoint. In a fifteen-year career, Kunal has dabbled in everything from credit card security to ethical hacking. He is also a producer and spends much of his free time experimenting with music, photo, video, and design work. Kunal received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Adam Baker is the founder of 3 SaaS companies with 2 exits and $20M ARR, bootstrapped. He has also held sales leadership roles at Salesforce and Intuit.
Adam is the CEO of dealpad.io, software giving sales teams a process to align with their buying teams and win more of the deals they work on.
Eric Olden is a maverick that has pioneered 3 major paradigm shifts in Identity and Access management. He founded, scaled, and successfully exited both Securant/ClearTrust (Web Access Management) and Symplified, (the first IDaaS company). He recently served as SVP and GM at Oracle, where he ran the identity and security business worldwide.
As a technologist, he was a co-author of the SAML standard, creating the first pre-integrated SSO platform, and is the visionary behind the Identity Fabric. With an obsession for simplifying the way we work as an industry, Eric wrote a new identity standard called Identity Query Language (IDQL) which provides a common language for policy management in a multi-cloud world.
Eric’s latest company Strata is the first distributed identity platform that solves the problem of fragmentation through a no-code software solution.
Ted Gutierrez is the CEO and Co-Founder of SecurityGate, the leading OT cyber assessment & improvement SaaS platform provider. He guides the strategy of the company to innovate for top cyber security challenges facing critical infrastructure companies today. He is a United States Military Academy graduate at West Point and served in the US Army for five years. Before founding SecurityGate, Ted conducted hundreds of site maturity assessments globally as a compliance and risk auditor. Outside work, Ted is a racecar enthusiast and enjoys working on his classic car collection.
Evan Varsamis is a New York-based Entrepreneur, Founder & CEO at Gadget Flow, and Mintify Co-founder of HustleClick, and CreatorClub, contributor at Forbes, Inc, HuffPost, and American Express Essentials. He is also an advisor at Sprint Fund, Qrator, and Crowdreach.
Evan is passionate about emerging technologies like NFTs, Crypto, DAOs, Gaming, the Metaverse, and Crowdfunding
His work has been featured on Mashable, The Next Web, Entrepreneur, Fortune, Forbes, and the Web Summit.
Amy Spurling is the Founder and CEO of Compt, HR software that enables companies to offer truly personalized employee perks while being fully tax-compliant and inclusive for global teams. Amy's experience as a former three-time CFO and two-time COO managing Finance and HR drives her belief that companies and employees can achieve much more together when employees are fully supported. A seasoned executive with nearly 20 years of experience in leadership roles at venture-backed companies, Amy has also closed over ten rounds of financing totaling more than $200M and managed two acquisitions to close. Amy received her Master of Business Administration from the Simmons School of Management and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Rochester.
Aaron Ginn is the co-founder of Hydra Host, The Foundation for American Innovation, and Fabius Labs. Hydra Host specializes in providing data centers with unparalleled provision, management, and security solutions, allowing them to focus on their core competency- hardware and infrastructure. The Foundation for American Innovation is a company of innovators and policy entrepreneurs working to advance a more perfect union between technology and the American republic. Fabius Labs is a full-service product agency that works with founders and entrepreneurs to bring their ideas to life using technology.
Mark Fershteyn is the CEO of Recapped.io, a new category of product that helps B2B sellers collaborate with their buyers. Before founding Recapped, Mark spent a decade selling technology and building sales teams from scratch.
TradeZing is a platform that aggregates real-time information from financial professionals, data sources, social media, and the creator community to help Americans learn about the current economic landscape.
Jordan Edelson is a Forbes 30 under 30 seasoned entrepreneur and CEO/Co-Founder of TradeZing and the groundbreaking mobile digital agency, Appetizer Mobile. Mr. Edelson is also the Director of Chic Sketch, an award-winning fashion mobile application. He has a long history as an entrepreneur from the early age of 17 has included starting multiple companies such as Game Broadcasting Live, a digital streaming video game broadcasting channel that premiered on Time Square's Jumbotron screens, and eSportsTV, a portal for streaming live electronic sports and professional video gaming broadcasts.
He’s made features in Popular Science Magazine, Business Review, Biz Journal, MSNBC.com, WABC-TV, World News Now(ABC), Discovery Channel, WRGB-TV (CBS), and CNBC, along with other radio, print, web, and television spots. Mr. Edelson graduated from The University of Albany with a B.A. in communications and a minor in business and sociology.
Timur Khabirov is an American entrepreneur, designer, and investor best known as the co-founder and CEO of Prequel Inc., the company behind the Prequel mobile photo editing app.
In 2006, he launched a B2B company developing and maintaining high-load intranet applications, one of its major clients being American Express.
Timur later took an interest in digital design, computer vision algorithms, photo editing, video, and 3D - co-founding AIAR Labs. Based on AI technology, Prequel launched in 2018 as a complete package of graphics editing tools for mobile, and to date has been downloaded over 100 million times by users around the world.
Noah Tucker is the Founder and CEO of Social Snowball, the word-of-mouth marketing platform for e-commerce merchants. Noah’s experience building Shopify sites, running ads, and working with influencers led him to Social Snowball, which now supports affiliate and influencer marketing for brands like Fanjoy, Goorin Bros, and Outway Socks.
Kirill Potekhin started programming at 12. He made a website for his father's business and his father paid for his classes and work. At the age of 17, he co-founded Easy Ten, a mobile app to study foreign languages. They were #1 in App Store by revenue among educational apps in many countries and went through 500 Startup acceleration. Over the years they had more than 20 million users.
After that, he and his friend and colleague from Easy Ten founded PotehaLabs. They did various natural language processing and machine learning tasks, such as conversational bots long before ChatGPT (at a much smaller scale of course).
And then together with Vitaly again they started Adapty. It was a combination of their previous experience: running and growing a mobile app and lots of analytical and predictive ML. Adapty helps developers to implement subscriptions in the app and grow revenue by running A/B tests, receiving reports and insights, and other analytics. They bootstrapped it for the first year but then went VC way.
Kirill was CTO for the last 5 years, but since 2022 he combine that with being CPO. They grew Adapty from 13 employees at the start of 2022 to over 50 now.
His interested in politics and economics and like reading books/articles on how the former affects the latter. Kirill is a big fan of Wait But Why, Hoover Institution, Kurzgesagt, and RealLifeLore. Kirill is good at strategic board games and huge Lego Technic sets.
Gene Hoffman currently serves as the Chief Executive Officer and President of Chia Network. Chia is a technology infrastructure company building a transformative open-source, public blockchain focused on real-world utility that is secure in approach, regulatory compliant, and sustainable by design. From 2017 to 2019, Hoffman was an advisor to the board of Chia Network before joining the Company as COO and President in August 2019.
Throughout his career in technology, Hoffman has built and scaled companies in enterprise software and SaaS, subscriptions, cryptography, and software development, served as a chief executive of a publicly traded company, raised over $215,000,000 in public and private markets, acquired four companies, and successfully sold three companies to PGP, Inc., Vivendi-Universal, and Amdocs. His success demonstrates the vital element of his entrepreneurial philosophy - deeply understanding the technology and starting with real utility and industry application creates foundational use cases and unlocks future potential.
Prior to joining Chia, Hoffman served as co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of Vindicia, a consumer subscription infrastructure company from 2003 until its sale to Amdocs in 2016. Previously, he co-founded the company that came to be Emusic.com, serving as CEO and President from 1998 to 2002. Hoffman has 23 years of experience in high-compliance security environments, including 12 years of managing PCI and SSAE-16 compliance for the storage of 220,000,000 credit cards.
Hoffman identifies as a true cypherpunk. In 1997, he helped end U.S. export controls on cryptography while at PGP, Inc. by personally exporting the PGP Source Code book. Just as Hoffman has spent his career driving the adoption of digital transformation, today he sees decentralized blockchain technology as the next step toward the future of finance.
Born in New York City’s east village, Noah Kerner is the CEO of the micro-investing app Acorns and co-founder of the shareholder rights startup Say. His background is colorful: 4X entrepreneur, Co-author of "Chasing Cool” with the former CEO of Barneys, and former DJ for Jennifer Lopez. In his 20s, Noah built the leading creative agency for the young adult market, Noise. Before being acquired by Engine, Noise developed hundreds of products and marketing campaigns for this generation including Facebook’s first application, the first credit card to reward responsibility rather than spending for Chase, Vice's music site Noisey, and the top branded game in the App Store.
Noah has been recognized as one of Billboard Magazine’s “Top 30 Under 30,” AdWeek’s “Top 20 Under 40,” Fast Company’s “Innovation Agents” and “Impact Council” members, and as a judge for the Webby Awards. He has also advised and invested in a variety of fast-growing startups, including WeWork, where he served as the first Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer from 2013-2014.
Passionate about educating today’s youth, Noah has lectured on entrepreneurialism, fintech, and media at NYU, UCLA, Stanford, and Columbia and currently serves on the Board of VH1's Save The Music Foundation. Noah is a graduate of Cornell University where he studied Psychology and Economics.
Tim Williamson is the Co-Founder and CEO of NieuxCo, a Web3 venture studio based in New Orleans. With experience leading and building companies in Web1, Web2, and now Web3, Tim was behind the conception and launch of key drivers of the entrepreneurial community, including The Idea Village, IDEAcorps, and New Orleans Entrepreneur Week. Tim formerly presided as President of NOLA Media Group, Louisiana's largest media company, reaching over 7 million consumers per month with $50M+ in revenues and 250+ staff. Earlier, Tim led the startup and growth of local media digital studios for Cox Interactive Media in New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Austin, San Antonio, Oklahoma City, and Omaha.
Throughout his career, Dan Goldsmith has focused on how the application of technology can change the world. His work in life sciences, education, and healthcare has allowed Dan to make an impact on a global scale and gain insights from hundreds of organizations. Dan is currently CEO of Tendo, a software company focused on seamlessly connecting patients, clinicians, and caregivers throughout the care cycle. Prior to Tendo, Dan was the CEO of Instructure, supporting the teaching and learning needs of more than 30 million students and teachers using Canvas. Dan also spent 8+ years at Veeva where, as Chief Strategy Officer, he helped the company IPO and become the leading software provider to the life sciences industry. Earlier in his career, Dan held senior executive roles at Accenture, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and IBM. Dan is an active advisor, investor, board member, and philanthropist. His service spans public, private, and non-profit organizations. Dan graduated from the University of Rochester and currently resides in the Philadelphia area, but he can often be found on the Silicon Slopes of Utah or working with organizations in Silicon Valley.
Chris Sheng is a 3x founder and growth marketing expert. He has worked with 250+ venture-backed Saas companies on go-to-market and growth. Additionally, he is a resident growth advisor at Mucker Capital and works closely with other top VC firms and their portfolio companies. He is currently the CEO of LeadrPro, a software marketplace connecting buyers and sellers of Saas solutions.
Jacob Jolibois is the co-founder and Chief of Product at Check, helping home service operators streamline and automate their business.
Over 15,000 operators across the US and Canada use Check to automate the tedious administrative tasks that come with running a home service business, helping them become more efficient and professional, grow their bottom line and find peace of mind.
Jacob brings together the business, technical, and customer objectives to build a product that operators love to use, improving the quality of life for them and their users.
He has spoken on stages around the world from TEDx to Web Summit and writes a weekly newsletter for thousands of founders and product leaders called Making Product Sense that dissects world-class products and companies.
Jason Hirshman is the Co-Founder and CTO of Uncountable where he leads product development and the engineering team. Jason was previously at Stanford University, where he received a Master’s in Computer Science and a B.S. in Mathematics. He was selected for the Stanford A.I. Innovation Group, which sought to apply machine learning in impactful ways. Jason's prior industry experience includes building software at Palantir to model data from Syrian refugee camps, leading the mentorship program at StartX, and working as an engineer at BenchPrep.
Pierre Hebrard, the co-founder of Pricemoov, is on a mission to make better pricing decisions more accessible for businesses worldwide. Through the development of their user-friendly SaaS platform for intelligent pricing, he has led Pricemoov's growth, global expansion, and team evolution as CEO.
Before Pricemoov, Pierre served as Managing Director at Jumia Kenya and COO at Jumia Nigeria, scaling operations and building strong teams. His background also includes international finance experience at Morgan Stanley and Société Générale.
In addition, Pierre is a University Lecturer on price management at HEC Paris, sharing his knowledge with aspiring professionals. He is committed to helping businesses embrace innovative pricing solutions for unparalleled success.
Iulian Circo is a serial entrepreneur and recovering humanitarian operating at the frontiers of technology and impact. His latest venture (Hyfe) is the world’s most sophisticated acoustic AI, used daily by researchers, medical professionals as well as thousands of regular people all over the world.
Over the years, Iulian has been part of action-packed operations in some of the world’s most challenging environments. These included dozens of humanitarian missions as well as things like supporting transition during peace-keeping operations in East Timor or DR Congo, leading the operations of a UN agency in Somalia, or turning around country operations for large global organizations in places such as Eswatini/ Swaziland or Mozambique.
He has founded and taken to scale global social enterprises and impact businesses in health and fintech among others.
Erik Kostelnik, is the Founder and CEO of Postal, the leading all-in-one Offline Engagement Platform. Erik is an award-winning entrepreneur and sales leader that has founded and scaled multiple technology companies that have led to hyper-revenue growth, major capital investments, and 3 favorable exits.
Edward Fernandez, president and CEO of 1031 Crowdfunding, has over 20 years of experience and is personally responsible for raising $800 million of equity from individuals and institutional investors through private and public real estate offerings. Headquartered in Irvine, California, 1031 Crowdfunding is a leading real estate investing platform for 1031 exchanges and alternative investment vehicles focused on tax deferral. Ed can speak to real estate-specific topics such as 1031 exchanges, 721 UPREITs, and other investment methods. He can also provide general guidance to business owners on entrepreneurship, self-belief, perseverance, and success, as he is a self-made American who built a successful real estate business from the ground up just a few years ago.
Sean Bennett is the co-founder of Stronghold, a leading financial infrastructure company that provides fast, secure, and accessible financial services through a simple API. Stronghold, recently named a Forbes Fintech 50 company, makes payments quicker and easier while maintaining regulatory compliance and interoperability between payment systems. Sean is a renowned technology expert in the digital currency space, having designed and executed some of the first distributed cross-border transactions of sovereign currencies.
In 2013, Sean started building stablecoin technology on Ripple to streamline the remittances process after experiencing its obstacles firsthand. Passionate about the power of digital currencies, he left medical school in 2014 to found Coinex Gateway. Coinex Gateway empowered consumers to move fiat currency via the Ripple and Stellar networks - in doing so, Sean helped build Ripple and Stellar’s first stablecoins (USD, AUD, and NZD). Sean continued innovating on the Stellar network by designing a remittance gateway that could solve the issues millions face when sending money home to their families. There, he met Tammy Camp (who was leading growth efforts at Stellar). They decided to found Stronghold to develop payments and financial infrastructure for all.
Sean holds a Bachelor’s degree in Health Sciences from the University of Otago and a Bachelor’s degree in Business from Massey University.
Vinay Patankar is the CEO of Process Street, a modern process management platform for employee onboarding, workflow automation, checklists, the team’s handbook, and more. He was the youngest Cisco engineer in Australia at age 16 and has a background in IT, finance, and software recruitment. He also founded an affiliate marketing company with teams in 3 countries (USA, Philippines, and India), that generated $1 million in revenue in less than 3 years.
Ben Weiss co-founded CoinFlip in 2015 and served as the Chief Operating Officer before being appointed as Chief Executive Officer in April 2021. Since its inception, Ben has led the company’s strategy and helped CoinFlip surpass $1B in transaction volume. In addition to running a burgeoning startup, Ben spends his time working with governing bodies toward cryptocurrency regulation. Regarded as a thought leader in the space, he is regularly interviewed by major news outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN Business, and Moneywise, and has given several keynote speeches about the future of cryptocurrency.
Ben graduated from Vanderbilt with a degree in Economics. Compelled by cryptocurrency’s lack of accessibility, he sought to create a cash-to-crypto ATM service. Since then, CoinFlip has expanded to n nearly 4,000 ATMs across the country and Canada, maintaining a strong record of regulatory compliance to ensure the safety and security of its customers. The company will keep that central focus, as well as map out new opportunities internationally and across its product lines.
Under his leadership, CoinFlip placed 60th on the 2021 Inc. 5000 list as the top-ranked cryptocurrency company, was named the 2021 and 2022 #1 fastest-growing company in Chicago by Crain's, and was awarded the 2021 and 2022 Stevie ® Awards for Customer Service.
Jake Anderson is a co-founder and the CEO of Anderson Optimization. Prior to founding AO, he earned his BSB in Finance and Entrepreneurial Management with a minor in Information System Management from the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota.
Prior to founding Anderson Optimization, Jake began his career in Fortune 500 corporate finance where he led a variety of cross-functional project teams and focused on strategy and business operations.
Outside of work, he enjoys spending time with friends and family, traveling, and following sports.
Dan Mallin, CEO & Founder of Lucy, a one-stop AI-powered knowledge platform for all the data an organization owns and licenses. Dan is a force in technology-based entrepreneurship, creating transformative tools that serve the needs of Fortune 1000 and the agencies that serve them. He has repeatedly broken new ground in the digital marketing services space. He has grown and sold four businesses and built forward-thinking tech platforms that are still in use day-to-day by some of the world’s largest brands, agencies, and media firms.
Bhavin Asher is the founder and Chief Technology Officer of GRUBBRR®, a self-ordering technologies company focused on automating commerce with its award-winning line of hardware and software solutions.
A combination of technologist, entrepreneur, consultant, and an all-around problem solver, Bhavin is passionate about democratizing technology for all businesses. He founded GRUBBRR with the mission of changing the way commerce is transacted by automating both the consumer and business experience through artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Erine Gray is the Founder and CEO of findhelp, a Public Benefit Corporation, the leading Search and Referral Network in the US. Their platform is used by most major health plans, hospital systems, and select residential and cause organizations. Erine is a 2019 TED Senior Fellow. He lives in Austin, TX.
Chris Mills is the Head of Product at Nexleaf Analytics, a non-profit working at the intersection of global health and technology to protect vaccines. Chris is excited about how remote work is creating opportunities for product teams to build with and for people like never before. When he's not working at Nexleaf, you can usually find him somewhere in the great outdoors of Oregon.
Colin Johnson, CEO and Co-Founder of Freeport, a platform bringing fine art investment on-chain. By tokenizing fine art, the platform expands access to this historic safe-haven asset class for both retail and accredited investors. The team is trying out a new approach to fractional ownership that will feel interconnected with the rest of the web3 world and be more appealing to a younger audience. Their goal is to democratize access to art, which is why prices start around $200 at launch instead of $15,000. Their ownership experience will include a visual display gallery and social sharing elements such as likes and comments, similar to TikTok.
Yogev Shifman is one of the co-founders of Exodigo, a successful AI company that aims to solve the underground challenge, providing underground risk management services. Before joining Exodigo, he worked at Buildots, another thriving AI company that serves the construction industry.
Prior to his tenure at Buildots, Yogev served as a distinguished officer in the Israeli intelligence corps. He directed multi-national and multi-disciplinary programs for real-time embedded hardware and software systems at one of Israel's top deep tech units. He was recognized with multiple awards for his contributions to the field.
Yogev holds a B.Sc in computer software engineering from Technion - Israel Institute of Technology (the Israeli MIT), and he began his career at Intel Corporation before pursuing an MBA in entrepreneurship and technology at Tel Aviv University.
Jayce Hafner was raised on an Angus beef cattle operation in Virginia where she learned how tough it is to grow a profitable farm. Jayce began her career in Washington DC as an environmental policy advisor organizing delegations to the UN Climate Change negotiations. After getting her MBA at Stanford, Jayce circled back to her ag roots to co-found FarmRaise: a platform that helps farmers master their finances. FarmRaise serves over 20K farmers, partners with major agribusiness companies like Cargill to connect farmers with climate-smart capital, and is on a mission to bring resilience back to the farming sector.
Rob Petrozzo is the founder of Rally, the pioneer alternative investing platform for blue-chip and digital collectibles, including classic cars, sports memorabilia, Birkin Bags, watches, and NFTs, totaling over 400 assets in 19+ different categories.
Throughout his career, Rob has pioneered industries, from design to fintech. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Rob was the first in his family to graduate from college. He studied Marketing Communication and Graphic Design at Philadelphia University. After college, he launched a boutique consulting firm and began a prolific career in design. Rob was quickly recognized and began designing for Kayne West, and emerging artists John Legend, Young Geezy, and DJ Drama.
Excelling as a young designer, Rob regretted missed investment opportunities in fine art and collectibles because he didn’t have access to cash. For Rob, Rally’s mission was to provide access to collectibles by offering fractional ownership to the enthusiast class. Rob's dedication has accelerated Rally’s growth over the past three years. The platform has $42M AUM and over 400,000 users.
The platform also has attracted high-profile investors and users, such as Jimmy Kimmel’s Wheelhouse, Kevin Durant’s Thirty-Five Ventures Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, Josh Richard’s Animal Capital, and Accel.
Ajay Kulkarni is the CEO and Co-Founder of Timescale, creators of the industry-leading relational database for time series, built on the standards of PostgreSQL and SQL.
With a focus on time-series data, his extensive experience has helped shape Timescale into a company dedicated to serving developers globally, enabling them to build the next wave of computing.
Timescale is backed by Benchmark, NEA, Redpoint, Tiger Global, Icon Ventures, and Two Sigma Ventures.
Robert Neir and Siddhant Kasat, Co-founders at Layer3, a research and development studio focused on Web3 building and consulting.
Robert Neir was a video game programmer since he was 14 years old. Went to USC (University of Southern California) for computer science (video games emphasis). Graduated and went straight into a full-time position at Microsoft video game studios as an engineer. Worked as a gameplay programmer at Forza under Microsoft for 3 years. Then found a passion for Web3 and quit Microsoft to work on DEXs within the Web3 space and manage a development team to build UIs for these Web3 projects. Now he is focused on R&D to build out new projects in the Web3 and Web2 space.
Siddhant Kasat has finished his computer science degree from the University of California, Irvine where he founded a blockchain organization focused on education, consulting, and development. He works as a software engineer at Microsoft and has previously worked on the Xbox Royalties team using enterprise blockchain. He is a web3 enthusiast and likes to keep up with emerging technologies and work on quick proof of concepts based on different ideas.
Mehul Bhatt is the co-founder and CEO of FloCareer - an innovative "Interview as a Service" HR Tech Platform that helps companies across the globe hire talent faster and easier at scale while reducing interviewing overhead. FloCareer combines two of his passions: Technology and People.
Prior to FloCareer, Mehul was helping pre-sales teams of Cisco in the capacity of Solutions Architect; but rest of his career he was a passionate programmer. He helped startups succeed by writing robust code for Networking, Virtualization, and Data Center Infra Management.
Apart from technology, Mehul loves nature - hiking, camping, SCUBA; and long distance running. He is also a futurist and love astronomy & theoretical physics.
Palash Soni, the Goldcast co-founder, and CEO, got his first taste of entrepreneurship charging kids from the neighborhood to play video games on his second-hand console. Soni says he’s always been fascinated by legacy companies like Microsoft, Verizon, and Disney that excelled at identifying and riding long-term trends, while also building resilience.
Soni got his start in engineering, then moved on to leadership roles at a mobile adtech company. He began pursuing an MBA at Harvard but after meeting his co-founders and developing the idea for Goldcast, he took a leave of absence to pursue his vision of helping B2B marketers run engaging digital events. He loves to read, especially science, biology and history books.
Manning Field is CEO of Follow, a B2C retail investing marketplace that connects influencers with people who automatically want to follow their money moves. Prior to Follow, Manning was the Chief Operating Officer for Acorns, overseeing the business with direct accountability for growth, retention, experimentation, customer service, analytics, project management, and Acorns’ regulated entities.
Manning launched market-leading products and programs at JPMorgan Chase like Chase Sapphire, Chase Freedom, and Chase Ultimate Rewards, and was named an Ad Age “40 Under 40.” He also spent four years in Beijing, China, as CMO of JPMorgan Chase’s consumer team and while there, founded a local credit card business. During his 18-year tenure at Chase, Manning oversaw many departments including Branding, Advertising, Product Development, Marketing, Corporate Development, Innovation, B2B Corporate Sales Strategy, and, lastly, as the Managing Director of Loyalty Innovation. He graduated from Indiana University and he and his wife have three future Acorns investors.
Flo Crivello is the founder and CEO of Lindy, the personal AI assistant that can help with tasks, from calendar management and email drafting to contract sending and beyond.
Before founding Lindy, he was the founder and CEO of Teamflow, a cutting-edge virtual office platform designed to enable seamless collaboration among remote teams.
Prior to Teamflow, he was an engineer and product leader at Uber for 5 years.
Armand Paradis is the Co-Founder and CEO of ComboCurve, the fastest-growing technology platform in energy. He leads reservoir engineers, programmers, and data scientists in building breakthrough technologies to evaluate and improve well performance, economics, and emissions.
ComboCurve is one of the most successful energy startups with over 270 of the largest players in the industry adopting its workflows in just 2 years. The company raised the largest round of Series B financing ever seen in energy.
Armand holds a Master's and Bachelor's degree in Petroleum Engineering from the University of Louisiana and the Sharif University of Technology. He serves as the sponsorship chairman for the SPE Gulf Coast Section Innovate Group. In 2022, he was honored as one of Hart Energy's Forty Under 40.
Thanks to his leadership, ComboCurve has won several awards, such as Disruptive Technology of the Year two years running, along with Innovation of the Year, Best & Brightest in Houston, and Best & Brightest in the Nation in 2022.
Tom Kieley graduated from Texas A&M in 2004 and co-founded SourceDay in 2015 after launching his first tech startup, RG in 2008. Earlier in his career, he started as a manufacturing supervisor at Dell and later into enterprise selling with software companies like Boomi and Pervasive.
Tom and his co-founder, Clint, started SourceDay to transform how manufacturers, distributors, and retailers collaborate with their suppliers to solve supply chain challenges they experienced early in their careers.
At the time of publishing, SourceDay has helped over 250 customers and 16,000 suppliers globally improve visibility and collaboration in their supply chains.
Tom is a husband, father of three, and exercise fanatic who loves cars, boating, and anything outdoors.
Raphael Ouzan is the founder and CEO of A.Team, a team formation platform that enables tech leaders to assemble, deploy, and manage cloud-based teams—high-performing, distributed product teams that build transformative new products. A.Team is powered by a members-only network of the world’s top engineers, product managers, designers, and marketers who come together to escape rigid structures to work on problems that matter to them alongside teammates they love.
A.Team is on a mission to change how we work for the better—part of Raphael’s quest to unlock human potential through technology. He founded BillGuard, the antivirus for bills (acquired by Prosper), co-founded BlockNation with Apollo Mgmt CEO Marc Rowan to invest in web3, and founded ITC, a not-for-profit for global tech upskilling. A decorated officer of IDF’s tech unit, he was named 30 under 30 by Forbes, and Global Shaper by the World Economic Forum.
Jeff Fernandez is dedicated to building businesses that help people.
He is the CEO and co-founder of Dandi, the analytics platform for advancing DEI. Launched in stealth mode in 2018, Dandi’s customers today include Oscar Health, Braze, Care/Of, Teachable, Rhino, and Blue Shield of California.
As an advisor, Jeff works with socially-conscious companies including Sealed. He is a seed investor in Hone and a limited partner at Combine, a design-led venture capital firm.
Prior to Dandi, Jeff led Grovo, the enterprise learning company that he co-founded in 2010. Built with a mission to remake employee training, Grovo was used in 190 countries around the world and named by Fortune the second-best workplace in the US. Grovo was acquired in 2018 by Cornerstone OnDemand (NASDAQ: CSOD).
Originally from Dumont, NJ, Jeff graduated with the highest honors from Harvard, where he wrote his thesis on maximizing human performance. Jeff has spoken at events including TEDx, SXSW, Internet Week, and ASU+GSV, and has contributed to Inc., Fast Company, Forbes, and more.
Jeff lives in New Jersey with his wife Cori and their two kids Remi and Rafael.
Maik Taro Wehmeyer is the CEO and Co-Founder of Taktile, a global automated decisioning platform that is revolutionizing how fintechs harness data to steer their business. In a world increasingly run on automated decisions, Taktile’s low-code platform makes it easy for credit and data teams to build more accurate decision flows, adapt to change quickly, and, ultimately, improve outcomes. Prior to joining Taktile, Maik worked at QuantCo, McKinsey, and SAP. He has significant experience in the machine learning and financial services spaces, serving as a member of EU Commission’s AI Alliance and the German AI Alliance.
Kelly Nyland is the CEO of Whym. As a long-standing technology executive, Kelly has launched 120 “next-gen” experiences in over 40 global markets. She’s partnered with the world's top online & offline retailers across 40,000 points of sale for more than 15 years. She’s a practiced technologist in “pulling the future forward” by leveraging technology in a way that adds value to the customer journey.
As the Head of GTM @ Snapchat, Kelly was recognized, globally, for her innovative GTM & Sales strategy around Snap’s camera glasses. She and her (now) co-founder, got an inside look at why social commerce experiences have been disappointing to influencers and brands that hoped to leverage their content on these platforms to drive acquisition and lifetime value.
She’s now built a software suite for brands that leverages the ubiquity, access and convenience of social selling.
Bryan Sapot is an entrepreneur, renowned speaker, and CEO with over 24 years of experience in manufacturing technology. He is the founder of Mingo, a smart factory platform that leverages technology to solve complex problems in the manufacturing industry. Bryan's deep insights into the manufacturing sector have made him a sought-after expert in the industry, and he is dedicated to building software that simplifies the lives of manufacturers.
Sanjay Goel, who is a serial entrepreneur, is the CEO and founder of NachoNacho. He is deeply interested in tech innovation and disruption. Sanjay enjoys building highly scalable startups, especially marketplaces.
Sanjay lived in 6 countries, and traveled in 88 countries, all 7 continents. He also speaks 6 languages to varying degrees.
Sanjay is also a helicopter and airplane pilot, skydiver, mountaineer, rock climber, ice-climber, skier, scuba diver, sailor, and windsurfer.
Colin Treseler is on a mission to help people save time by automating the most common tasks in a workday. As CEO at supernormal.com, he leads a team that automatically captures your meeting notes without lifting a finger. At the forefront of Generative AI, his team is helping people save more than 100,000 hours a month. With the shift to remote and hybrid teams, Supernormal has exploded in growth as companies realize that documenting discussions is a cornerstone to distributed work.
Previous to Supernormal, he led product and ML teams in social and fintech companies including Meta and Klarna. At Meta, he ran search (discover tab) for Instagram. In his fintech days, he joined the Swedish rocket ship Klarna for easier payments on the web.
Shawn Hewat is the CEO & Co-founder of Wavy, a platform that empowers teams to create a meaningful company culture, wherever people are located. With a background in marketing and employee engagement at Nudge, Shawn is passionate about the future of work, people & culture, and work-play-life balance. Outside of Wavy, she can be found adventuring outdoors or cooking up a new recipe.
Harold Hughes is the founder & CEO of Bandwagon, a South Carolina-based live experience technology company. Under his leadership, Bandwagon has raised more than $3M in venture capital and successfully acquired IdealSeat, Inc. in 2020. Their customers include Fortune 50 brands, entertainers, as well as professional and collegiate athletes. As a first-generation American, Harold prioritized education, receiving two Bachelors degrees (Economics and Political Science) from Clemson University and later received his MBA from Clemson while he led business development at a Fortune 1000 company based in Greenville, South Carolina. As a web3 builder and community leader, Harold published "A Kids Book About Blockchain" to help educate people "from 6 to 60" about the revolutionary technology that Bandwagon specializes in.
To that end, Harold is also an active angel investor, primarily investing in women, people of color, and Black founder-led companies. Most notably, he has invested in Partake Foods, the Jay-Z-backed CPG company making allergy-friendly snacks, and companies like Goodr, Chipper, Athletic Greens, Republic, Stix, and the National Cycling League.
Ivan Yang is the co-founder and CEO of Moss, a company helping brands maximize the engagement of their web3 customers. Prior to Moss, Ivan worked in both the investment banking and principal investing arms of Goldman Sachs. He has a B.Comm and LL.B from the University of Sydney and is finishing the last semester of his MBA at MIT.
Brooke LeVasseur, CEO of AristaMD, has 20 years of leadership experience launching new, innovative healthcare products and solutions to payers and providers, including software and eConsult solutions. As an established entrepreneur and an innovative leader, Brooke has deep experience identifying, developing, and launching new business offerings while managing teams to achieve operational goals. Her expertise spans the healthcare spectrum, from consumer health to devices and diagnostics. At AristaMD, Brooke is responsible for leading the company’s executive team and ensuring primary care physicians are empowered to be the quarterback of care for their patients. She is dedicated to shifting the healthcare industry to the value-based care initiative by making specialty care more accessible and affordable.
Ashok Sivanand is the CEO of Integral, a digital transformation firm that helps businesses with embedding a technology DNA to their culture, processes, and experiences by collaborating to build delightful products and high-performing product teams.
Ashok is a student of the automotive and manufacturing industry and has worked as a forklift driver on the line, developed applications at a General Motors plant, and various product roles at an industrial IoT startup called Shoplogix.
Ashok transitioned this knowledge of lean manufacturing to lean-agile software while serving on the leadership team at Pivotal Labs.
At Pivotal, Ashok visited Detroit from Toronto to help Ford build a development lab called FordLabs; loved Detroit so much that he decided to stay and start Integral here. Integral also sponsors integratedetroit.org to help bridge the race and gender gap amongst Detroit's technologists.
Ravi Sandepudi is the Co-founder and CEO of Effectiv, a fraud & risk management platform designed for credit unions. Before starting Effectiv, Ravi was the Director of Product Development at PayPal, leading their efforts to build cutting-edge fraud protection services for hundreds of thousands of merchants. Ravi joined PayPal via the acquisition of Simility, a pioneer in fraud detection software, where he was the first employee and led their offices in India and the UK. Before Simility & PayPal, he worked at Google in their Risk, Trust & Safety group, building systems that detected fraud, malware, and abuse across products like Google Search, Ads & Google Pay.
Rishi Khanna is the CEO of Stocktwits, the original social platform for individual investors and traders with six million registered members and millions of monthly visitors. Prior to StockTwits, he was a Managing Director at SS&C where he had overall responsibility for sales, product, operations and strategic direction of a number of businesses serving the alternative assets industry. Prior to joining SS&C, Rishi was Co-Founder and President of Novus, a portfolio intelligence platform for the institutional asset management industry that he co-founded in 2007. Before Novus, he led product development and technology initiatives for Gerson Lehrman Group. Rishi holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Cornell University.
Stefanie Sample is a serial entrepreneur, expert marketer, and efficient operator. In April 2021, she founded Fundid as a non-technical, non-banking background, solo entrepreneur, based in Montana. With a mission to make growth possible for all business owners, regardless of their size, Fundid has quickly emerged as a trusted financial partner to the smallest business owners. Fundid attracts customers who are currently being left out of a broken financial system by saying yes to supporting their growth when others are saying no. Prior to Fundid, she has proven herself with an impressive track record of business accomplishments. Whether starting, buying or selling companies, Stefanie has repeatedly leveraged her marketing and operations skills to create scalable business efficiency. Stefanie is also an advisory board member of a mid-market bank, co-created an accelerator program for startups, and has been a trusted advisor to many companies looking to grow.
Stefanie enjoys representing women business owners and speaking about the solutions that will unlock their potential in a world built for men. She is an avid skier, trail runner and went on to compete in an ironman. These days she can be found spending her free time teaching her girls to ski the trees and summers camping by Montana lakes.
Maggie Norris, CEO of Aidaly, a healthcare technology company upskilling family caregivers with the training, coaching, and compensation to provide quality care in the home.
Her passion is building technology to help people take care of their families. She is motivated to design solutions for the female consumer and believes she is the key to reinventing healthcare, finance, and education.
Margaret brings a wealth of experience as a healthcare CEO, startup Advisor, Investor, and Developer with a background in consumer-focused solutions that scale. Previously, Margaret founded Uphold Health and served as Head of Product at AFTER. Before co-founding AFTER, Margaret founded Home Management Solutions LLC. the parent company of KidsGoDo inc. and exited in 2017.
She studied improv at I.O. Chicago, comedic acting and writing at The Second City, and long-form improvisation under the guidance of Joyce Piven at Piven Theatre Works. She enjoyed a brief acting career that included various commercial and film roles and was a founding member of the sketch comedy group ‘The Big P/L’.
Margaret attended Northwestern University and studied at Tufts University in Taillores, France. Margaret was awarded the National Caring Award and inducted into The Caring Institute Hall of Fame in Washington D.C. by Val Halamandaris.
She has served as an Advisor or Member/Board Member of the Chicago Leadership Alliance, Ryan Banks Academy, Women Tech Founders, The Chicago Council, and various other nonprofits.
Rowland Hobbs is the Co-Founder and CEO of Stake. Stake is building the financial infrastructure for the next generation of rentals. With technology that aligns incentives between residents, operators, owners, and investors, everyone earns the Return on Rent™ they deserve. A leader in financial product design, Rowland led Accenture and Teneo’s product design practice. Rowland previously founded two companies and has been recognized by Forbes, Insider, and Fast Company. His inspiration for Stake came from a unique overlap of his pro bono work in microlending, loyalty platforms, and banking services.
Jim O'Brien, CEO & Co-Founder of Agrograph. Jim's been helping corporations navigate innovation initiatives and build sustainable processes for over a decade. He's held leadership positions at 4 startups and led product innovator teams at 3 multinational corporations ranging from financial services to insurance, to agricultural and corporate wellness. Jim holds an MBA from Edgewood College and a Master’s of Science from UW-Madison.
Maxim Fateev is the founder of Temporal.io, a developer-first, open-source platform that ensures the successful execution of services and applications. He is also the co-creator of Cadence, a workflow orchestration engine. Maxim developed Cadence when he was at Uber, seeing the engineering challenges that come from trying to solve the workflow orchestration problem.
Dominik Tornow is a Principal Engineer at Temporal. He is a dedicated and self-motivated software engineer and architect. He uses conceptual and formal models to make complex concepts tangible and complex systems correct by construction.
Tyler Morrey, a Co-Founder and CEO of Upside.coop, is building a platform to power the ownership economy. His experience as a valuation expert in complex financial instruments and startup consulting led him to see an unmet need in company growth - enabling brands to succeed alongside their customers by mobilizing them with the opportunity to earn ownership in the brand through their engagement.
Dante DiCicco is the Founder and CEO of Zitti, a company on a mission to level the playing field and transform food industry operations by giving small-to-medium-sized restaurants and food service providers the same advantages experienced by larger chains.
Dante has invested in 20+ companies as an angel investor.
He’s a passionate leader and operator who previously spent nearly 7 years at Snap leading teams, building mobile-first content experiences, and driving international revenue growth. Prior to his time at Snap, Dante was an Associate at BlackRock within their Financial Institutions Group, overseeing over $40 billion in global Assets Under Management.
He holds a B.S. from Stanford University and currently resides in Los Angeles, CA. When he's not working you can find him golfing, exploring local cuisine, or cheering on his favorite sports teams.
Alex Ghiculescu is the co-founder of Tanda.co/Workforce.com and runs a fund for B2B SaaS companies built on Rails. He lives in the Colorado mountains with his family.
He writes about what he's learned over 10 years of building software on Substack. You can also find him on LinkedIn and Github.
CEO & Founder Erik Huberman launched Hawke Media in 2014. Now valued at over $100 million, Hawke Media is the fastest-growing marketing consultancy agency in the United States. Prior to its launch, Erik successfully founded, grew, and sold two e-commerce companies by the age of 26. Erik has since continued to strategically expand his business portfolio inclusive of a handful of company acquisitions—Hawke Ventures, which raised $25M in its second fund, and most recently HawkeZ, an agency offering brands the tools needed to tap into GenZ. As a serial entrepreneur and marketing expert, Erik has been recognized by his industry peers through honors and awards including, Forbes Magazine’s 30Under30, CSQ’s 40Under40, and Inc. Magazine’s Top 25 Marketing Influencers.
Ben Borodach has spent his career working at the intersection of finance and technology. He helped scale Team8 Group into a multi-hundred million AUM fund, and initiated and helped sell several FinTech companies to PayPal and Bitsight, among others. During his tenure at Team8, Ben also spearheaded the firm's strategy arm and its US office as well as launched an award-winning cyber ETF and Ph.D. program. He has also been an advisor and contributor to the World Economic Forum on issues relating to central bank digital currencies.
Prior to joining Team8, Ben was a FinTech strategist at Deloitte Consulting, where he advised the largest US banks and insurers on their business, technology, M&A, and venture strategies.
Most recently, Ben co-founded april to bring more equity to the tax experience for all Americans. The company's vision is to democratize access to the tax code, enabling any company to develop and incorporate tax features and filing into their application.
Ben graduated from NYU with a degree in Economics and Business with Dean's List and Presidential Honors Scholar distinctions.
John Cordier is the Co-Founder and CEO of Epistemix. Having grown up in 13 places before attending the University of Pittsburgh to study neuroscience and sociology, he was bound to get into complex social systems science at some point. After working with Don Burke and John Grefenstette at the Public Heath Dynamics Lab, he’s led the development of an agent-based modeling platform using synthetic populations and a simulation-specific language to broaden the adoption of simulation across disciplines and industries. As a champion for using GIS and simulation to improve conditions for people to live healthier lives, John spends his non-Epistemix time working on data science education initiatives. John currently lives in Salt Lake City and outside of work spends his time in the Wasatch Mountains.
Daniel Naim is the Founder and CEO of Fennel, the first retail investing platform to allow users to vote with their shares and access ESG information about the companies they invest in. Backed by the founder of Acorns, Capital Factory, and more, Fennel launched in the fall of 2022 and provides retail investors ESG-based information on the companies they invest in, while also not allowing for shareholder lending so investors can take an active role in being a shareholder.
Joanna Riley is an entrepreneur, advocate, and mentor for diversity in technology, and the CEO and Co-Founder of Censia. Censia was built to transform the way enterprise companies hire talent, its platform is a true system of intelligence for the enterprise, predictively matching the most in-demand people to opportunities at scale, powered by AI.
Before Censia, she experienced two successful acquisitions of her companies, was part of the International Training Unit for the FBI, was a collegiate rower, and earned her BA degree in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia, where she was a full scholarship athlete. She is part of the President's Program at Harvard Business School, receiving her MBA.
Jake Wood is the founder and CEO of Groundswell, a software company that enables companies to make philanthropy an employee benefit. Groundswell launched in 2021 after raising $15 million in venture capital led by Google Ventures.
Prior to launching Groundswell, Wood served as the founder and CEO of Team Rubicon, a disaster response organization that is widely considered one of America’s leading nonprofit organizations.
Jake is a Marine Corps veteran with combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, a twice-published author, a frequent contributor in the media, and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin.
Jennifer Nuckles is the CEO of R-Zero. Jennifer is an industry veteran, with over 25 years of experience leading and accelerating revenue growth and profitability for companies including high-growth, venture-backed, and public companies. Prior to R-Zero, Jennifer was the Executive Vice President and Group Business Leader at SoFi. Jennifer was previously Chief Marketing Officer of health tech leader Doctor on Demand and social gaming giant Zynga, Inc. She spent almost a decade in leadership positions at The Clorox Company in marketing and sales. Jennifer holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA from the University of California, Berkeley.
Arun Saigal is the CEO and Co-Founder of Thunkable, the no-code platform to build powerful, native mobile apps. He holds an S.B. and M.Eng from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Arun has held various leading roles at technology companies, including Quizlet, Khan Academy, Aspiring Minds, and Google. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 and a finalist for numerous other innovation awards. Arun is an established leader and visionary in the no-code and mobile development space.
Arun practices his musical talents in his free time, playing viola, mridangam, and even beatboxing. He also conducts orchestras and plays in several San Francisco-based music groups.
Syed Hamid is the CEO and founder of Sofy, a no-code automated mobile app testing platform. Millions of people use mobile apps every day, and app development teams must test their apps before every release/update. This increasingly complex and resource-intensive process is time-consuming. Fortunately, Sofy’s innovative platform makes the necessity of testing mobile apps swift and painless. Before starting Sofy in 2016, Syed worked as an engineering leader for nearly two decades at Microsoft.
Patricia Thaine is the Co-Founder & CEO of Private AI, a Microsoft-backed startup. She is also a Computer Science PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto (on leave) and a Vector Institute alumna. Her R&D work is focused on privacy-preserving natural language processing, with a focus on applied cryptography and re-identification risk.
Patricia is a recipient of the NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship, the RBC Graduate Fellowship, the Beatrice “Trixie” Worsley Graduate Scholarship in Computer Science, and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship. She has a decade of research and software development experience, including at the McGill Language Development Lab, the University of Toronto’s Computational Linguistics Lab, the University of Toronto’s Department of Linguistics, and the Public Health Agency of Canada.
Joel Stevenson is VP of Growth at Vendasta which acquired Yesware in 2022 where Joel was CEO. Prior to Yesware, Joel built Wayfair’s B2B business from scratch to $400MM in annual revenue. He also ran Wayfair’s UK business and oversaw the FP&A function as Wayfair transitioned into a publicly traded company. Prior to Wayfair, Joel worked as a consultant at ZS Associates and spent the early part of his career in a variety of sales roles. Joel has an MBA from Yale, attended the University of Illinois for undergrad, and has a goal of being #1 for humor endorsements on LinkedIn.
Aaron Podolny is the CTO and co-founder of Scribe, a productivity tool used by over 300,000 users to automatically generate step-by-step guides. Before that, he founded a number of startups and sold Onward — an automation company — to Google in 2018. Earlier in his career, Aaron studied neuroscience and psychology at Yale and built machine learning and statistical models in economic consulting.
Tom Medema, Founder & CEO of Bubbles. Tom pioneered asynchronous, remote work years ago when he was CTO of Bloomon, one of the fastest growing startups in the Netherlands. Now he's CEO of Bubbles, which is likely the fastest-growing asynchronous video tool in the world right now - with 250K users and backing from Bain Capital. Khosla Ventures, and Craft Ventures.
Cavan Klinsky is the Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder of Healthie, where he spearheads the development of the company’s comprehensive white-label and API platform, empowering health and wellness professionals to grow their businesses and build digital-first relationships with clients. He works closely with Healthie’s startups to integrate into other tools used in the growing digital health ecosystem.
From writing the first line of code to scaling an application that powers millions of requests each day, Cavan has built Healthie’s strong, scalable foundation that powers digital health’s future. A self-taught developer from an early age, Cavan has freelanced for different startups, small businesses, and non-profits with a focus on building minimum viable products, and during high school co-founded Gevva, the “First Search Engine to Focus on Getting Things Done”. Cavan completed his first year of college at the University of Pennsylvania, where he met his Healthie co-founder, before dropping out to build Healthie.
Jean-René Boidron gathers over 30 years of marketing experience in the digital sector and software industry internationally. He worked in various software companies in the US, Japan, and in Europe in the 90s before founding a web agency in France in 1997. He went through the internet bubble burst and made the company one of the pure players in web-based IT consulting in France with 300 consultants.
He co-founded Kameleoon in 2013. In the space of five years, he has turned the bootstrapped young start-up into one of the European leaders in experimentation (A/B testing) & personalization.
Thanks to a single, unified platform gathering both web and product experimentation, Kameleoon managed to enter and expand into the US. The company is now global and expanding very fast in all markets.
He also supports many entrepreneurs in their development plans in France and abroad in organizations such as Réseau Entreprendre or CroissancePlus serving as Vice-President for the latter for 5 years.
Iman Abuzeid, M.D., is the Co-founder and CEO of Incredible Health, the fastest-growing career marketplace for healthcare workers whose matching technology is the fastest, most effective way for hospitals to hire qualified permanent nurses. With Incredible Health, hospitals can hire nurses in less than 20 days versus a national average of 90 days. Backed by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Incredible Health is on a mission to help healthcare professionals live better lives, and find and do their best work. Hundreds of leading hospitals across the country trust Incredible Health, including HCA, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Stanford Health Care, Baylor Scott & White, and many more. Iman is an MD and holds an MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
DeVaris Brown is the CEO and co-founder of Meroxa, a VC-backed company enabling teams of any size and level of expertise to build real-time data pipelines in minutes not months. Prior to founding Meroxa, DeVaris was a product leader at Twitter, Heroku, VSCO, and Zendesk. When he’s not sitting in front of a computer, you can find DeVaris behind a camera capturing moments in time, at the stove whipping up the finest delicacies, or behind a set of turntables, moving a sea of people through music.
Aye Moah is a seasoned startup co-founder and CEO of Boomerang with a decade of experience in bringing category-creating products to market. Boomerang, the most popular service for Gmail and Outlook, enables millions of people to work more effectively with their email and calendar scheduling. Boomerang’s latest addition to their service is changing the way people schedule meetings. Moah is a skilled startup leader with multiple patents and a reputation as an industry trailblazer. Moah has grown Boomerang's revenue from 0 to $10M in annual revenue profitably, on a $400k total investment.
Jennifer Henderson is the founder and CEO of Tilt, a company revolutionizing employee leave in the workplace. Tilt’s SaaS platform creates a human experience through technology to support every aspect of a leave of absence. She spent 15 years in corporate America prior to founding Tilt in a variety of operational roles. She lives in Colorado with her family and loves being outdoors.
Michael Zalle is the Founder and CEO of YellowBird. He is responsible for creating, building, and launching new concepts and companies, resulting in multiple successful exits over a 25-year tech career. He has built a career through a unique balance of commercializing novel business models, operationalizing innovative technologies and platforms, rapidly scaling operations, and building market-shaping ecosystems. Michael’s companies and purpose are ever focused on serving others. Whether it be satellite systems for First Responders, environmental products for flood and spill response, or time and economic support for difference-making organizations, Michael believes in “doing well while doing good.”
Michael’s college journey began at San Francisco State University and was completed at Pepperdine University Graziadio Business School while working full-time and traveling at age 19. As a lifelong member and mentor for the Amputee Coalition of America, he enjoys the time he’s able to invest in mentoring kids with physical challenges.
Married 22 years with two children, Michael spends most of his free time at lacrosse or soccer games chasing balls, applying band-aids, and handing out snacks. He enjoys traveling and engages in a variety of sports including golf and tennis; he ranks himself as an incredibly average golfer and perhaps even worse tennis player.
Tim McLaughlin is Co-Founder and CEO of GoTab, Inc., a leading restaurant commerce platform that helps more than 1,000 large- and mid-sized restaurants, breweries, bars, hotels and other venues run lean, profitable operations while making guests even more satisfied. Started in 2016, GoTab processes over $250M in transactions per year with operations across 35 U.S. states, Canada and growing. The company offers a host of solutions, including its all-in-one point-of-sale (POS) and property management system (PMS) integrations, mobile ordering and payment features, and kitchen management systems. An experienced e-commerce executive, board member, and restaurateur, prior to founding GoTab, McLaughlin led Siteworx, Inc., a mid-sized digital experience agency with clients including PayPal, Goldman Sachs, VeriSign, Bain & Co., and Thermo Fisher Scientific, to a successful PE exit in 2013. Subsequent to Siteworx, Tim and his wife Jen co-founded Caboose Brewing Co., an upscale brewery and farm-to-table concept based in Fairfax, Virginia. Tim is also the owner of craft beer and cider distributor, Ferment Nation. In 2022, Insider named Tim to its annual Restaurant Innovators Power Players list, and Inc. recognized GoTab as a Power Partner for the company’s proven track record of supporting entrepreneurs and helping startups grow.
Tara Fung is a growth-oriented leader who believes web3 technology will fundamentally alter the way the world works and what is possible. As co-founder & CEO of Co:Create, she is working to revolutionize brand loyalty programs and unlock the power of community for innovative brands. Prior to Co:Create, Tara worked in industries spanning German automotive, FinTech and crypto. Tara is a graduate of Harvard Business School and the University of South Carolina.
Mark Jacobson is the Co-Founder & CEO of Terrain Analytics, a strategic workforce analytics data platform, and a co-founder & fund advisor of SignalFire. Previously, Mark served as a senior Partner and executive committee team member at True Search, the fastest-growing & 7th largest search firm in North America. Prior to True, Mark founded Ignition Talent Group and spent his early career working at both large & boutique executive search firms. Mark earned a B.A from Tufts University.
Kashyap Deorah is the Founder of HyperTrack - The world's largest community of logistics tech builders. Kashyap has founded and sold three companies, invested in over 75 companies, 6 of whom have become unicorns, and written a bestseller on Indian startups. He has operated in the India-US corridor for 25 years now and now lives with his wife and two children in Berkeley. Kashyap and his wife Shruti are active philanthropists who contribute to causes related to education, climate, and gender and serve on the board of the IIT Bombay Heritage Fund.
Danny Maloney is the co-founder and CEO of Tailwind – an AI-driven marketing suite that empowers 1 million+ entrepreneurs and small businesses to reach their marketing goals, no matter their budget. Tailwind powers your entire marketing process, from crafting marketing plans and creating original photo assets to designing posts, writing copy, to distributing content. And soon, it'll also be able to create and optimize ad campaigns for you as they integrate Nectar9, which Tailwind acquired last year. Before founding Tailwind, Danny worked to develop Google and YouTube products such as Street View and the YouTube Partner Program and was General Manager-Video at AOL, where he propelled the company to the #2 spot in US video in 18 months.
Duy Bao Vo started Productfy with the belief that financial services have both a huge moral obligation and a tremendous opportunity to do societal good and that by democratizing the process of launching financial products, we can engender a more compassionate, empathetic, and socially-just financial ecosystem. Duy spends his days collaborating with teams to help clients scale their FinTech programs through Productfy’s technology and program management offerings while working towards the vision of enabling any organization to offer a credit union-like experience in less than one week. Early in his career, Duy served as a software developer building fraud detection software for the card processing system and eventually led engineering, product, and operations teams for various venture-backed companies. Duy has Bachelor's degrees in Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, and Physics and an M.S. in Computer Science from San José State University.
Duy is the proud father of two young children, both named after Star Trek characters.
Christopher Dell'Olio is the CEO of WebJoint, a leading technology company that provides innovative software solutions to businesses in the retail delivery and logistics industries, including the cannabis industry. With a background in business and technology, Christopher has been instrumental in guiding the growth and success of WebJoint. Under his leadership, the company has been helping companies streamline their operations and increase efficiency. Christopher has a deep understanding of the challenges faced by these industries and is dedicated to providing solutions that help businesses stay ahead of the competition. With his expertise and vision, Christopher is shaping the future of the retail delivery and logistics landscape.
Matthew Gregory is the founder and CEO of Ockam.
Ockam empowers developers to build applications that can Trust Data-in-Motion across complex, variable, and hostile networks.
Matthew has a diverse background in cloud-native open-source software development. While at Microsoft he led Azure's pivot to Open Source. He was at Heroku during his formative years, and he built the Weather API that your favorite weather app probably uses. He is also a former America's Cup and Volvo Ocean Race navigator.
Yegor Sak could never keep a job, so decided to work for himself. He created viral videos before Youtube existed, and branched out into other fields after learning to program. Yegor operated a dev agency before working on his own projects again. He bootstrapped Windscribe and became profitable in month 2.
Stefan Deeran is co-founder and COO of Vendelux, the leading AI platform for events and conferences.
Prior to Vendelux, Stefan ran the Platform Solutions division at Shutterstock overseeing AI and martech partnerships with Amazon, OpenAI, Google, and Facebook, and also led GTM teams at venture-backed startups in NYC including NewsCred (acquired by Optimizely) and Parse.ly (acquired by Automattic).
Brandon Cooper is an internet technology businessman, CEO and co-founder of Aphid. Brandon has over 15 years of experience in Information Technology and Marketing. Brandon specializes in Artificial Intelligence, Machine/Deep Learning, and Blockchain technology. Brandon has been nominated for top tech leader awards and has been featured on television broadcasts nationwide.
Mr. Kevin Greene is the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Tassat Group Inc., the leading provider of blockchain-based real-time solutions to banks. He joined the firm in 2017 as a senior Member of the Board and was named Executive Chairman in 2019. Mr. Greene is regarded as a driving force of innovation and progress in the application of blockchain-based technology solutions for the financial services industry.
In addition to his roles at Tassat, Mr. Greene serves as a Managing Partner of James Alpha Management, LLC. Previously, Mr. Greene served as Chairman & CEO of Capital Resource Holdings, LLC, the holding company parent of CRA RogersCasey, one of the nation’s leading pension consulting firms advising more than $500 billion in the pension fund, foundation, endowment, and high net worth assets.
Earlier, Mr. Greene founded Bryant Park Capital, a privately held investment bank specializing in private equity financing and mergers & acquisitions for both private and public companies in the U.S. and Europe. Prior to founding Bryant Park in 1991, Mr. Greene was a senior consultant with McKinsey & Company, focused on corporate finance, corporate strategy, and mergers & acquisitions.
Mr. Greene serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the Michael J. Farrell Foundation and is a Trustee of Kaatsbaan Cultural Park and the Woodstock Film Festival.
An accomplished author and speaker, Mr. Greene has published articles focused on economics and political science and has been a featured speaker at several asset management industry conferences.
Mr. Greene earned a B.A. degree in Economics (with distinction) from Georgetown University, a master’s degree in Public Policy (Kennedy Scholar) from Harvard University and an MBA in Finance from New York University. He holds the Series 7, 24, 63 and 79 licenses with FINRA.
Jackson Rodriguez has spent the last decade growing startups from 0 to 1. He is the CEO and founder of 3RM, a firm building tools to discover, connect, and manage relationships across the web3 ecosystem and beyond. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of California, Davis.
Michael Hamilton is the founder and CEO of Peeva- the first and only universal pet microchip identification system, central pet microchip registry, and unified database of electronic medical records for pets. Prior to turning to entrepreneurship, Michael developed more than a decade of experience in New York managing litigation support and E-Discovery projects for some of the nation's largest law firms and corporations. Michael's experience includes work over the past decade at Bloomberg LP, Wolters Kluwer and DTI Global. He has worked in consulting, business development (at the Sales, Management, and Director levels) competitive intelligence, legal and regulatory compliance, eDiscovery, and litigation support.
Giora Engel is the co-founder and CEO of Neosec. Prior to starting his second cybersecurity company, Giora was VP of Product Management at Palo Alto Networks after it acquired his company, LightCyber, which covered the field of network & endpoint behavioral analytics. For nearly a decade, he served as an officer in the elite technological unit in the Israel Defense Forces, where he pioneered the development of cyber technologies. Giora is a recognized innovator in cybersecurity, cyber warfare, and behavioral analytics, and he holds several patents.
Rebecca Clyde is the co-founder and CEO of Botco.ai, which helps businesses converts content into conversations. Using the AI chat cloud, businesses can personalize conversations, engage their customers and gain better insights. Rebecca accomplished entrepreneur with fundraising experience, having raised nearly $5M for her company in venture capital. Prior to Botco.ai, Ms. Clyde co-founded and directed Ideas Collide, an Inc. 5000 marketing automation agency now in its 17th year serving Fortune 500 companies. Ms. Clyde began her career at Intel and holds an MBA from the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. Ms. Clyde is the most recent recipient of the prestigious Spirit of Enterprise Award bestowed by Arizona State University and the Economic Club of Phoenix.
Pierre Brunelle is the CEO and Co-Founder of Noteable, a collaborative data notebook that enables data-driven teams to use and visualize data, together. Pierre led Amazon’s notebook initiatives both for internal use as well as for SageMaker. He also worked on many open-source initiatives including a standard for Data Quality work and an open-source collaboration between Amazon and UC Berkeley to advance AI and machine learning. Pierre helped launch the first Amazon online car leasing store in Europe. At Amazon Pierre also launched a Price Elasticity Service and pushed investments in Probabilistic Programming Frameworks. And Pierre represented Amazon on many occasions to teach Machine Learning or at conferences such as NeurIPS. Pierre also writes about Time in Organization Studies. Pierre holds an MS in Building Engineering from ESTP Paris and an MRes in Decision Sciences and Risk Management from Arts et Métiers ParisTech.
Paul is the founder and CEO of OpStart, a full-stack accounting and finance solution for startups. Founded in 2020, OpStart currently serves over 60 venture-backed startups and recently raised a $2M seed round.
Paul is also a co-founder and board member of Puente, a non-profit tech company that powers data-driven community development in nine countries. His prior experience includes stints as a VC at Adams Street Partners and investment banker at William Blair.
Paul lives in his hometown of South Bend Indiana with his fiance, Morgan. He holds a finance degree from Notre Dame.
Jonathan B Fishbeck is the Founder and CEO of EstateSpace, a platform to simplify estate management. EstateSpace helps our clients simplify how they manage operations, communicate and share information. With families, family offices, a network of service providers on our platform, and a commitment to transparency and equality in estate management – we are breaking the mold on how estates operate.
Before devoting his work full-time to EstateSpace, Jonathan Fishbeck served as the Founder and CEO at a design-build firm whose focus was advising, developing, and operationalizing sizable estate properties for Ultra-High Net Worth families and family offices. It’s this experience and expertise, combined with a background in technology that was the genesis for EstateSpace.
In addition, Jonathan serves a number of philanthropic organizations where his passion for helping veterans, children, and blood cancer research shines through. These positions and organizations include Chairman, Fisher House Foundation, Board Member, Children’s Voice International, and Board Member, There Goes My Hero, respectively.
Chao Cheng Shorland is the co-founder and CEO of ShelterZoom, a leading blockchain-based, smart-document SaaS provider. She was interviewed by The New York Times about ShelterZoom's blockchain technology that was used by a Vatican library to preserve manuscripts.
Their latest product, Document GPS is an extension that enables users to track their email attachments and revoke access, even after a recipient has opened the email. Chao was named Female Innovator of the Year in 2019 by the Women World Awards. Under her leadership, ShelterZoom won a Top 50 Startup award at the WorldFestival 2021 Innovation Awards. Besides that, the company has been accepted into the world's largest corporate sustainability initiative, United Nations Global Compact.
Antoine Castel, Co-Founder of MetaEngine, a blockchain-based platform where developers can choose blockchain features to fit their games. Antoine is a seasoned entrepreneur with a strong background in finance & crypto as a tokenomics expert & portfolio manager. He has former investment banking experience and has created and sold several companies. He is a serial gamer who wants cooler games, better stories, and smarter game economies and has been part of the gaming industry for 12 years.
Dallas Griffin has a long track record of successfully advising upstream and natural resources clients on a wide array of assignments, including acquisitions & divestitures, mergers & acquisitions, public and private capital raise, and strategic alternatives reviews. Prior to co-founding Anode Labs (the team behind the React network) Griffin worked for Piper Sandler since 2009, where he held the position of managing director.
He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with bachelor’s degrees in business honors and finance, as well as an MBA degree. Griffin was ESPN The Magazine's First Team Academic All-American and a four-time First Team Academic All-Big 12 pick while he was a 4-year Academic All-American on the university's Division I football team. He is also a member of the Texas Friar Society.
About React:
The React Network is building the world’s biggest decentralized crypto network to unlock a new energy source, allowing participants to contribute their energy resources in exchange for value accrual in the network. The U.S. is struggling to modernize the electric grid, and needs the grid to become more flexible to prevent power outages from the effects of climate change. Anode is creating opportunities for everyday homeowners to earn compensation while supporting the energy grid and combating climate change at the same time.
Maika is the CEO of Webacy - the protection layer for self-custody. Webacy develops tools and services to make self-custody safer and easier. Webacy is strictly non-custodial and no-access (no seed phrases, private keys, or passwords). Webacy is hella venture-backed.
Maika is also a former professional acrobat and performer for the Cirque Du Soleil brand of shows. She attended Stanford University and specialized in Artificial Intelligence. Maika was most recently a Cybersecurity Engineer for Microsoft. She is a Forbes 30 Under 30 lister.
Ashley is a Principal at VamosVentures. She started her career at Morgan Stanley in Capital Markets and moved into strategic roles at Shoptiques.com, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Estee Lauder, focused on the intersection of consumers and technology. She was previously an investor at Brand Foundry Ventures, Founders Factory, and Dorm Room Fund. Ashley holds a BA from Brown University and an MBA from MIT Sloan.
VamosVentures invests in diverse founding teams and mission-oriented companies across FinTech, Sustainability, Future of Work, Commerce, and Health and Wellness. 100% of their portfolio is diverse led and over 87% of their portfolio companies are Latinx led. 100% of their investment team is also diverse.
As COO, Denise leads the HR, people, and operations and is the chair for the company's Black Professionals group. An experienced operator, Denise played a pivotal role in enabling Meraki’s growth, helping the team navigate its high-growth startup stage through a successful integration as part of Cisco Meraki. Prior to her eight years at Meraki, she held leadership roles at Uncommon Schools, Long Drugs Stores (CVS), TJX Companies, and Frito Lay.
Geng Wang is the CEO and Co-founder of Civic Champs, a volunteer and mentorship management platform that triples volunteer capacity and retention for nonprofits.
Prior to Civic Champs, Geng co-founded two companies, Rent Jungle (an apartment search engine) and Community Elf (a social media management firm). Both companies were acquired in 2014 and 2017 respectively.
Geng is also a former McKinsey & Company consultant and holds a bachelors from Michigan State University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Mark Lurie is the CEO & Co-Founder of Shipyard Software. He is a serial entrepreneur and investor who previously founded two venture-backed startups. Codex is a blockchain-based title registry for art & collectibles used in the offline auction world with 500,000 NFT titles created (ICO 2018). Prior to Codex, Mark founded an online marketplace for art & collectibles, which was acquired in 2016. Previously, Mark was an investor at Bessemer Venture Partners, where his investments included Twilio (TWLO). He is currently a Venture Partner at FJLabs and a board member of GMO Trust (issuer of GYEN, the first Yen-backed stablecoin) and the Foundation for Art & Blockchain (a 501c3 nonprofit). He has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA in Economics from Harvard College.
Shawn Lipman is the CEO at Feedonomics, the leading full-service feed management solution provider for multichannel retail. Shawn is passionate about ecommerce and the role that technology can play in solving very challenging business problems for the world’s largest brands, retailers, and agencies.
An accomplished entrepreneur, Shawn employs his talents in leadership and problem solving to create an amazing culture that empowers people. He previously founded and sold a healthcare company that in 10 years grew to be the contracted provider for some of the largest healthcare chains in the United States.
Shawn is enthusiastic about building strong and enduring culture-based organizations. This appreciation was formed over 40 years of playing and coaching his beloved sport of rugby at the highest level, including representing the USA in the 1991 Rugby World Cup and being inducted into the US Rugby Hall of Fame.
His love for ensuring sustainable excellence and world-class performance drives Feedonomics’ commitment to the Feed On Principles, which are predicated on servant leadership, no egos, creating a learning environment, and going for the gap, among others.
Kenneth Landau is the CEO and co-founder of Mytaverse, a leading enterprise metaverse company. Born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, he attended Universidad Metropolitana, attaining a B.S. in Civil Engineering. He then attended the George Washington University for an MBA with a concentration in Finance. Landau then joined McKinsey & Co. in their New York offices as a Management Consultant for two years before acquiring and expanding the Mail Boxes Etc. franchise in the Latam region. Landau led the expansion of MBE in different countries in Latam for 30 years, building one of the most successful networks in the world. In 2020 Landau co-founded Comerxia inc, a technology company that enabled cross border commerce from the United States to any country in the world and the first back-end integrated technology with Amazon.com cart for international shipping and Customs calculations on the fly. He lives in Miami.
Miles Everson joined direct sourcing platform MBO Partners in 2019 as Chief Executive Officer.
Most recently, Everson served as Global Advisory and Consulting CEO for Pricewaterhouse Coopers, LLP (PwC), leading the company's Asia Pacific Americas Advisory and Consulting businesses.
Before joining MBO, Everson had a rich career with PwC, almost three decades in total. He began in the firm's Assurance practice, moving to leadership roles within Advisory/Consulting in both Canada and the U.S., including several Financial Services leadership roles, and eventually became the U.S. Advisory/Consulting Vice Chairman. In 2015, he stepped into the new role of Asia Pacific Americas Advisory and Consulting Leader to help globalize the Advisory/Consulting practice.
Everson has worked with many of the world's largest and most prominent organizations, specializing in executive management. He helps companies balance growth, reduce risk, maximize return, and excel in strategic business priorities.
He is a sought-after public speaker and contributor and has been a case study for success from Harvard Business School.
Chris Kirsch is the CEO of runZero, a company he co-founded with Metasploit creator HD Moore to help companies solve their asset inventory challenges. Chris started his career at an InfoSec startup in Germany and has since worked for PGP, nCipher, Rapid7, and Veracode. He has a passion for OSINT and Social Engineering. In 2017, he earned the Black Badge for winning the Social Engineering Capture the Flag competition at DEF CON, the world’s largest hacker conference.
Annafi Wahed, CFA, has a broad array of experience spanning the federal government, non-profit, political and private sectors. In 2016, she left her role as a Senior Consultant at Ernst & Young to join the Democratic campaign. Walking door to door, she saw firsthand how next-door neighbors could be completely isolated from one another by the media they consume. Annafi launched The Flip Side as a passion project in 2017, and has since spearheaded each new stage of the venture.
The Flip Side is a startup on a mission to help bridge the gap between liberals and conservatives. Through their free daily newsletter they offer a one-stop shop for smart, concise summaries of political analysis from both conservative and liberal media. They recently launched a forum which uses human-centered design principles and a custom ranking algorithm to reward thoughtfulness and bipartisanship, rather than trolling or clickbait.
Alex Yevlakhov, COO of Jumbo Exchange – After entering the Web3 space for the first time in 2016, he has worked on facilitating ecosystem growth in EOS and Solana. He holds a Master's degree in International Relations from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, and is fluent in English, German, and Russian.
Layne Nadeau is the Founder and CEO of Nval.com, a B2B company producing mark-to-model NFT price and market analytics data for regulated (or any) companies and platforms.
Layne has led multi-million dollar initiatives in retail banking, investment banking, blockchain, and digital asset industries as well as US state governments, public sector, commercial and retail automotive services, public utilities, transportation, professional associations, and universities.
Layne has a bachelor’s degree in Math and Computer Science and is genuinely excited about digital asset markets, and ecosystems and is building to enable this new technology space.
Layne is a father to 3 girls, a husband, an avid cyclist, sailor, brewer, world traveler, and NFT/DeFi degen.
As a new dad, David had a stressful beach vacation and dreamt up the idea for his current venture, Beachy. Growing up in hospitality and being a ‘beach boy’ from the ages of 14-22, provided David with the insight and experience to modernize the beach vacation experience.
Starting from the simple idea, “Why can’t I book my beach chairs, the same way I book an airline seat, at the same time I make my hotel reservation?” The company has now evolved into a fully integrated ordering platform empowering recreation and food and beverage staff to deliver a better guest experience while increasing topline revenue by over 40% at hard to service outlets such as the beach and pool.
Beachy patented technology has won numerous awards for their innovative platform and have been published in articles around the world, including:
HiTech: Entrepreneur 20x winner 2021
Phocuswright: People’s Choice, Emerging Company Tech Innovation of the Year in 2019
Phocuswright: Runner up Emerging Company Tech Innovation of the Year in 2019
VRMA: People’s Choice Tech Innovation of the Year 2019
VRMA: Tech Innovation of the Year 2019
Killian Fjellbakk is a Norwegian serial entrepreneur living in Zurich Switzerland. He was selected as Forbes 30 under 30 in Switzerland, and is now working on a digital wellbeing app called Zario. The app helps people reduce unwanted screen time by using psychology and gamification and has been selected as honorary app for good by the google play store. He belongs to a 3500 year old shamanic ethnic minority group above the arctic circle called the Sámi. In his personal time, he likes to complete challenges on his bucket list which can be found on his personal website: killianfjellbakk.com. This year he completed an Ironman race, famous for being one of the toughest endurance races in the world.
Curtis Northcutt is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur focusing on machine learning and AI to empower people. He is the CEO and co-founder of Cleanlab, an AI software company that improves machine learning model performance by automatically fixing data and label issues in real-world, messy datasets. Curtis completed his PhD at MIT where he invented Cleanlab’s algorithms for automatically finding and fixing label issues in any dataset. He is the recipient of the MIT Morris Levin Thesis Award, the NSF Fellowship, and the Goldwater Scholarship and has worked at several leading AI research groups, including Google, Oculus, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and NASA.
Since reading The Wal-Mart Effect by Charles Fishman in 2011, Olivia Pedersen has been on an 11-year-long journey to figure out how she can contribute to solving the climate crisis. After working as a designer in the Athletic & Outdoor Industry for almost a decade, she became disheartened by the industry she loved so much and the ironic impact it has on people and the planet. During Olivia’s Master’s research in Sustainable Design, human-centered design, systems thinking, behavioral science, and circular economics grasped her curiosity. With her expertise in creativity and sustainability, she is on a mission to build an innovative solution for a sustainable future. Olivia founded Sustaio in January 2020 which was the brainchild of her M.A. thesis research. Sustaio empowers people to live climate-smarter by incentivizing emissions-reducing behavior. Sustaio provides real-time tracking and information for the everyday individual to take immediate action in reducing their footprint, like a FICO for sustainability. Imagine a world whereby having a healthier climate impact you can unlock better pricing in the world.
Eli Rubel is the CEO of MatterMade.co and has served as a marketing advisor to companies like Dropbox, Loom, Productboard, Calm, and many others. Prior to Matter Made, Eli was the founding CEO where he led Glider through a successful acquisition to FPX.
Andrew Headrick grew up in the Western suburbs of Minneapolis. He grew up in a large family with quadruplet younger siblings, which meant he spent ample time in primary care clinics and waiting rooms during his younger years. Andrew attended Middlebury College in Vermont, where he studied Economics and Chinese. He has held various roles professionally, at Medtronic, at a local hedge fund, and most recently at Piper Sandler, an investment bank, where he completed 13 healthcare transactions worth over $4.3B. It was during his time at Piper that he realized just how badly the healthcare system needed to change. Andrew founded Kavira Health in late 2020 in an effort to make everyday healthcare more convenient, more cost-effective, and more accessible to all. Kavira has been doing just that – since its inception, Kavira has had thousands of patient interactions with a 9/10 patient rating, their patients have never paid a copay, nor have their patients ever had to leave their homes to receive care.
Alex Rappaport is an award-winning leader with a passion for innovation and sustainability. He is the CEO and Co-Founder of ZwitterCo, Inc., a company that develops membranes that are immune to irreversible fouling and enable treatment and reuse of the world’s toughest wastewaters. At ZwitterCo, Alex drives strategic planning, organizational design, and the long-term vision for company growth.
Under his leadership, ZwitterCo has been recognized by the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center as a leader in clean water technologies. Alex has also led the company through multiple highly successful rounds of financing with both institutional and strategic partners.
Alex is a fierce supporter of his team. His strength is setting a culture of empowerment with a philosophy of “come as you are – love what you build.” He encourages the same entrepreneurial spirit, creativity, and resourcefulness in his team and has fostered a community that is dedicated to ZwitterCo’s mission to preserve and manage industrial and agricultural water and wastewater.
Alex holds an M.S. in Innovation and Management and a B.S. in Environmental Engineering from Tufts University.
Chelsey Roney brings her business-building and strategy experience to Proxi, where she serves as COO and growing the business through sales and marketing. Chelsey is a serial founder who has exited two of her companies: SaaS business in the University space, and a local services business. She has also worked in omni channel marketing at Microsoft and Finance at Boeing. Month after month, Chelsey's persistence, attention to detail, and deep understanding of finance and marketing have helped Proxi grow.
Eric Tang is a co-founder of Livepeer and Livepeer Studio. He has been working in the blockchain space since 2016, and in the software industry since 2006. He is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, where he studied Computer Engineering and Physics. Previously, Eric was co-founder and CTO of Wildcard.
After spending years working in product at fast-growing startups, Dan co-founded Donut to help teams foster cultures of connectivity, collaboration, and belonging. When he’s not working on Donut, you can find him playing music for business with his band, Mobile Steam Unit, and teaching a lean startup course at Brown University.
With experience in the payments industry for over a decade, Caleb Avery was often asked to help software companies who were looking to monetize their payments. Unable to find a solution that didn’t require his clients to compromise on either technology, user experience, or economics, he decided that he needed his own solution.
That led him to build Tilled and create PayFac-as-a-Service.
Caleb first started working in the payments industry while in college, co-founding a credit card processing independent sales organization, or ISO, with a few of his friends. Beginning with very traditional credit card processing customers including restaurants, salons, liquor stores and other brick and mortar businesses, Merchant Services Done Right later expanded into processing services for e-commerce businesses, software companies and now operates in 22+ states across the country.
Over the years, he also consulted for larger software companies processing anywhere from $100 million to over a billion in annual payments volume. These clients needed a payments expert to help them negotiate agreements, develop new pricing models, and maximize their revenue from credit card processing.
It was while working with these businesses that Caleb had a realization: software companies wanting to optimize their integrated payment processing solution were really looking for two key things. One, an instant digital sign-up experience for their customers. And two, to maximize the revenue they could earn.
Tilled’s revolutionary PayFac-as-a-Service platform allows software companies to enjoy all of the benefits of becoming a PayFac without any of the upfront investment or ongoing overheads, all while capturing the lion’s share of the economics.
Daniel Baraghoush is the Founder and CEO of ArcadeQuest. He's won awards for entrepreneurship, innovation, and filmmaking. His background is in gaming, capital markets, and marketing. Daniel has worked with companies that surpassed the $1Bn market cap.
As a child growing up in Los Angeles, Jean Smart watched her immigrant parents work tirelessly to provide for their family and employees.
Owners of a grocery store and a restaurant; Jean’s parents valued education and hard work. While her parents took care of everyone around them, they didn’t formally invest in their retirement, leaving them vulnerable in their later years. Jean’s parents were an all too familiar story in the US; equal parts inspiration and cautionary tale.
After a career in financial services, Jean decided to start Penelope - a 401(k) platform focused on micro and small businesses. Monica Barry joined as a co-founder and remains an advisor. Today, Jean and the Penelope team are on a mission to enable every small business owner and employee to build a bright financial future.
Danny Nathan is the consummate "square peg." Throughout his career, he's been called a product person, a UX guy, a designer, a strategist, and a marketer (and a few other choice names like "The Cleaner"). And with over 18 years of experience in product, design, and technology, most of those are spot-on.
Today, Danny leads the team at Apollo 21 — an entrepreneurially-minded crew focused on building products, services, and companies. Apollo 21 sits somewhere between software consultancy and venture studio. The team works with clients ranging from small startups who are building their first product to multi-billion dollar corporations looking to generate operational efficiency through the creation of bespoke technology.
Pranav Buggana joined the Climate Fight in Sumer 2022 after 3 years of working in Data Science/ML Engineering for manufacturing, media, and political campaigns. He is a solo founder of his first Startup, Toohla, which is dedicated to empowering individuals to fight climate change. Toohla's mission is to jumpstart a global Sustainability Movement through a Gamified app where Individuals can track, reduce and offset their emissions.
Rijul Gupta is a Synthetic-Media expert and thought leader with a degree in Machine Learning from Yale University. Rijul has spent the past five years developing patent-pending synthetic media algorithms while pursuing various ethical-only consumer, enterprise, and dual-use applications of the technology. He has been featured in Forbes Magazine for his work as a pioneer in the burgeoning Synthetic-Media landscape. As CEO of DeepMedia, Rijul has won pitch competitions at Harvard and Yale and maintains relationships with Professor Zucker (Machine Learning) and Professor Staib (Signals Processing) at Yale University. Rijul is a Thiel Fellow Finalist and a patented inventor whose entrepreneurial career has revolved around the study of DeepFakes and the technology behind them He possesses rare and unique technical knowledge that is necessary to program and create a solution to this rapidly evolving field of technology.
Ethan Castro is a hard-of-hearing music producer, songwriter, engineer, and inventor with Tourette’s Syndrome. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Music Composition from California State University, Fresno; a Master of Arts in Music Industry Administration from California State University, Northridge; and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Digital Composition at the University of California, Riverside where he invented his patent-pending audio technology that allows people to simultaneously hear and feel audio in high-fidelity. Ethan serves as Chief Technical Officer of EDGE Sound Research, Vice President of EDGE Original Inc., Graduate Studio Manager of UCR’s Experimental Acoustics Research Studio (EARS) facility, and was previously the Vice President of the Riverside Philharmonic and the founder of the EARS Student Group. Ethan’s 15 years of music production/audio engineering, forthcoming dissertation on tactile audio/multimodal composition, and a lifetime of practicing visual and touch-based hearing compensation methods position him as a leader in audio innovation and multi-sensory experiences.
Or Weis is the CEO and co-founder of Permit.io a serial entrepreneur who is passionate about developer tools, previously founding Rookout.com, a leading production debugging solution; and “Upwards”, the largest founders’ PLG community. Before becoming a founder, Or worked as a lead engineer in multiple cybersecurity and big data companies, the intelligence corps., as a consultant for the Ministry of Defense, and as VP R&D at Netline CT cyber division.
Prompting better and safer engineering Or has been recognized as a Snyk Ambassador, and as a JFrog Superfrog
Jeffrey Scholz is the founder of RareSkills.io, a remote-only web3 bootcamp focused on transforming junior web3 engineers into senior ones. RareSkills students have gotten job offers from elite blockchain companies like Trail of Bits and LayerZero. Unlike traditional coding bootcamps, RareSkills targets experienced engineers who are seeking to become genuine experts. Many of RareSkills' students already had jobs as smart contract engineers before they joined, and some have even had jobs as solidity instructors.
Jeffrey Scholz is the bestselling author on Udemy for intermediate and advanced-level solidity blockchain courses. Before he founded RareSkills, he was the youngest senior engineering manager at Yahoo, where he built the video machine learning team and platform from the ground up. He has two patents in machine learning and has placed in the top 10 in highly competitive international machine learning competitions.
He has a graduate degree in theoretical computer science from Columbia University. He currently resides in Jakarta Indonesia.
Nick Jordan is the CEO and founder of Narrative. He has spent his career at technology-driven companies like Adobe and Yahoo. Prior to Narrative, Nick was the SVP of product and strategy at Tapad, where he helped evolve the company from a media business into a data and technology licensing business.
Teampay CEO and founder Andrew Hoag revolutionized corporate spending when he created Teampay in 2016, after seeing how broken legacy platforms were firsthand as an employee and operator. Hoag’s vision guided the company to build a breakthrough patented platform and now, Hoag continues to innovate on his ongoing quest to bring human-centered finance to companies. Hoag's leadership has allowed the company to continue to see exponential growth – Teampay now supports hundreds of thousands (over 250,000) of users from high-growth, public or IPOing companies.
A cloud native pioneer and evangelist, Tobi Knaup serves as the CEO of D2iQ. Previously, Tobi served as D2iQ’s Chief Technology Officer. As the primary author of the world’s first open-source container orchestrator (Marathon) and co-creator of the KUDO toolkit for building Kubernetes Operators, Tobi has the unique ability to understand an organization’s cloud-native journey from all levels--business, technological, and talent. And as the driver behind D2iQ’s next-generation Kubernetes platform, Tobi helps make it possible for organizations to navigate the cost and time-intensive challenges associated with enterprise-grade container orchestration.
Before co-founding D2iQ, Tobi was one of the first engineers and technology lead at Airbnb, proving the technology’s value at scale in a production environment serving millions of users.
A German native, Tobi holds a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science from the Technical University of Munich.
Nick Durkin is Field CTO for Harness.io, a Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service platform designed to make deployments easy, safe, and repeatable for everyone in engineering and DevOps organizations. He is responsible for the organization's worldwide field engineering team, post-sales engineering team, and a portion of the product. He previously held technical and executive roles in organizations such as OverOps, DataTorrent, and Early Warning. Nick also held the position of a lead architect on the Department of Homeland Security’s FIVICS initiative as well as developed several patents for anti-fraud technologies currently in use among not only the Federal Government but also the world's largest financial institutions.
Diego Hoter, Co-founder & CEO at ucrop.it, a collaborative platform for farmers and companies to agree, trace, verify and share sustainable CROP STORIES(tm) at a farm level in a profitable, digital, scalable, and immutable way. They eliminate greenwashing in climate metrics.
Diego is a +20 years experienced entrepreneur and professional with a demonstrated history of delivering valuable results across several industries such as management consulting, technology, agriculture, and the real estate industry. He is a company and team builder!
Having saved up in the early stages of his career, Ritesh Raj made it his mission to travel as much of the world as he possibly could and has been to over 100 countries so far. In 2017, along with Haitham Saead, Ritesh founded the Florida-based online travel agency (OTA) CuddlyNest — the fastest-growing accommodation booking platform with millions of properties of all types across 200+ countries.
David Heinemeier Hansson is the creator of Ruby on Rails, co-owner of 37signals (makers of Basecamp & HEY), a best-selling author, Le Mans class-winning racing driver, antitrust advocate, and investor in Danish startups.
Devin Bandara is the Founder & CEO of Nirvana Labs - Enlightening Blockchain Infrastructure
Devin started in the blockchain space as a software engineer in 2018 and went on to build Aegis Studio, a web3 engineering and consulting company that solves really hard problems using web3 technology. While growing Aegis Studio, he noticed that many of the existing blockchain/web3 development tools out there were both very expensive and didn't work as advertised.
Seeing that there was a huge opportunity to apply the web2 concepts of vertical integration and web3 concepts of decentralization to the infrastructure level of blockchain networks, they needed to move quickly. Within 9 months, they've deployed Ethereum and Avalanche nodes to 33 cities around the world using a multi-cloud and energy-renewable grid. When comparing their nodes to their competition, web3 developers see an average savings of 40% on their web3 infrastructure bill. The craziest part is that they're 260% faster as well!
In short, they built Nirvana Labs so web3 devs can build better dApps in less time while serving more users for less money!
Their mission is to decentralize all blockchain infrastructure and then decentralize themselves after they have achieved a network effect to build a true public web3 cloud.
Vivien Zhang is a retail executive, turned tech entrepreneur. Having worked at some of the most sought-after luxury brands, including Tiffany & Co. and Harry Winston, she combines her deep knowledge in the luxury space with her passion for technology and founded - The Spot Room.
With a mission to accelerate Web3's mainstream adoption, The Spot Room is building the infrastructure of decentralized commerce to enable physical goods to transact on blockchain.
Prasad Gundumogula is a successful Entrepreneur and Operator since 1999, with an excellent track record for founding multiple transformative ventures and nurturing them from startups to Multi-millions in businesses spanning the Travel, Logistics, Retail, and Auto industries. Built ExploreTrip, Metaminds, Logixcube, and POD Technologies from the ground up and evolved them as technology leaders with path-breaking innovations in the respective business area with successful exits.
In his current venture at Mondee Inc, as a Founder and CEO, he crafted its vision, was instrumental in raising Multi-hundred Million dollars PE investment, and helped it become the pioneer Travel technology company and the World’s largest Air Consolidator. Played a vital part in the strategic acquisitions of Mondee and led the effort to acquire ten (10) top-notch travel technology companies and air consolidators.
Visionary Architect with an uncanny knack for leveraging cutting-edge technology in solving core business problems. A natural leader and team player with a unique capability in motivating people to accomplish impossible missions. A versatile and multifaceted personality can engage in a deep-dive technical session with Architects and Developers and shift gears the next moment to participate in strategic meetings with top management to provide thought leadership. Endeared for his Leadership and genuine concern in welfare of everyone around him and his problem-solving skills, is considered the Go-To man by all strata of the organization.
Jaydeep Korde is co-founder and the CEO of Launchnodes. He is an experienced product person and tech entrepreneur whose work has ranged from building an early cloud computing start-up and selling it to a UK PLC, through to being a Strategic Advisor to global corporations on how to improve the way they make software and use technology. Jaydeep is a cryptocurrency investor and builder and has, over the past 7 years, extensively used microservice architectures using cloud-native development patterns to orchestrate building useful tools that work at scale and hyperscale. Jaydeep is a graduate of Edinburgh University.
Olliver Barr is the co-founder of Finterest and is passionate about changing how people view their money through DeFi. Finterest is truly decentralized borrow and lending protocol on The Internet Computer built to support Native Bitcoin borrow and lending. Olliver is a recent Oregon State graduate with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics with a focus on Statistics and Data Science. He develops DApps from scratch with a focus on well-tested Solidity smart contracts. He is currently developing with Solidity, JavaScript, Node.js, Web3.js, Truffle, and Ganache.
Shiloh Johnson is a long-time accountant and founder of ComplYant, a technology platform offering business owners and entrepreneurs a simple way to manage rules and requirements. Rooted in the firm belief that complex tax laws and nuanced regulations often create barriers for small or underrepresented business owners, her company's mission is to ensure that organizations of all colors, shapes, and sizes have access to accurate fiscal guidance.
Recently, Shiloh was awarded a startup grant by the Annenberg Foundation and Pledge LA, along with capital from MuckerLab and Slauson & Co. She's participated in Grid110 and Techstars LA accelerators. She has written course content for the National Association of Tax Professionals, and is a member of the Institute for Professionals in Taxation, the American Institute of CPAs, and the National Association of Black Accountants.
She fights for the underserved. She believes that the color of your skin should not impact your likelihood of success. Everyone deserves complete and accurate fiscal guidance and financial success.
Shiloh holds a bachelor's degree in accounting, a master's degree in taxation, and is a Certified Public Accounting licenser (*inactive).
Nima Olumi is the CEO of Lightyear Strategies. A Boston based public relations and software development company. He handles and writes communications to the press for over a dozen US businesses, and leads a team of seven engineers. Nima is a passionate economist, he's been quoted in in Forbes, CNN, the NY Times, and the Boston Globe. He focuses on building quality software products for the PR industry. In his free time he enjoys skiing, golfing, and time with his family.
Dave Jacobs is Co-CEO and Co-founder of Homethrive, a fast-growing, tech-enabled healthcare service company that’s disrupting and revolutionizing how organizations support unpaid family caregivers and their loved ones. Dave has extensive experience as a leader in the healthcare industry. Even so, a personal caregiving experience left him struggling to navigate complicated systems and find the support he needed, making family caregiving far more challenging than anticipated. That's why he co-founded Homethrive: to help other unpaid caregivers and their families identify what they need, when they need it, and who they can trust, because no one should have to go through this alone.
Dave spent fifteen years as a senior executive at Medline Industries, a leading healthcare products company. While at Medline, he was President of the Durable Medical Equipment division and ran Medline’s Post-Acute business that encompasses nursing homes, home health, assisted living, and managed care insurance. While in those roles, Dave developed a deep, first-hand appreciation for the benefits of seniors living independently at home and the many challenges seniors and their family caregivers face.
Marco Giardina is the co-founder and CTO at Geowox. Geowox offers property valuation services and technology to Lenders and Private Equity Funds.
As CTO, he is responsible for the data pipeline, machine learning models, and research and development activities on remote sensing and imagery data.
Marco's background is in Statistics, and he spent several years working as a data scientist for banks, telcos, and media companies in Ireland and Italy.
Valentine Osakwe is the CEO & CTO of Peep Connect- the fastest and smartest software for restaurants. Valentine and his co-founder Zerryn Gines founded Peep Connect in 2020. They started Peep because they have witnessed how hard it is for small businesses to build brand loyalty and engagement in an ever-changing digital world. Peep's mission is to help restaurant owners to drive sales and boost customer retention by creating a five-star experience for their customers.
Zeb Anderson, for his sins, is an attorney and is also a developer. He has spent seven years in various corporate roles at Medtronic, including leading analytics for corporate strategy channel management.
From learning cyber security controls and finance in internal audit to leading analytics teams for global channel management and corporate strategy, he understands how technology and data can disrupt old models of operation. He founded two previous start-ups and has the scars to prove it.
He is on the board of PC's for People, a non-profit that has become the nation's largest non-profit solving the digital divide. They have distributed over 80,000 computers, subscribed tens of thousands of families to low-cost internet, and recycled millions of pounds of electronics.
When he is not working, he loves spending time with his two incredible kids and getting out in the woods whenever possible.
Jacek Strzelczyk is a co-founder and CEO of SATIM. He has been leading the company since 2012 when SATIM has been created. Since then the company successfully achieved $1.5M in non-dilutive grants from European Space Agency and raised two rounds from VCs. Jacek has an IT background and a Ph.D. in Remote Sensing.
Frank Chein is the CEO and co-founder of PrizePool. In 2011, he started LearnSprout, a data analytics solution focused around helping schools make sense of their data to help students which were acquired by Apple in 2015. In 2007, he joined Facebook when it had less than 500 people. Frank has a BA in Business Administration and a BS in Economics from the University of Washington.
Ian Hoppe has more than a decade of experience in and around the electrical industry, having worked as an electrician in commercial and industrial environments across the US before studying electrical engineering and working as an electrical designer and drafting engineer. For the last two years, Ian has led the company, Condoit, in its mission to develop digital tools for the electrical industry.
Bob Miles is the Founder and CEO of Salad.com, the world's largest distributed computing platform. Before Salad, he pivoted careers from a pilot to an aerospace engineer, and finally into the startup world. He's an avid traveler and has been to North Korea twice!
Adam Feldman is the CEO and Co-founder of Crispify, an automotive startup. Before founding Crispify, Adam was the VP of Innovation and Strategy of A.L. Group, a global automotive tier-1 company. Adam holds an MBA from Tel Aviv University and an Executive Education Diploma from Wharton Business School.
Julie Kring is an artist, mountaineer, and founder of Khepra - a company with a mission to clean up the chemicals industry. As a biochemist with a lifelong vendetta against petroleum, she has created a novel electrified reactor for converting waste from farms, recycling centers, and forestry into valuable materials to replace traditional petroleum-based materials. Born and raised in Silicon Valley, she watched her father invent new technologies in the garage, and in the summers, they would backpack the Sierra Nevada together. Through these experiences, she learned the value of technology in solving climate change and has since devoted her life to restoring the Earth by creating circular economies for materials.
Anders Lillevik is the CEO and Founder of Focal Point – a company providing an end-to-end enterprise procurement orchestration platform. For more than 20 years as a Chief Procurement Officer, Anders has helped organizations such as Fannie Mae, QBE Insurance, and Webster Bank optimize their procurement operations. In these roles, he has managed teams of 120+, including $8b annual spend and $5m annual procurement software expenditures.
As an industry veteran, Anders had a vision for procurement departments to shift from pure cost centers to strategic contributors to the top and bottom line. In 2020, he set this vision in motion and founded Focal Point to address the unmet need for a complete solution that connects the tools for every aspect of procurement orchestration across siloed data and processes. Focal Point empowers Chief Procurement Officers to move up the digital maturity curve across the entire procurement process.
Cyrus Massoumi founded new telehealth platform Dr. B and can discuss what his regrets are with Zocdoc around not making healthcare more accessible. He's also the founder of startup VC firm humbition and has been recognized by both Fortune and Crains on their 40 under 40 lists and by Fast Company as one of the Most Creative People in Business.
Ed Vincent is an entrepreneur with over 25 years of business, technology, and management experience including 6 years of banking and valuation experience. He founded an e-commerce business in 1999 which was sold to a competitor in 2001. Repeat Founder including SimplyEngage, myProducer, & Predict Ventures. Currently Founder & CEO of festivalPass.
Dr. Katherine Grill is the CEO and co-founder of Neolth, a technology company that provides personalized mental health support to teens through a self-guided platform. Prior to founding Neolth, she worked at Children's National pediatric hospital conducting NIH research, co-founded a community health program for young adults, and was a university professor teaching courses in psychology and neuroscience at undergraduate and graduate levels.
Dr. Grill received a BS in Art Therapy, MA in Psychology, and a PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience. She has expertise in school-based mental health and using digital interventions with adolescents and young adults.
Dr. Grill was selected for the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the 2022 education category and was the recipient of the Outstanding Young Alumni Award in 2022 from the Canterbury School.
Ben Simon is the director of nft & crypto community giving at Crypto for Charity, and he's an avid participant in the space (especially generative art NFTs on Tezos and ETH). Ben's career before crypto was in organizational and strategy development for large, international nonprofits -- groups like Greenpeace, Amnesty International, and UNICEF, among others. Ben worked to build out an advocacy and fundraising program at Mozilla, helped launch the 2012 re-election campaign for President Obama, and has a failed food retail startup in there as well.
Ilene Richardson brings extensive experience as an award-winning multi-platform producer with credits in television, advertising, and web content production. A Clio-award winner, she was an early adopter of web-based innovations in advertising, producing one of the first online viral campaigns. Her firm Imaginary Content specializes in expert content creation across various platforms – from global eCommerce to broadcast, commercial, and video. Imaginary Content is the AOR for Kraft Heinz, producing more than 50,000 digital assets across their CPG products including Heinz Ketchup, Planters Peanuts, Lunchables, Philadelphia Cream Cheese, and many more.
Lori Shao is the CEO and Founder of Finli, a simple, secure, and cost-effective digital platform that financially lifts service-based small businesses. Finli is inspired by Lori’s unique perspective as an immigrant and her desire to create a premium, yet accessible solution that allows all entrepreneurs to easily receive, manage, and grow their finances. For over two decades, Lori has built financial tech for small businesses at Wells Fargo, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), MUFG, and JPMorgan. She resides in Los Angeles with her husband Derek, two human children and almost a dozen non-human children.
Ryan Tansom started his entrepreneurial career at his family business where he was the Executive VP and responsible for the strategic, operational, and financial strategy of the $21 Million company. Ryan helped turn the company around and bring intentional focus to the right strategies which enabled it to be sold for 8 figures to a local competitor in 2014.
Ryan took his experience and founded Arkona to create the Intentional Growth™ Framework which helps owners grow the value of their company with the end in mind through educational training, fractional CFO services and strategic planning.
Ryan also hosts the popular Intentional Growth™ podcast that has 250+ episodes, 360k+ downloads and guests like Gino Wickman, John Warrillow, and the editors of HBR and Inc. Magazine.
Raffaele Colella is the Co-founder and CEO of Mindmesh, a YC company. Mindmesh is the first work OS built for individuals and teams. Raffaele is a 2x Entrepreneur, First startup received multiple Apple features and was acquired by Google. Raf joined Google and then became the lead PM for the new Google News Android app. Raffaele lived and worked 10+ years in Europe and 10+ years in the US.
Ben Heller is the chief technology officer at Driver Technologies, Inc. He has 15+ years of experience building in mobile, web, and server-side technologies. Both global corporations and rising startups have leveraged his code to facilitate growth and innovation. Heller has worn many hats, from co-founder (Cureatr, medical care coordination) to engineering director (Arccos Golf, IOT/data) to principal engineer (Plex, media-streaming). Ben delights in designing streamlined, scalable solutions for unique and challenging problems. His work has taken him deep into large geographically distributed databases with massive simultaneous read/write volume, low-level Bluetooth and audio interfaces, media processing pipelines, and behaviorally-driven motion algorithms. He's excited to combine these experiences to bring forth the next generation of automotive safety.
Ron is the founder and CEO of Kidas, a company that creates an AI-based solution that helps parents to protect their kids from bullying, scams, and online predators in more than 200 online multiplayer games like Fortnite, Roblox, and Call of duty.
Ron holds an MSc in information system engineering and machine learning from the Technion, Israel Institue of technology, an MBA from the Wharton school of business, and an MA in global studies from the Lauder institute at the University of Pennsylvania.
Before starting Kidas, Ron was an early-stage venture capital investor, and prior to that, he was an R&D manager who led teams to create big data and machine learning-based solutions for national security.
Ron is excited about gaming and making gaming a safe experience for kids and families.
Camille Mackenzie is a serial founder, brand strategist and designer, and has a long history working in the construction industry which was the basis for the founding of her startup, Kintail which she co-founded with her husband, Carson, CTO and architect of the platform. Kintail is a no-code analytics platform that enables construction firms to integrate and automate data from any source and build insights in minutes without the need for writing code or spending hours in spreadsheets.
Eduard Oboimov is CEO and Co-founder of eTEU, a startup that aims to digitalize documentation processes involved in international trade for SME exporters and importers. eTEU connects members of the international supply chain to a single blockchain-based platform, digitalizing shipping documentation and automating repetitive bureaucracies involved in organizing the international shipment. The startup is backed by UK Government Research & Innovation Council and leading technology investors, including Techstars Accelerator.
Phil Reynolds is the Co-founder and CEO of DevStride, an Enterprise Agile Planning tool that frees your team from project silos. DevStride raised a $3.3m pre-seed round in August of 2022 following 18 months of initial product development.
Prior to DevStride, Phil was the Co-founder and CEO of BriteCore where he continues to serve as Chariman. BriteCore is a leading administration system for Property Casualty insurance that grew from a $6.1m seed-stage valuation in 2011 to a $180m Series B valuation in 2019.
Phil is a frequent speaker and presenter and has been featured in numerous national publications. He has placed repeatedly in the the Inc 500, been named Missouri Governor’s Entrepreneur of the Year. He has obtained certifications for Scaled Agile Leadership,Property Casualty Underwriting, and Leading Change in Complex Organizations through MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He is also a member of the Acrew Capital Crew of Leaders, and an active LP in the First Close Partners Network.
He is an avid fan of technology, music, whiskey, and car who enjoys mentoring first time founders whenever possible.
Ayal Yogev is the co-founder and CEO of Anjuna Security. Ayal has 20 years of experience in the enterprise security market, serving most recently as VP of Product Management at SafeBreach. Prior to that, he led the Umbrella product management team at OpenDNS, which was acquired by Cisco in 2015 for $635M. Ayal has also held senior product management positions at Lookout and Imperva, and he was part of Imperva's IPO in 2011.
Ayal holds an MBA with honors from UC Berkeley Haas School of Business and a B.Sc. Summa Cum Laude in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Tel-Aviv University.
Kirill is the Founder and CEO of Enki, the company that helps teams with adoption of business intelligence and data tools. Previously, he co-founded Emerging Travel Group (including the brands RateHawk & ZenHotels) a profitable OTA with net annual revenues of over $100M, and Quid, a leading research and analysis tool for strategy teams with revenues of over $50M. In addition to his entrepreneurial ventures, he is an angel investor in Calm, AngelList, Opencare, and more.
From his first job after graduating from WPI building test-bank software and building camera-ready copy for textbook publishers to his time as a professor, Joel Young has been fascinated with the tools, the techniques, and the science of measuring human performance and aptitude.
After a full Air Force career and then serving as a professor, in 2014, Joel shifted to the industry to build LinkedIn's ML infrastructure. In August 2019 he moved to product engineering, leading Assessments in LinkedIn's Talent Solutions organization. This was his amazing learning path with close involvement with external customers, marketing, product management, design, and both business and corporate development.
Along the way, at LinkedIn, he interviewed 550 candidates, personally hired over 50, led hiring committees for five years, and helped define and document LinkedIn's engineering interviewing and hiring processes.
Their work in Assessments and Skills Path opened the door to potential and skills-based hiring. However, it didn't address the problem with traditional interviewing processes using ad hoc interviews resulting in a selection based on comfort and is-like-me decision-making. These processes bias against non-traditional candidates AND increase the likelihood of underperforming hires.
In the early summer of 2021, they founded Hireguide to address this gap.
Priyom is a seasoned Enterprise Technology professional with experience in India, China and US markets. He has a strong track record of conceptualising, incubating, and growing disruptive B2B and B2C businesses. He helped launch 4G wireless services in India and then launched and scaled a video OTT platform to 150 mn users. Before launching Asanify, he headed Subscription and & International Ad Sales business units at 2 of the largest digital media companies in India. With Asanify, he is simplifying the lives of 50mn+ small business owners in India and APAC region through an AI led chat first people management platform.
The founder of Newport Beach-based DAIM, is no stranger to managing risk and being on the forefront of innovation as we head into a new digital era and the 21st Century financial landscape. Impacted by the housing meltdown during the Great Recession, the Florida entrepreneur relocated to New York City to trade options in the pit of the exchange. Within a few years he was managing a desk of brokers as the head of equity derivative sales at a Broker-Dealer. During that time he became an Options Principal and General Securities Principal. In 2013, Courchesne began studying cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, setting the stage for him to create DAIM: a registered investment advisor and asset manager specializing in digital assets. The process for getting the license was extremely difficult but with persistence it was worth the challenge. Today DAIM manages cryptocurrency portfolios for over 200 individual clients and serves as a 3(38) fiduciary for 401K plans with direct Bitcoin exposure.
Cara Borenstein is a software developer and co-founder and CEO at Stashpad - the developer notepad. She previously was an engineer at Twilio and is an alum of Columbia University and Techstars.
Dr. Gaitan is the Co-founder and CEO of Benchmark Labs. He did his doctoral studies at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada) working with William Hsieh in machine learning applications in the environmental sciences. He also holds a Bachelor degree in Civil Engineering and a Master degree in Hydrosystems from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogota, Colombia). He previously worked at early stage start-ups in the environmental science space, including VP of Weather Forecasting and Head of Data Science at Arable Labs, and as Research Scientist for the South Central Climate Science Center at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) in Princeton, New Jersey.
Max is a Software Engineer and Researcher turned entrepreneur with over 17 years of experience building large scale distributed systems, including streaming analytics systems. Max used to work in Fortune 500 companies, early and late stage startups, 3 of which became unicorns (Veeva, Reltio, SignalFx). In 2020 he co-founded Telmai and focused on building SaaS product in Data Observability space.
Jonah Salita is the CEO and Co-Founder of Diall. He previously founded Vasco Creative, a product design & creative agency with clients in the healthtech space and annual billings over $200k. Jonah’s entrepreneurial spirit started when he stumbled into the creative world after designing his own tennis apparel brand because he was too small to fit into the “cool” looking adult clothes.
With over 15 years of government contracting experience and having personally participated in the sale of over $2.5 billion worth of IT goods and services to the US federal government, Mike now leads Govly, the #1 market network for government contractors. A serial entrepreneur, Mike has founded 4 start ups, all of which are still in operation, with Govly being his first software/technology company. Currently living on the Big Island of Hawaii, Mike is an early riser to more closely match the hours of the rest of the team that span California, Colorado, Washington and New York.
Andrei has been working in the team messaging space since 2012 - first on a Slack-like product called LeChat, then on sameroom.io (acquired by NYSE:EGHT in 2017), and now on Fogbender, a YC-backed customer support platform for API-first companies.
A partner at M13, Anna was the managing director of Techstars LA and also a partner in The Fund LA. A certified executive coach, Anna has worked as a corporate lawyer, McKinsey consultant, product exec, and entrepreneur. She serves on the Advisory Board of PledgeLA and is a member of AllRaise.
Before co-founding Railsbank, Nigel was already a successful fintech entrepreneur, having previously founded Evolution and Currency Cloud, which were both sold to well-known publicly listed companies. He brings a wealth of capital markets experience gained at Nomura, Swiss Bank Corp and Dresdner Kleinwort Investment Bank. Nigel's ambition for Railsbank is to enable the world’s most ambitious brands to deliver exceptional embedded finance experiences for their customers. His taste for adventure has taken him to many places, from 17,769 feet up in the Himalayas, to sailing across the world’s oceans and flying paragliders over the skies of the UK
Torben is the co-founder and CEO of Wingback. Torben and his co-founder Yann built an IoT company in the past and founded Wingback in 2021. Wingback was part of Y Combinators W22 batch. Wingback is fully remote and is committed to building a great remote work culture. We believe that as a fully remote company, we have to put certain routines in place in order to be an outstanding team instead of just being a group of outstanding individuals - no matter whether someone works out of the Albanian countryside or Lower Manhattan.
Chris Hill is the co-founder and COO of Massdriver.cloud, a Y Combinator backed startup in the emerging IDP (Internal Developer Platform) space. Massdriver let's teams quickly build engineering platforms and enable developer self-service whether you run workloads in containers, VMs, or serverless. Before founding Massdriver, Chris worked in a range of industries, from defense contracting to ad-tech and e-commerce. He has worked as a software developer and cloud engineer and has experienced the pain of both worlds. For more information on Massdriver, check out https://www.massdriver.cloud.
Idan Ninyo is co-founder and CEO at Bionic, an application security posture management (ASPM) company. Prior to founding Bionic, Idan was CTO and Engineer in Residence at YL Ventures, an American-Israeli venture capital firm that specializes in seed stage cybersecurity. Before that, he held a senior engineering role at Magic Leap and served in the Israel Defense Forces. Idan graduated from Bar-Ilan University at age 19 with a bachelor of science degree in applied mathematics.
Akbar Thobhani is the co-founder and CEO of sFOX, a full-service crypto prime broker bringing together liquidity, best price execution, dark pool access, treasury management, custody and settlement services all together in one trading platform and API. Prior to co-founding sFOX, Thobhani served as Head of Growth & Business Development at Airbnb, where he managed payments for over 190 countries.
With vast experience in trading and payments, Thobani has developed several platform solutions for companies like ITG, Boku, and Stamps.com. He started his career as a software engineer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Thobhani earned his MBA from MIT, where he started mining bitcoins before it was popular.
Fred Stevens-Smith is CEO of Rainforest QA, a no-code test automation platform for modern product teams. Rainforest was founded in 2012 during YC, and has raised over $40m while helping hundreds of startups improve their QA. Rainforest is a fully remote company, with 40 developers, designers and PMs all over the world. Fred is a nomad, heading to wherever the internet is good and the snow is plentiful!
Emily and her two co-founders started Awtomic to make it easier for direct to consumer brands to offer delightful subscription experiences to their customers. As e-commerce continues to rapidly grow, they are helping to define how subscriptions will play a critical role.
Nate is the CEO and Co-Founder at Quindar, a Y-Combinator backed aerospace startup focused on automating satellite design, test, and operations. Before Quindar, Nate worked at Lockheed Martin and OneWeb - where he and his 5 co-founders met and helped build the software platform that operates the second largest satellite constellation in the world. They are now focused on completely removing humans from operating satellites and extending IT incident management practices into space operations.
Matthew Spoke is the Founder and CEO of Moves, the all-in-one banking app designed exclusively for gig workers. Matt has spoken at major tech conferences around the world, and has regularly contributed to Forbes.com and started his first company when he was 28. Prior to starting Moves, Matt was a Certified Public Accountant at Deloitte.
Eve Halimi is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Alinea, an investing app created for Gen Z’s which allows users to grow their money by investing in what matters to them. She gained extensive experience empowering brands to build better digital experiences working in strategy at Contentsquare, a growth stage data analytics startup, bringing that expertise to Alinea. Prior to creating Alinea, Halimi held multiple positions at financial institutions and hedge funds such as Goldman Sachs and Boussard & Gavaudan. She founded her first community-based application at the age of 15. Alinea is backed by Y Combinator, Harvard, Kima, Goodwater and many other leading investors.
Jason Alvarez-Cohen is a tech entrepreneur and Forbes 30 under 30 honoree. He is the CEO, Co-Founder and chief engineer at Popl, a technology company based in Los Angeles that is building the next generation digital business card platform.
Before Maroo, Alexey headed the FP&A team at Revolut (UK’s largest fintech company), where he set up financial planning function and was part of a core team raising a $500m Series D round. Previously, Alexey spent 10 years working in finance all over the world–from 15 states across the US to China, France, the UK, and Russia–for Procter & Gamble and General Electric.
A Denver, Colorado native, Chris Kline, was challenged to develop a way for individuals to directly invest in Bitcoin for retirement.
Together with Camilo Concha and Johannes Haze, Kline co-founded Bitcoin IRA, and Kline then developed the process and exclusive partnerships to create a full-service, turnkey solution allowing investors to capitalize on the rapidly growing digital currency market space for their retirement portfolio while maintaining full IRS compliance.
Kline holds a degree in International Finance and Leadership from the University of Colorado, Boulder.
After moving on from his career with top brands such as Barclays Wealth and Alexander David, Growth Gorilla’s Founder and Managing Director, Shameer Sachdev, struck out on his own and built the fintech growth marketing agency, Growth Gorilla. The agency focuses exclusively on catalyzing growth for courageous fintech.
Now Shameer is on a mission to share expertise from all corners of the fintech industry and provide The FML Podcast’s listeners with unique and valuable insights that can help deliver real results.
Rick was disillusioned with the web2 social media space. He saw social media platforms using people for data and then changing algorithms to eliminate the whole reason people even joined the platform.
He, and his team, created DSCVR to give people options, put emphasis on community and ultimately give control back to the user. They already have 115k users and are growing rapidly.
Manuel Schönfeld is the founder and CEO of PowerX, a company with the mission to combat climate change. PowerX is venture-backed by Seqouia Scout Fund, Y Combinator and Antler.
Manuel spent several years working for McKinsey and Company as a project manager. He advised governments and private sector on innovative energy solutions (ie. Power-to-X, hydrogen to chemicals, solar to cooling) and worked with clients from all continents.
Before joining McKinsey, Manuel worked for the World Bank and Morgan Stanley Hong Kong with a focus on renewable energy and intelligence testing. He authored different books and articles, which have been quoted in renown publications such as the World Development Report 2018 (WB, United Nations).
Nick Dazé is the co-founder and CEO of Heirloom. Before co-founding Heirloom, he was the co-founder of PocketList, and an early team member at tech companies such as Faraday Future ($FFIE), Fullscreen (acquired by AT&T), and Bit Kitchen (acquired by Medium as Knowable). He studied English at the University of Southern California and has spent his entire career in startups.
Howard Katzenberg is a seasoned entrepreneur and early “FinTech” industry pioneer, with significant expertise in scaling venture-backed businesses through IPO, strategic planning, financial leadership, and financial technology.
Currently, Howard is the Founder and CEO of Glean AI, the only Accounts Payable company that combines smart automation with spend intelligence and helps companies save money on their vendor expense. Prior to Glean, Howard was the CFO of Better.com, the leading home finance company, where he enabled the company to grow revenue 5x while significantly accelerating its path to profitability. Before joining Better.com, Howard served as the CFO of OnDeck, the leading small business lending company. Under his leadership as CFO, OnDeck consistently grew over 100% annually, completed one of the first FinTech IPOs in 2014, and was regularly recognized as a top place to work.
Andres Fleischer, Managing Partner of Ripio Ventures
Andres has an incredible life story that brought him as a young child in Argentina to a Stanford-educated thought leader and entrepreneur at the forefront of blockchain innovation in Latin America.
Today, he’s the Managing Partner of Ripio ventures, where he strategizes how to best support up-and-coming web3 startups in Latin America and globally.
Alex Louisy is the co-founder and CEO of Upflow.io, a fintech startup on a mission to revolutionize how B2B businesses get paid. Their accounts receivable software is helping hundreds of fast-growing B2B companies collect customer payments effortlessly: saving time, helping make better business decisions, enhancing customers' experience, and improving cash flows. Upflow is backed by leading investors (Y Combinator, 9yards, eFounders) and top BAs from N26, Square, Mercury, Uber, and Netsuite.
Previously, Alex started his career in investment banking, before overseeing the international expansion of Wifirst - a telecom company.
Zerzar Bukhari is Founder & CEO at Zynq. Zerzar has worked on various enterprise products at Google and Microsoft. He holds an engineering degree from the University of Toronto and a master's degree in finance from Harvard University.
Keshav Pingali is the CEO and co-founder of Katana Graph, the AI-powered Graph Intelligence Platform providing faster, deeper, and more accurate insights on massive and complex data.
Keshav holds the W.A."Tex" Moncrief Chair of Computing at the University of Texas at Austin, and is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and AAAS. He received his Masters in Electrical Engineering and his Doctorate in Science from MIT. He previously also held the India Chair of Computer Science at Cornell University
David Hoffman is the CEO and Co-Founder of Beam, the easiest way to design and remodel your home. From the DIY’er, to the hands-off-I-need-to-hire, Beam provides you with all of the tools you need to remodel better. Previously, David co-founded Next Big Sound, which was named one of the 10 best music startups of 2010 by Billboard Magazine before the company was acquired by Pandora in 2015.
When David isn’t growing Beam, he’s likely working on his own remodeling projects or making memories with his wife and two daughters. To learn more about Beam or to start your next remodeling project with ease, visit www.buildwithbeam.com
Born in France, founded HireSweet in 2016 - we help companies hire for roles where they lack applicants (like software engineering, sales, etc.). Spearheaded sales and marketing from the 1st to 1000th client, grew the team to 40 people while raising a single Seed round of $1.5M, and got selected by Y Combinator.
Rafael Cosman is the CEO & Co-founder of TrustToken, the core team building TrueFi into the protocol for global lending. TrueFi lets portfolio managers launch uncollateralized lending opportunities on-chain to a global base of lenders and borrowers. Since November 2020, has completed $1.5B of origination and +$1B of repayments with no defaults.
Prior to TrustToken, Rafael helped build StreetCode, a non-profit that teaches East Palo Alto youth technical skills, and worked at Google Brain, Palantir, and Kernel.
Rafael graduated from Stanford University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science. In his free time, you’ll find Rafael reading or surfing.
Matt Cutler is CEO & Co-Founder of Blocknative, the leading real-time infrastructure for monitoring pre-chain data, optimizing gas spend, and predicting transaction settlement. Matt has founded multiple technology startups, including Web analytics pioneer NetGenesis, which went public in 2000 at the height of the Web 1.0 boom.
His most recent startup, mobile collaboration platform Collaborate.com, was acquired by Cisco in 2013. Along the way, Matt has consistently made meaningful contributions to emerging technology ecosystems, including serving as chair of the first-ever Webmasters Guild, co-authoring the award winning E-Metrics Whitepaper, championing AdWeek’s Viral Video Awards, establishing Cisco’s global Design Thinking initiative, and more
Michael Broughton is the founder and CEO of Altro. He founded Altro in 2019, following personal frustrations with access to credit and financial tools. Prior to Altro, Michael spent time in Venture Capital, scouting for Sequoia Capital and working with early stage startups such as - Madefor, working with Blake Mycosike on launching the brand, shipping first product and understanding consumer spending (starting as us 4 out of his office at Toms); to Launching DOAPKitchens product at unis and creating their University Program, with the program starting at USC and expanding to local universities.
Michael currently sits on the board of a ~900M Credit Union, turning from a board member to Vice Chairman in the past 4 years. He now spends his time in consumer finance, investing/advising companies such as Burst, StreetFins, LendMe, Of All Trades, Barcode, and others. Altro, since inception, has raised over $20M and grown its team across the United States. Altro aims to serve the 86M Americans who do not have access to finance.
Brendan P. Keegan serves as Chief Executive Officer [CEO] at Merchants Fleet and was recently named the world’s Most Innovative CEO by CEO World Awards®; Executive of the Year, silver winner by Best in Biz Awards; and a Stevie Awards® bronze winner by American Business Awards®. He has been involved with Merchants since 2009—as a client, board member, and strategic advisor. Brendan is focused on transforming the company’s business model and creating a new category within the fleet industry known as FleetTech. Brendan’s innovative leadership has fueled the company’s strategic direction and positioned Merchants as the fastest-growing fleet management company in North America.
Brendan is an award winning, 6-time President & CEO of companies ranging from 500 to over 10,000 employees located in nearly 150 countries in the tech & financial services sectors. He served as the Fortune 100’s youngest Chief Sales Officer for EDS, a $22-billion tech leader. Brendan has raised nearly $2.0B in capital and returned over $4.0B to investors. He has trained over 350,000 leaders, led nearly 50,000 employees, and driven sales of $100B+.
Previously, Brendan was named a Distinguished Fellow by Dartmouth College, Fast50 Executive by FastCompany, successful entrepreneur by Enterprise Bank, US Business Delegate to Africa, Best-of-the-Best CEOs by Incentive, 100 Fastest Growing Companies by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Business of the Year by NH Business Journal, Top 10 Coach of the Year by USA Football, and Volunteer of the Year & Youth Coach of the Year in NH.
Brendan received his Bachelor’s Degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, an MBA from the George Washington University, and Executive Certificates from Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania & University of Chicago.
Sahil is the CEO and co-founder of Dots, a Y Combinator company building a developer-friendly API that lets businesses pay their contractors through just a few lines of code. Whether it's gig workers like Uber drivers, sellers on marketplaces like Etsy, or simply just your local handyman - Dots’ abstracts away the complexity of payouts completely.
Sahil is dedicated to providing a simple-to-use API that makes money movement as flexible as the modern workforce. Prior to Dots, Sahil worked at Google Research and Google X on early stage projects. Sahil received a M.S. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.S in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley.
Dan Raju is the Co-Founder and Chairman of Tradier. As one of the larger volume producing brokerage platforms, Tradier has grown in the last 5 years to become the preferred destination for Active Investing.
Tradier offers a MarketPlace of Investor Platforms and the most widely used brokerage web APIs for Trading Platforms, Advisors, and Developers to build embedded or complete investing experiences. Trader today powers some of the biggest and most innovative financial services platforms in the market.
As co-founder and CEO of Future, Jean-Louis Warnholz oversees Future’s overall strategy, forges impactful partnerships, and develops financial tools to simplify climate-smart living for families and individuals. Jean-Louis possesses years of entrepreneurial experience.
As the Founding Principal and Managing Director of the BlackIvy Group, he was responsible for the company’s growth strategy and development of new businesses. Anchored in Ghana, Kenya, and Tanzania, BlackIvy delivers life's essentials to consumers in Africa across five verticals in health, housing, food, logistics, and warehousing. Previously, Jean-Louis worked for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s office, the Soros Economic Development Fund, and the World Bank.
Emily is the founder & CEO of Bento, a software platform for customer onboarding. Bento's guides are embedded natively into SaaS applications to create Getting Started pages and activation flows.
Prior to founding Bento, Emily was the Head of Product at atSpoke (acquired by Okta) and a Growth Product Manager at Intercom. Emily has her MBA and Bachelor's degrees from Harvard and lives in San Francisco.
Will is the CEO & Founder of Stack, the first cryptocurrency app authorized for under-18-year-olds in the United States. The startup is backed by Madrona Ventures (early investors in Amazon, Redfin, Apptio, and Rover, among others) and The Venture Collective (early investors in BlockFi and Axiom). It has been featured on Yahoo Finance, Nasdaq, MSN, Business Insider, Tech Crunch, Geekwire, and BuiltIn, among others.
Will has spent 12 years in FinTech working with Sofi, Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade, E*Trade, Copper Banking, and others. He built Stack to blend the most speculative but also exciting financial asset class (crypto) with financial education. Stack creates a safe place for teenagers to approach crypto and web3, while their parents sit in the passenger seat.
Simon Jones, CEO & Co-Founder of Voltz Labs, believes in a transparent, equitable, and community-driven future, where technology provides equal economic opportunities to all. Simon has been involved in three financial technology startups - twice as a founder and once as an early employee. Simon completed his Executive Education at Stanford.
Gabe Frank is CEO of Arcade.xyz, the most sophisticated DeFi NFT lending infrastructure. A third-generation pawnbroker, Gabe helped run the family business of 9 storefronts under the name Benny’s Pawn, founded in 1947 and eventually acquired in 2016. Through this real-world experience, Gabe learned the importance of collateralized loans against physical assets and developed and ran an online sub-prime loan portfolio.
An early NFT enthusiast and DeFi advocate, Gabe brings expertise from consumer and traditional financial markets to Arcade.xyz, having previously supported BitGo growing their digital asset custody (AUC) to over $1B and assisted BitGo Prime in building an institutional lending book to over $150m. Later, Gabe joined Curv, where he introduced the first-of-its-kind institutional Metamask product built for DeFi hedge funds and fintechs.
Kalpesh Kapadia’s career spans 25+ years in the US and Asia, primarily in technology and finance. He came to the US over 20 years ago as a young student and struggled to establish his credit profile. In 2013, Kalpesh co-founded Deserve, a cloud-based, API-centric software platform that enables a delightful digital/mobile cardholder experience for consumers, and modern card program management for partners, with a full suite of rewards, reporting, analytics and customer service.
Prior to co-founding Deserve he was one of the top analysts/investors in Wall Street’s tech sector. In 2004 he was ranked the #1 analyst in the US across all sectors by the venerable Wall Street Journal. In 2005 he founded Equanum Capital and successfully managed it through 2012.
He earned an MBA from Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University where he serves on the alumni board and as a proud member of W.L. Mellon Society. He also holds an MS in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. His personal and charitable interests focus on empowerment through higher education. Kalpesh is a member/supporter of organizations such as Cato Institute, Santa Fe Institute and American Himalayan Foundation.
Greg has been a technology entrepreneur since 1998. Before Greg founded CryptoStopper, he started Axis Backup, a backup and disaster recovery company for the insurance industry. He saw firsthand the rapid increase in the damage cyber criminals were doing with debilitating malware resulting in high financial loss to vulnerable companies.
Between 2012 and 2015, one in five of Axis Backup’s clients was hit by cybercrime. Greg realized effective cyber security could save businesses from costly downtime and compromised systems. In 2015, Axis Backup was acquired by J2 Global, freeing Greg to create CryptoStopper and focus exclusively on cybersecurity.
As Founder & CEO, Alfred Kahn leads commercial activities at Boomtown, including strategy, marketing, and corporate development. After graduating from Colorado State University, he began his journey as a serial entrepreneur and has founded several companies over the years. Alfred founded Boomtown because he is an operator that understands the power software has to disrupt an industry.
Serial entrepreneur with several successful exits, seasoned Fortune 500 executive, and non-profit leader. Richard is the author of the "Official US Software Channel Sales Guidebook" and has been a featured speaker at COMDEX, CES, the Art of Product Launches, and many other events. He ran a consulting firm for 14 years and advised startups and multinationals, including Hitachi, IBM, Computer Associates, and many others.
He has served as the Executive Director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Tanzania, was CEO of Big Brothers Big Sisters of the San Francisco Bay Area, and is currently CEO of CLOSEM, a SaaS company he co-founded with Laura Betterly. CLOSEM automates the process of sales followup. CLOSEM is now becoming a suite of applications for small businesses and entrepreneurs looking to increase sales, and they have just released LINKEM, with more coming out soon.
He has interesting things to share about sales, direct marketing, software startups, and sub-saharan African farming, as well as an avid wildlife and landscape photographer.
Neha Govindraj is the founder and CEO of Bonside, Inc., the future of financing for brick-and-mortar businesses. Bonside is currently operating in a members-only Beta and financing best-in-class businesses up to $1m in growth capital.
At Bonside, rather than investing to own a percentage of the business, we invest to own a percentage of their revenue. Prior to founding Bonside, Neha co-founded Glowbar after working in the consumer and private equity practices of Bain & Company.
Adam is the co-founder and CEO of Boom & Bucket. Adam has built 3 enterprise B2B businesses with a combined value of more than $10B as an early exec and operations leader. Prior to Boom & Bucket he was the COO at Bolt where he has partnered with visionary founders to lead 40x revenue and 11x headcount growth (from 15 to 175) over three years.
Prior to Bolt he started, built, and sold an HR tech company. Early in his career he was the first employee at Addepar and partnered with the founders from seed to post Series C.
Adam is a leader for high-growth environments with significant ambiguity, shifting roles, and changing priorities. He has a strong ability to synthesize complex business challenges and build operational and action-focused plans. He enjoys all aspects of business operations from sales and marketing to human resources and finance but is particularly passionate about recruiting and building teams.
Chrissa McFarlane founded Patientory after working more than a decade in the healthcare technology industry and realizing there was a need for more personalized, secure and consumer-driven health information management solutions.
Devoted to fostering digital innovation in the healthcare industry, McFarlane served as co-chair of the HIMSS18 Blockchain Workgroup, the HIMSS Interoperability & Health Information Exchange Committee Named one of the top women, “leaving their mark on the MedTech field in health IT,” by Becker’s Hospital Review and World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, McFarlane has published multiple international healthcare research articles. In 2019, McFarlane authored her first book titled Future Women: Minority Female Entrepreneurship and the Fourth Industrial Revolution in the Era of Blockchain and Cryptocurrency.
Andrew Gazdecki is a 4x founder with 3x exits, former CRO, and founder of MicroAcquire. Gazdecki has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes Wall Street Journal, Inc. Magazine, and Entrepreneur Magazine, as well as prominent industry blogs such as Axios, TechCrunch, and VentureBeat.
Dan is a marketing technology executive and the founder/CEO of Marpipe. Prior to founding Marpipe, Dan launched a marketing consultancy from his dorm room in college, which turned into a fast-growing agency based in Soho, Manhattan that specialized in creative production and demand generation for DTC businesses.
Marpipe was initially developed when the agency ran into trouble with creative testing, and today, Marpipe has raised over $10m from the likes of Adobe, Samsung, and executives at Buzzfeed, Hubspot, MediaMath, and Criteo. He was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Class of 2022 in marketing and advertising.
Dakota Younger is the Founder and CEO of Boon, a gamified employee referral marketplace that engages and incentivizes your organization's existing talent pool to create the highest caliber pipeline of talent.
Born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska, Dakota originally landed in Los Angeles to pursue stand-up comedy. The years he spent working grounds and staying quick on his feet helped build both the framework and the flexibility for transitioning into entrepreneurship.
After a decade helping Fortune 500 companies and hot new startups source top talent in industries like tech, healthcare, education, hospitality, aviation, and finance, Dakota sold his successful recruitment firms and founded Boon to solve new challenges arising in the recruitment industry.
Tony Smith is the CEO & Co-Founder of Restaurant365, a rapidly growing, industry leading restaurant software platform. In his current role, he focuses energy on company vision & long-term strategy, building an engaging & inviting culture, and the growth of individuals & the business.
A lifelong learner, he earned his bachelor’s degree in business management and information systems from Brigham Young University, Magna Cum Laude, and has been recognized for leadership with awards such as Innovator of the Year from the OC Business Journal. A dad-joke connoisseur, Smith enjoys having fun while trying out new restaurants, spending time with his wife and 4 lovely daughters, singing, and watching college football.
Grant is currently the founder and CEO of Replicated Inc, a platform that enables commercial software vendors to operationalize and scale the distribution of their applications to complex enterprise environments. Their platform is used by many software vendors including UiPath, HashiCorp, Nylas, CircleCI (and many others), and as a result, over 60% of the Fortune 100 have applications deployed by Replicated in their infrastructure.
Grant is also the creator of EnterpriseReady.io & host of the EnterpriseReady Podcast which both aim to help SaaS & software companies build the features that enterprises love. Prior to Replicated, Grant was the founder and CEO of Look.io, which was acquired by LivePerson, Inc (Nasdaq: LPSN).
Alex is co-founder and CEO of Plug Pagamentos, a LatAm payments platform. For the past 12-years, he's worked with startups around the globe — living in cities such as San Francisco, New York, London, and Madrid. Previous to starting Plug, Alex managed southern Europe for Braintree — a PayPal company, where he saw his best clients attempting integrating multiple PSPs. When not talking about payments or LatAm startups, Alex can be found surfing or training jiu-jitsu.
Gary Hagmueller is the CEO of Arcion, the world’s only cloud-native, CDC-based data mobility platform. Gary is a proven CEO who has created over $7.5B in enterprise value through two IPOs and four M&A exits over his 20+ years in the tech industry.
Gary holds an MBA from the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California, where he was named Sheth Fellow, as well as a bachelor’s in Business Administration from Arizona State University. As a father to twin teenage boys, he is clearly experienced in project management and negotiation skills.
Liam is a serial entrepreneur who runs Time Doctor and Staff.com — one of the most popular time tracking and productivity software platforms in use by top brands today. He is also a co-organizer of the world's largest remote work conference — Running Remote. Liam has also co-authored a book - Running Remote - focused on remote work methodology.
Shaina is the Cofounder and CEO of Dogdrop— a venture backed and female founded start-up building the next generation of dog care. Shaina lived and worked in China for over three years at early stage tech start-ups before returning to the US. She has her Masters of International Business, loves to travel, and takes her mini dachshund, Poppy, with her everywhere.
She has her Masters of International Business and is a co-instructor and guest lecturer at Whittier College. She's passionate about international business, lifelong learning, and her mini dachshund, Poppy!
Jake is the founder and CEO of Metalink, where he leads company strategy and brand innovation. Prior to starting Metalink, Jake served as head of activation for Community.com, a software company enabling celebrities and high profile entities, ranging from Barack Obama to White Claw, to directly reach their fans and customers text messages. He also founded music management company TH3RD BRAIN, developing business for artists such as Krewella, ZHU, Gallant, and Grace VanderWaal. Udell was recognized on Forbes' 2016 30 Under 30 list and Billboard’s 2018 40 Under 40 list.
Romeo Durscher is the Vice President of Public Safety at Auterion, the premier end-to-end operating systems for commercial drones, based on open-standards, flexibility and choices. Born and raised in Switzerland, Romeo came to Auterion after 6 years at DJI, where he built the public safety vertical and has become one of the most trusted global leaders and evangelists in small Unmanned Aircraft Systems integration and deployments. Prior to joining the drone industry, he spent 13 years at NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.
Part of his work is advising first responders and humanitarian organizations on proper drone use and data integration, collaborating with R&D teams on hardware and software solutions, and expanding the drone ecosystem to enhance fully integrated end-to-end solutions and workflows.
Romeo has actively participated in drone missions for search and rescue operations, natural disasters, such as the Tubbs, Carr and Camp Fires in California, emergency responses, and various training exercises. He has led global partnerships, such as European Emergency Number Association (EENA), to develop protocols, standards, and best practices for public safety officials to integrate drones into their workflows.
Commercial UAV News named Romeo “One of the 25 Most Influential People in the Commercial Drone Industry”, as well as “One of the Top 7 Drone Visionaries in Emergency Response & Public Safety”. The non-profit global organization DRONERESPONDERS awarded him with their first "Public Safety Drone Leadership Award" and the Unmanned Tactical Applications Conference awarded Romeo with the “The Supporting Those Who Serve” annual award, as a recognition of his exceptional leadership advancing the implementation of public safety drone programs across the globe.
Romeo has appeared in media forums from ABC’s Good Morning America, New York Times, Wired magazine, to Forbes and held keynote presentations, panels, workshops, and webinars across the world, sharing success stories, use cases, lessons learned, and his vision of the drone industry. Romeo can be found on Twitter at @RomeoCH.
Brian's career is a learning-based journey with an intense focus on people, purpose, values, culture, and leadership. Brian has had amazing entrepreneurial and leadership experiences at Jobing.com, P.F. Chang’s China Bistro, Y Scouts, and Conscious Capitalism Arizona. Today, Brian is channeling his experiences and energy into helping organizations and their teams build trust, connection, and belonging in the rapidly accelerating remote and distributed workplace through his new company, Anthym.
Brian is a Board Member and President Emeritus of the Arizona Chapter of Conscious Capitalism, a member of the Board of Directors of the Better Business Bureau of the Pacific Southwest, a TEDx speaker, and the co-author of "Hiring on Purpose - How the Y Scouts Method is Revolutionizing the Search for Leaders".
Brian's most important and cherished responsibilities are being the lucky father to his 2 daughters, Taylor and Riley, and the proud husband to his wife, Jackie. In his spare time, you'll find Brian practicing guitar and catching a live music concert every chance he can get.
Michael Maylahn is trained as a Biomedical (Electrical) Engineer from USC. Michael founded a math and science education program to finance his education. He has conducted medical research in rural Costa Rica, lived with a family in Germany, spent substantial time in India and embraces traveling to better understand people. Michael is the founder and CEO of Stasis, a remote patient monitoring company, that has treated over 60,000 patients and counting.
Guillermo is a serial intra/entrepreneur with 24+ years of healthcare technology experience that prides himself in designing, developing, and taking to market innovative solutions that address industry-wide problems.
Guillermo is the Founder and CEO of NotiSphere, a healthcare technology startup revolutionizing the way the industry handles medical recall communications.
Before NotiSphere, Guillermo served as Chief Executive Officer of Genesis Automation USA, a subsidiary of the fastest growing provider of traceability solutions for the healthcare industry in Ireland and the UK.
Guillermo was also Executive Vice-President for the Commercial Group at Zynx Health, a leader of evidence and experience-based products and services for the healthcare industry.
Prior to Zynx Health, Guillermo worked at VHA and Novation (now Vizient) where he was instrumental in designing, developing and commercializing innovative price benchmarking solutions and analytics applications that still today save hospitals hundreds of millions every year and generate millions in revenue.
Earlier in his career, Guillermo also held positions at CSC Consulting, EYT (formerly Ernst & Young Technologies) and Shared Medical Systems (now Cerner).
Guillermo holds a BS in economic sciences and business, from the University of Navarra, Spain and a Senior Executive Program degree from IESE Business School.
Scott has become an industry leader in workplace injury prevention through his innovative and comprehensive approach using wearable technology. This approach evolved from the combination of over 20 years of experience working with elite athletes (as a coach, physiotherapist, and biomechanist), with the skills developed working in private practice treating injured workers. Over the past five years, Scott has been partnering with large organisations, Workers’ Compensation insurance brokers, and safety consultants to reduce the costs associated with workplace injury using wearable technology and data analytics. In 2019 his company, Preventure, launched their IoT-based workplace injury prevention product and has since expanded to the USA through support from Silicon Valley investors.
Lucas is an idea's man, a huge risk-taker, never afraid of change, always disrupting, innovating, and pivoting to solve problems that will leave a huge impact on this planet.
Pushing the boundaries when it comes to tech & innovation, his mission is to change the MSP industry forever. For more than 17 years he has served a diverse range of businesses, from start-ups to scale-ups, with the highest calibre in helping businesses leverage the latest technology trends, digitally transform organisations, and drive competitive advantage.
Tribu is a machine learning productivity toolkit for helpdesks to improve efficiency in ticket management and request resolution. Unlike traditional manual helpdesk processes, Tribu uses machine learning to automate ticket functionality to create quicker processes and manage technician workloads.
Brian started a 24/7 gym in 2014 after purchasing a commercial property. He quickly realized the value of an access control system was in the profitability of his business. When he launched a software platform in 2016 for bike-share programs. Customers wanted the ability to share or rent basketballs in the park, kayaks next to the river, and so much more. Koloni quickly realized there was a gap when it came to connecting consumers back to the physical world.
Koloni is now tackling the smart locker industry. Currently led by outdated UI/UX, expensive locker banks, and limited to parcel delivery. The Koloni smart lock can enable any locker to quickly be smart and programmed for deliveries, storage, and rental applications.
Chris is the head of Product and CEO/cofounder at Blackthorn.io, where they created multiple apps for the Salesforce.com platform. He develops high-level UX and technical approaches with their Product and Engineering teams.
Cofounding the company in August of 2015, they've been through a lot. From nearly going bankrupt in 2018 to now 80 employees and 500+ customers, the ride has gone from stressful to now fun!
Michael Hoffman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gather Voices, a technology company that automates the creation, management, and publishing of video content. He is also the founder of See3 Communications, a digital marketing agency in Chicago. Hoffman teaches marketing at the University of Chicago and is an internationally sought-after speaker and trainer who is a trusted advisor to business leaders on engagement strategy.
Ryan leads the engineering team and previously founded Peer with the COO of Salesforce; acquired by Twitter in 2016. He has over a decade of experience working at tech companies of all sizes, including both Twitter and Concur, 2 of the most successful consumer and enterprise SaaS companies in the world. Ryan has a degree in Biomedical Engineering and Computer Science from Cornell University.
He is a 20 year old guy, just dropped out of college, and is founding Rock It. His passion in life is to design software that actually enhances individuals' lives. That's why he dropped out of college, and that's why he designed and am launching Rock It. He thinks there's a large split out there of people who don't like Big Tech. He thinks there's a lot of dissatisfaction with what's going on in Silicon Valley with them creating platforms that actually make our individual happiness and well-being worse off. But the split comes in that some people who say to just get off your phone, delete these toxic apps, and spend more time in the real world.
Well, he doesn't think that's the solution per se. Technology can never move backwards, and it's really misguided to think people can or will say no to technology. He thinks the solution, really, is learning from these companies that have created toxic products, and say How could we create something that is actually good? And that's what we're doing with Rock It. We've designed and are launching an app that's success metrics exactly correlate to our members happiness and well-being. So check out our website GoRockIt.com to sign up for the waiting list and in the meantime, get out there and go rock it!
Jack is building companies that benefit the East African agricultural sector. With NINAYO, smallholder farmers are able to own their harvests as a digital asset. This enables the farmer to store their harvest in a USSD wallet, and sell when the price is right. Resultantly, more food to reach markets at better prices in some of the most food insecure regions on earth. NINAYO's worked with WFP, USAID and the UN, and is soon partnering with some major cryptocurrencies to expand their service through staking.
With Maua Mazuri, Jack is providing disease-free seedlings via a tissue culture laboratory, with a particular focus on the banana industry. Soon, via NINAYO, farmers will be able to get financing for their tissue culture seedling farms as well.
Jack started as a Peace Corps Volunteer in 2009, and has gotten stuck in Tanzania ever since. He's working to bridge the numerous gaps in market access, finance, data and agro input quality.
Matt is the CTO at Zippity, a SaaS startup that enables great day-of service experiences for the onsite service industry. Prior to Zippity, Matt led the Fulfillment Experience team for AmazonFresh.
Ramin Bastani started Healthvana in 2014 to better deliver medical test results via a HIPAA-secure, mobile-friendly portal.
Cloud Architect and tech guy with 20+ years in the industry, mainly doing professional services focusing on infrastructure on different agencies, until started as an independent consultant about 10 years ago. This journey continued with the creation of Flugel.it, a 40 people organization that helps Startups and ScaleUps in the B2B space to tackle their challenges with Cloud Infrastructure and DevOps methodologies.
He is the founder of FixMyCar, the fastest and easiest way to get your car fixed anywhere. According to his interview, he got customers from Craigslist where he got the mechanics and he created a mobile auto repair business that way. Now he is running the business of a mobile auto repair service dedicating in fixing your car repair problems.
CEO of Brewbike. We're changing the future of business for the future of us all. Booth MBA - finance and entrepreneurship. Obama Administration. Obama campaign '08 and '12. He won both.
Devon Townsend, Co-Founder/CTO of Cameo. Devon Townsend is a co-founder of Cameo, the leading marketplace connecting fans directly with tens of thousands of pop culture personalities in the form of customized video messages, live video calls and direct messages. Launched by Townsend, Steven Galanis and Martin Blencowe in 2017, the Cameo platform has connected fans with tens of thousands of their favorite athletes, entertainers and other influencers, helped facilitate more than 1 million Cameo videos, and raised more than $1 million for a wide range of charities through its Cameo Cares program. Prior to Cameo, Townsend was a Vine influencer who regularly received DMs from fans asking for shout-outs to them and their friends, which helped shape the Cameo business model. Townsend holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Duke University and served as Cameo’s first Chief Technology Officer. He has received Forbes 30 Under 30 and Inc. 30 Under 30 honors in 2019 for his contributions to Cameo. Among Devons amazing achievements, his most impressive is being Mike's brother. ;-)
Thomas Hopkins is the Engineering Manager at Getro, the platform for independent professional networks to easily make and receive introductions. Their customers include over 400 independent professional networks — like venture capital funds (Union Square Ventures), membership communities (Women 2.0) and government associations (Techleap.nl) and have raised ~$4m in seed funding. Prior to Getro, Thomas was Lead Engineer for Strategic Projects at Conversocial where he developed software to simplify how brands communicate with their customers by combining human agents and bots in a single platform. Thomas holds a BSc in Physics from the University of Southampton in the UK and previously served as co-founder and co-chair of the London Pro European Forum - a network for local and national political organisations to collaborate on campaigns to improve ties between the UK and EU.
Jaclyn went to Michigan State University to pursue a career in law. When she came to the realization that she didn't have to pay for law school to debate people on a daily basis, she added a second major, completing her B.A. in both Communication and Political Science - Pre-Law. Since then, she has worked in a variety of different roles in the tech industry, as both the customer and a vendor. This unique perspective has allowed her to bring empathy to the customer support process to ensure a first-class customer experience. Jaclyn joined the team as an Customer Success Manager at bant.io in early 2018 and now proudly supports bant.io as COO, where she is responsible for wrangling and organizing our team initiatives.
Neil Smith is the CEO and founder of Prolo.io, an internet infrastructure startup that provides edge computing and internet exchange solutions across the United States. Before Neil started Prolo, he spent the last five years working in cloud computing where he served as the Director of Security Assurance for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Director of Red Teams for IBM Cloud. When not working on building a better internet, Neil spends his free time advocating for responsible public land management in his home state of Idaho. This will likely be a very technical conversation, as Neil is one of the smartest (and funniest) people I know. Join us!
COO at Noteworth with 6 years of experience with growing a startup. Expertise in engineering, product, technical culture, people people people, and business development. Eager to build a team that can accelerate virtual healthcare delivery. Nishant completed his graduate studies in computer engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology and is an avid swimmer.
Argentinean Psychologist and Career Coach, passionate about helping professionals to unleash their true potential and get the job they really want. He is a former IT Recruiter, and in his last experience, he worked for a staff augmentation company from California, USA. Currently, he has his own career coaching business in Buenos Aires providing 1 on 1 sessions and workshops and providing services to two outplacement companies from USA. He firmly believes that professionals with a lack of emotional intelligence and self-knowledge are the ones who struggle the most to get the job they love and make a living from it. These two requirements are key to build a solid personal brand and stand out from other candidates.
Scott is Co-Founder & CTO at Hunt Club. Hunt Club helps companies scale through trusted relationships. We work with high-growth companies across the country, leveraging our technology and a network of thousands of subject matter experts to hire better candidates, faster.
Edan Shahar, co-founder and CEO of Test Innovators, has extensive experience in the realms of technology and education. He has founded several technology companies which turn data into actionable insights. In founding Test Innovators, Edan combines his love of education with a passion for using technology and data to create superior methods to improve student learning.
Morley Zhi is the Director of Engineering for Vibrant, an app for people in Argentina to protect their money from devaluation. Vibrant is built on the Stellar blockchain, an open network for storing and moving money, and is a project of the Stellar Development Foundation. Before working in the blockchain space, Morley was a Director of Engineering at the dating app OkCupid.
Aaron is the founder and CEO of Petabridge, a company dedicated to helping .NET developers build high-performance, large-scale, and real-time software systems, and founder of the Akka.NET project. Previously Aaron was the founder of MarkedUp - analytics and marketing automation services for software developers. Before that Aaron was the Startup Developer Evangelist for Microsoft. He is globally recognized as a top .NET developer and tech leader.
Rhythm360 is a web app built for the specific needs of cardiology clinics. Medical staff can access patient information, schedule appointments, prescribe medication and write notes all whilst monitoring their patients pacemaker data in real time. Built to replace a clinician’s convoluted workflow, we designed an all-in-one solution focussed on convenience and speed. The overall goal was to give staff more time away from their screens so they could focus on providing stellar patient care.
Today we will be interviewing a veteran recruiter who has placed hundreds of developers with companies in the US and Argentina. Recruiters are often the gateway to fantastic opportunities, so it's important to know how they work, what they look for and other pro tips that top candidates do well. She is a professional recruiter working at LIVY. She graduated with Business Administration degree major in Talent Management. She's a rockstar in sourcing, project management in LATAM region.
This week host Mike Townsend interviews 4 guests, all with impressive backgrounds in tech, education, and startups to discuss topcs including 1. how international developers can be successful in US companies 2. strategies to sharpen your tech skills 3. what technologies are best to learn now 4. the best place to go for online free education 5. the future of education with Launch House.
Jose Soto is a Lead Programmer at Tighten, a premier web development agency specializing in Laravel, Vue, and React. He is an educator at heart and loves to share his knowledge on youtube. Outside of coding, Jose loves to travel with his family, drink coffee, and play soccer.
Quinntin Ruiz has created multiple ventures in the education space, including a coding and entrepreneurship bootcamp for college students. He’s currently working on Lectureless, a platform to create active learning experiences online.
https://m.facebook.com/quinntin.ruiz
Justin Hall is a Program Manager at Apple and ex-organizer of the largest hackathon in Connecticut. He is motivated by tackling challenges and forming new connections, and enjoys windsurfing, skiing, and community building.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/justindeanhall/
Jacob Peters, lifelong community builder and cofounder of Launch House. https://twitter.com/j__cub
Omar has been the CTO of an Aerospace company, and a leader in the Buenos Aires development community. He's built 8 applications from scratch including a trading platform, game engine, compression algorithms, and even participated in a NFT project.
We talk about the state of Argentinian development, the economy, and other opportunities for people to connect across the world.