Startup Grind Global Conference 2017

Ben Horowitz

Andreessen Horowitz

Ben Horowitz is a cofounder and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and The New York Times bestselling author of The Hard Thing About Hard Things, which is now available in over 16 languages. Prior to a16z, Ben was cofounder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2007 for $1.6 billion, and was appointed vice president and general manager of Business Technology Optimization for Software at HP. Earlier, he was vice president and general manager of America Online’s E-commerce Platform division, where he oversaw development of the company’s flagship Shop@AOL service. Previously, Ben ran several product divisions at Netscape Communications. He also served as vice president of Netscape’s widely acclaimed Directory and Security product line. Before joining Netscape in July 1995, he held various senior product marketing positions at Lotus Development Corporation. Ben has an MS in Computer Science from UCLA and a BA in Computer Science from Columbia University. Ben serves on the board of the following Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies: 21, Capriza, Databricks, Foursquare, Genius, Lyft, Magnet Systems, Medium, NationBuilder, Okta, SignalFX, Tanium, TransferWise, and Usermind. He is also on the board of Columbia University and CODE2040.

Patrick Collison

Stripe

Patrick Collison is the CEO and co-founder of Stripe, the technology company that expands internet commerce by making it easy to process transactions from anywhere. After experiencing firsthand how difficult it was to set up an online business, Patrick and his brother John started Stripe in the fall of 2010. Their goal was to make accepting payments on the internet simpler and more inclusive. Today, the 500-person (and growing) Stripe-team processes billions of dollars a year for hundreds of thousands of companies, from Fortune 500’s to upstarts. Stripe’s vision is to create a world in which an entrepreneur’s success is no longer determined by geography or personal means, but on the promise of their idea. Stripe most recently launched Atlas, a toolkit for starting a global internet business from virtually anywhere in the world. Earlier this year Patrick joined President Obama in Havana in March to open Atlas to Cuban entrepreneurs, and was soon after named a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship. Prior to Stripe, Patrick co-founded Auctomatic, which Live Current Media acquired for $5 million in March 2008.

Jan Koum

WhatsApp

Jan Koum is a Ukrainian-American internet inventor and computer programmer. He is the CEO and co-founder of WhatsApp, a mobile messaging application which was acquired by Facebook Inc. in February 2014 for US$19 billion.

Leila Janah

Sama

Leila Janah is the Founder and CEO of Sama and LXMI, two companies that share a common social mission to end global poverty by giving work to people in need. She is also the co-author of America's Moment: Creating Opportunity in the Connected Age, a book by Rework America: A Markle Initiative. Leila was included as one of The New York Times T Magazine’s “Five Visionary Tech Entrepreneurs Who Are Changing the World” in 2015. She was also named a “Rising Star” on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in 2011, one of Fast Company’s “Most Creative People in Business” in 2011, and was profiled as one of Fortune’s “Most Promising Entrepreneurs” in 2013.

Alex Chung

Giphy

Alex Chung is Founder of Giphy, Inc. Mr. Chung served as the Vice President of Technology at Artspace.com Markets Inc. A creative technology director and entrepreneur living in New York City, he has spent over 15 years building startups as well as designing future technologies for clients ranging from MTV, GE, Intel, Comcast, Sega, Nokia, and Vulcan Ventures to Bergdorf Goodman, Fendi, Neiman Marcus, and Kate Spade. He is also the creator and co-founder of The Fridge which led the popup social networking movement. He has earned degrees in philosophy and computer engineering from UW, fine art from SFAI, and graphic design from Parsons the New School of Design.

Mark Pincus

Zynga

Mark Pincus is the founder and Executive Chairman of the Board at Zynga. He has served as Chairman from April 2007 to March 2016 and Executive Chairman since March 2016. He previously served as Chief Executive Officer from April 2007 to July 2013 and from April 2015 to March 2016, and as Chief Product Officer from April 2007 to April 2014. In 2014, he founded superlabs, a San Francisco-based product lab focused on developing products that connect and empower people, which was acquired by Zynga in 2015. Mr. Pincus also founded Zynga.org in 2009, a non-profit organization dedicated to using social games for social good. From 2003 to 2007, Mr. Pincus served as Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Tribe.net, a company he launched and one of the first social networks in the industry. From 1997 to 2000, he served as Chairman of Support.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: SPRT), a help desk automation software company he founded, and he served as Chief Executive Officer and President from December 1997 to July 1999. From 1996 to 1997, he served as Chief Executive Officer of FreeLoader, Inc., a web-based news company he founded. Mr. Pincus also made founding investments in Napster, Twitter and Facebook. Mr. Pincus graduated summa cum laude from University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School. He is an angel investor in multiple Silicon Valley startups and regularly gives lectures to aspiring entrepreneurs.

Sean Rad

Tinder

Sean Rad is Founder and CEO of Tinder, a global platform that has brought the world closer together by facilitating more than 11 billion new connections. Known for his entrepreneurial drive and creativity, Sean has been recognized in Forbes’ 30 under 30 and Vanity Fair’s “The New Establishment.” Before founding Tinder in 2012, Sean launched and sold several successful tech ventures similarly focused on enhancing the way people communicate. These include Orgoo, a unified communications platform for consumers and Ad.ly, the largest celebrity endorsement platform for social media. Sean, 30, attended the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business.

Noam Bardin

Waze

Noam Bardin has served as CEO of Waze since March 2009, building the company to become one of the world's most talked-about startups through its acquisition by Google in June 2013. Noam continues to lead the global Waze team within Google to help Wazers around the world enjoy faster, safer drives. Hailed as one of Business Insider's 100 Stars of Silicon Valley, Noam previously co-founded Deltathree inc., a leading international VoIP service provider, where he worked in senior leadership for 10 years in a variety of positions including Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and VP of Operations. Prior to Deltathree, Noam served as CEO of Intercast Networks. He holds a B.A. in Economics from Hebrew University and a Masters of Public Administration from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Vinod Khosla

Khosla Ventures

Vinod grew up dreaming of being an entrepreneur, despite growing up in an Indian Army household with no business or technology connections. Since the age of 16, when he first heard about Intel starting up, he dreamt of starting his own technology company. Upon graduating with a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, Vinod failed, at age 20, to start a soy milk company to service the many people in India who did not have refrigerators. He came instead to the U.S. and got his master’s in biomedical engineering at Carnegie-Mellon University. His start-up dreams attracted him to Silicon Valley, where he got an MBA at Stanford University in 1980. Upon graduation he was one of the three founders of Daisy Systems, which was the first significant computer-aided design system for electrical engineers. The company went on to achieve significant revenue, profits, and an IPO, but Khosla, driven by the frustration of having to design the computer hardware on which the Daisy software needed to be built, started the standards-based Sun Microsystems in 1982 to build workstations for software developers. At Sun he pioneered “open systems” and RISC processors. Sun was funded by longtime friend and board member John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In 1986 Vinod switched sides and joined Kleiner Perkins, where he was and continues to be a general partner of KPCB funds through KP X. Through the years there, with other partners, he took on Intel’s monopoly with Nexgen/AMD (the only microprocessor to have significant success against Intel, sold to AMD for 28 percent of AMD), incubated the idea and business plan for Juniper to take on Cisco’s dominance of the router market, formulated the very early advertising-based search strategy for Excite, and transformed the moribund telecommunications business and its archaic SONET implementations with Cerent (sold to Cisco for $7B). He helped in creating value, having fun, succeeding, failing (remember Dynabook?), and driving impact in partnership with entrepreneurs and the partners at KPCB. In 2004, Vinod, driven by the need for flexibility to accommodate four teenaged children and a desire to be more experimental, to fund sometimes imprudent “science experiments,” and to take on both for-profit and for “social impact” ventures, formed khoslaventures, funded entirely with family funds. His goals remain the same: work and learn from fun and knowledgeable entrepreneurs, build impactful companies through the leverage of innovation, and spend time in a partnership that makes a difference.

Daphne Koller

Coursera

Daphne Koller is Co-Chair of the Board and Co-Founder of Coursera. She is also the Chief Computing Officer at Calico Labs, an Alphabet (Google) company that is using advanced technology to understand aging and design interventions that help people lead longer, healthier lives. Previously, she was the Rajeev Motwani Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where she served on the faculty for 18 years. She is the author of over 200 refereed publications appearing in venues such as Science, Cell, and Nature Genetics.

Hamdi Ulukaya

Chobani

Hamdi Ulukaya is founder, Chairman and CEO of Chobani, LLC, widely regarded as one of the most successful American food companies of the past decade and a pioneer for the natural food movement. A Kurdish Turk raised in a dairy-farming family in a small village in eastern Turkey, Hamdi launched Chobani Greek Yogurt in Upstate New York in 2007 with the mission and vision of making better food more accessible. In less than five years, Chobani became the No. 1–selling Greek Yogurt brand in the U.S. with more than a billion dollars in annual sales – making Chobani one of the fastest growing companies of its time. Hamdi’s vision for Chobani has effectively transformed the food industry in America.

Michael Seibel

Y Combinator

Michael Seibel works at Y Combinator as a full-time partner and CEO of the YC accelerator program. Previously, Michael Seibel was the co-founder and CEO Justin.tv and Socialcam. Socialcam sold to Autodesk in 2012 and under the leadership of Emmett Shear, Justin.tv became Twitch.tv and sold to Amazon in 2014. Before getting into startups, he spent a year as the finance director for a US Senate campaign and in 2005, Michael graduated from Yale University with a BA in political science.

Ryan Smith

Qualtrics

Ryan Smith co-founded Qualtrics in 2002 with the goal of making sophisticated research simple. As CEO, he has grown the company from a basement startup to one of the fastest-growing technology companies in the world. Qualtrics has more than 7,000 enterprise customers including half of the Fortune 100, 1,600 colleges and universities worldwide, and 99 of the top 100 business schools.

Jason Robins

DraftKings

Jason Robins is Chief Executive Officer of DraftKings, a leader in the Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) industry and at the forefront of its astronomical growth. Robins co-founded DraftKings in 2012 and oversees all of the company’s strategy and operations, while also driving funding and partnerships. Robins has quickly built a reputation for expanding DraftKings’ reach across numerous platforms through wide-ranging, forward-thinking partnerships. Under his leadership, DraftKings became the first DFS company to sign a league partnership, with Major League Baseball (MLB) in 2013. Since then, the company has signed four additional league-wide partnerships, including the National Hockey League (NHL), NASCAR, MLS and UFC. DraftKings is also the exclusive partner of 12 National Football League (NFL) teams, seven National Basketball League (NBA) teams, 27 MLB teams and seven NHL teams.

Holly Liu

PKO Investments

Holly Liu is co-founder of the mobile gaming company, Kabam, a world leader in AAA mobile games. Her work has contributed to record revenue growth for Kabam year over year from $0 to $400 million in 2014, which has led to Kabam’s valuation of $1 billion in 2014. She led the design for Kabam’s award-winning Kingdoms of Camelot franchise, which has grossed more than $250 million in less than four years. She was also the founding mobile designer for extension Kingdoms of Camelot: Battle for the North, which was the top grossing app on iOS in 2012. Currently, Holly is Chief Development Officer leading the development of Kabam internationally through key relationships and industry presence, focusing primarily on China. In addition, she continues to develop global cultural initiatives within Kabam.

Bing Gordon

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Bing Gordon joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 2008 and serves as General Partner and Chief Product Officer for the firm, leading KPCB ProductWorks, a new program that brings together talent and experience to help entrepreneurs build successful products and services. Bing also leads KPCB’s sFund, the investment initiative to fund and build applications and services that deliver on the promise of the social web. The sFund, launched in 2010 with strategic partners Amazon.com, Facebook, Zynga, Comcast, Liberty Media and Allen & Co., has made 16 investments to date, including four seeds. Bing serves on the board of directors of Amazon, MEVIO, N3twork, OUYA, Zazzle and Zynga. He was also a founding director at Katango (acquired by Google 2011), ngmoco (acquired by DeNA 2010) and Audible (acquired by Amazon in 2008).

Megan Quinn

Spark Capital

Megan is a General Partner at Spark Capital, where she invests in growth-stage companies, including Slack, Glossier, and Niantic. She was formerly a partner at Kleiner Perkins. Prior to becoming an investor, Megan led the product development organization at Square and spent seven years at Google building Google Maps.

Hiten Shah

KISSmetrics

Hiten has started 3 SaaS companies, Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics and the newest is Quick Sprout. He also loves to advise, invest and help founders and their companies.

Ryan Holmes

Hootsuite

Growing a company from an idea to one of the largest investment raises in Canadian Venture Capital history. Join us as we sit down with Ryan Holmes, the Founder & CEO of Hootsuite. Ryan Holmes founded Hootsuite in 2008, growing the company from a lean startup to a global leader in social media with over 11 million users, including 79 of the Fortune 100 companies. Thought leader, dog lover and serial entrepreneur, Ryan has redefined the face of social media—bringing Twitter, Facebook and other social networks out of the dorm room and into the boardroom. A college drop-out, he started a paintball company and pizza restaurant before founding Invoke Media, the company that developed Hootsuite. Today, Ryan is an authority in technology and business. He writes regularly for publications like Fast Company, Inc, Fortune, and has a column in the Wall Street Journal. He's also one of LinkedIn's top 20 most followed Influencers and presents at the world’s top tech conferences. An angel investor and advisor outside of Hootsuite, Ryan supports programs that empower the greater startup community and future generations of entrepreneurs, including his own non-profit initiative, The Next Big Thing.

Vladimir Tenev

Robinhood

Vlad Tenev is the cofounder of Robinhood. A first-generation immigrant from Bulgaria, Tenev earned his B.S. in Math and Physics at Stanford University before starting two finance companies in New York City, selling trading software to hedge funds. In 2013, Tenev created Robinhood, a financial services company focused on offering free trading for everyone. The company has raised $66 million from NEA, Index Ventures, and others.

Dave McClure

500 Startups

Dave uses his uncanny ability to function without sleep and frequent flyer miles to uncover geeks around the world. His ominous past includes work at Founders Fund, Facebook fbFund, PayPal, Mint.com, & Simply Hired. Dave blogs & rants @ 500hats.com.

Shernaz Daver

Udacity, GV

Shernaz is Chief Marketing Officer at Udacity, an online education company. She brings over 20 years of experience building brands and consumer perception; advising executive management; scaling operational teams; and developing global businesses to take companies to the next level in marketing and mindshare. Over her tenure, she has worked with numerous companies including Netflix, Walmart, Motorola, Polyvore, Khan Academy, Zynga, Groupon, Kosmix and Baidu. She was the chief marketing officer and head of investor relations at Inktomi, a company that became one of the hottest Internet names reaching a $37 billion valuation. Shernaz started her career at Sun Microsystems with roles in the US and European offices. She currently serves as an executive advisor to GV.

Kenneth Lin

Credit Karma

Kenneth started Credit Karma in 2007 to offer free credit scores and bring transparency and simplicity to the credit industry – an industry that was built around and had long prioritized banks above consumers. He has guided the company from a small team of three to a team of several hundred employees who are disrupting consumer finance, serving millions of people. Kenneth’s vision is that one day Credit Karma can create a simple way for Americans to manage their financial identities. Kenneth also founded Multilytics Marketing in 2006 and has a B.A. in mathematics and economics from Boston University.

M.G. Siegler

GV

M.G. Siegler is a general partner at GV, where he primarily focuses on early-stage investments. He has been deeply involved in the startup space since 2005, first as a web developer, then as a writer, and most recently as an investor and advisor. Before joining GV, M.G. was a founding partner of CrunchFund, an early-stage investment fund. Prior to that, he reported on the startup world as a writer for both TechCrunch and VentureBeat. M.G. still writes regularly for 500ish, his Medium publication and from time-to-time doing movie reviews in haiku format. Originally from Ohio, M.G. graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor before moving out west to work in Hollywood. One day, he will write that killer screenplay.

Fei-Fei Li

Stanford, Google Cloud

Dr. Li is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford, and the Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Stanford Vision Lab. Her main research areas are in machine learning, deep learning, computer vision and cognitive and computational neuroscience. She has published more than 150 scientific articles in top-tier journals and conferences and invented ImageNet and the ImageNet Challenge, a critical large-scale dataset and benchmarking effort that has contributed to the latest developments in deep learning and AI. As of January 2017, Fei-Fei Li is spending her sabbatical at Google Cloud as Chief Scientist AI/ML.

Bharat Anand

Harvard Business School

Bharat Anand is the Henry R. Byers Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in economics from Harvard University, and received his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University. Professor Anand is an expert in digital and corporate strategy. He has studied how new technologies affect what we watch, read, and hear, and how companies navigate digital change. He has written more than fifty articles and case studies, received awards for his research and case-writing, and chaired various executive education programs. He is a two-time winner of the “best teacher award” at Harvard Business School. Anand has advised leading organizations and entrepreneurs around the world. Recently, he helped create Harvard Business School’s digital learning initiative, HBX, which he now oversees as faculty chair.

Nir Eyal

Author, Hooked

Nir Eyal writes, consults, and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business. The M.I.T. Technology Review dubbed Nir, “The Prophet of Habit-Forming Technology.” Nir founded two tech companies since 2003 and has taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. He is the author of the bestselling book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. In addition to blogging at NirAndFar.com, Nir’s writing has been featured in The Harvard Business Review, TechCrunch, and Psychology Today. Nir is also an active investor in habit-forming technologies. Some of his past investments include: Eventbrite, Product Hunt, Pantry, Marco Polo, Presence Learning, 7 Cups, Pana, Symphony Commerce, Worklife (acquired by Cisco) and Refresh.io (acquired by LinkedIn). Nir attended The Stanford Graduate School of Business and Emory University.

Phil Libin

Evernote / mmhmm

Phil Libin is co-founder and CEO of All Turtles, a mission-driven product studio, and mmhmm, a new app that makes video communication more clear and compelling. Previously he was Managing Director at General Catalyst, and before that he was co-founder and CEO of Evernote, which he grew to become a beloved product for hundreds of millions of users.

Justin Rosenstein

Asana

Justin Rosenstein is the co-founder of Asana, a fast-growing app that makes it easier for teams to track their work with greater clarity, accountability, and efficiency. He’s also the primary author of Wavelength, an online publication for teams who aspire to do great things together—through a mindful, purposeful approach. Previously he led development for products at Facebook and Google, including the Like Button, Facebook Pages, and Gmail Chat. Justin majored in Math and got part way through a Master’s in Computer Science at Stanford. He is also a serious student of yoga, meditation, and cats.

Ann Miura-Ko

Floodgate

Ann Miura-Ko is a founding partner at Floodgate, a seed-stage VC firm where she has been one of the first investors in companies such as Lyft, Xamarin, and Refinery29. Ann is known as a pioneer investor in the artificial intelligence space. In addition to partnering with entrepreneurs building impactful businesses based on truly intelligent AI, she is a co-sponsor of the AI Grant. A repeat member of the Forbes Midas List, she is also a lecturer in entrepreneurship at Stanford School of Engineering. She has a BSEE from Yale and a PhD from Stanford in math modeling of computer security.

Eric Yuan

Zoom

Prior to founding Zoom, Eric was Corporate Vice President of Engineering at Cisco, where he was responsible for Cisco's collaboration software development. As one of the founding engineers and Vice President of Engineering at WebEx, Eric was the heart and soul of the WebEx product from 1997 to 2011. Eric proudly grew the WebEx team from 10 engineers to more than 800 worldwide, and contributed to revenue growth from $0 to more than $800M. Eric is a named inventor on 11 issued and 20 pending patents in real time collaboration.Eric is a graduate of the Stanford University Executive Program.

Chris O’Neill

Evernote

Chris O’Neill is CEO of Evernote, where he’s tackling the challenge of turning a beloved globally recognized brand into a productivity powerhouse beyond its already sizeable 200 million member base. Previously, Chris was managing director of Google Canada, where he oversaw Google’s operations in Canada and served on the Americas’ Executive Management Group.

Laura Weidman Powers

CODE2040

Laura Weidman Powers is the co-founder and CEO of CODE2040, a nonprofit that creates pathways to success in the innovation economy for Blacks and Latino/as. She brings to this work a background in entrepreneurship, nonprofit management, youth development, and technology. Laura and CODE2040 are based in San Francisco.

Mike Abbott

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Mike Abbott joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 2011 and focuses on investments in the firm’s digital practice, helping entrepreneurs in the social, mobile and cloud computing sectors rapidly scale teams and ventures. Mike serves as an expert resource on enterprise infrastructure, cloud computing and “big data.” He also helps entrepreneurs win the race for talent in a hyper-competitive recruitment environment.

Reggie Bradford

Oracle

Reggie Bradford brings more than 20 years of experience to his role as Senior Vice President, Startup Ecosystem & Accelerator at Oracle. In his current role, he is focused on driving Oracle’s global startup initiatives and leading the expansion of its Oracle Startup Cloud Accelerator program, as well as championing Oracle’s vision to become the global leader in Cloud Computing. He also serves as a thought leader speaking and writing about Entrepreneurism, Cloud, Internet of Things, Globalization, Data Visualization, Artificial Intelligence and other emerging technologies. Prior to joining Oracle, Bradford was the founder and CEO of Vitrue, the global leader in cloud-based social marketing and management. Vitrue was acquired by Oracle in May 2012 and is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Oracle. Prior to Vitrue, Bradford held executive management positions at TANDBERG Television, N2 Broadband, and WebMD. Over the course of his career, Bradford has received a number of industry accolades recognizing his success as an entrepreneur and Internet visionary, including Business Insider’s 2014 Most Influential People in Cloud Computing; Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Distinguished Entrepreneur Award in 2013; Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2012. Bradford currently serves on the board of directors of Integrate, a cloud-based marketing and media services provider; Mana Health, a healthcare technology startup which helps physicians glean trends from patient medical record data; and Persado, a marketing technology startup which provides marketers with an automated copywriting software that generates persuasive language to their target audience. Bradford received a BBA in Finance from the University of Georgia and an MBA from Emory University. He serves on numerous advisory boards including Felix Capital of London. Bradford resides in London with his wife Holly and their children.

Jessica Mah

inDinero

As Founder and CEO of inDinero, Jessica loves helping entrepreneurs run better businesses. She studied Computer Science at U.C. Berkeley and has been running businesses since she was 13. Jessica has been featured on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 and Inc’s 30 Under 30 lists. Jessica founded her first startup at age of 13, and entered into the Computer Science program at Berkeley at 15, where she started internshipIN.com.

Pascal Finette

Singularity University

He love's technology and believes that the Internet is deeply impacting humankind. He got started on the Net before there was a web browser, founded a couple of technology startups, led eBay’s Platform Solutions Group in Europe, launched a consulting firm helping entrepreneurs with their strategy & operations, invested into early-stage tech startups, led Mozilla Labs, created Mozilla’s accelerator program WebFWD, headed up Mozilla’s Office of the Chair and invested into social impact organizations around the globe at Google.org. I also created the non-profit organizations Mentor for Good and co-founded The Coaching Fellowship; the GyShiDo (Get Your S%#& Done) movement and publish the influential The Heretic newsletter.

Today he heads up Singularity University’s startup initiatives, where they grow startups solving the most intractable problems in the world. Further he is the entrepreneurship chair and SingularityU’s Global Evangelist. I frequently speak and write about the magic which happens at the intersection of entrepreneurship, technology & global impact.

Christine Souffrant Ntim

Forbes 30 Under 30, Vendedy

Christine Souffrant Ntim is a Haitian-American entrepreneur with over 7 years business management experience across 30+countries. She was selected for Forbes 30 Under 30, AdAge 40 Under 40, Haiti Changemakers 1804 List, and Caribbean Change Makers 30 Under 30 in 2016. She speaks on leadership, disruptive entrepreneurship, and exponential tech AI, VR, Robotics at the United Nations, TEDx, European Union Forum and over 20+ global conferences each year. She also interviews top influencers in the Middle East as the Managing Chapter Director of Startup Grind Dubai, powered by Google for Entrepreneurs. Christine is the founder of Vendedy, a social network connecting global travelers to street markets with the aim of digitizing a $10 trillion dollar black economy by centralizing the world’s 200,000 street markets. Today, Christine is an award-winning keynote speaker, traveler and serial entrepreneur who builds startup ecosystems for entrepreneurs via GlobalStartupEcosystem.com and BrandEntrepreneurs.com.

Adam Singolda

Taboola

Adam Singolda is the founder and CEO at Taboola, the leading discovery platform, serving over 1B unique users every month. Taboola works with the world’s top publishers, brands, and marketers to drive goals around audience development, engagement, and monetization. In addition to its personalized content recommendations, Taboola empowers editorial, product, and sales teams with solutions built around real-time page optimization, innovative native advertising offerings, and more.

Jim Scheinman

Maven Ventures

Jim has achieved 5 ‘unicorn’-level successes over the past 20 years as a founder, executive, and investor. His top performers include Zoom ($1B valuation), Cruise ($1B sale to GM), Bebo ($850M sale to AOL), Tango ($1B+ valuation), and NBCi ($6B IPO), plus several other exits including the recent acquisition of Check by Intuit for $360M. Jim is one of the leading growth experts in Silicon Valley, a TED speaker, and a frequent presenter and judge at many startup conferences and events. Jim has a BS in Neuropsychology from Duke University and earned a JD at the University of California Davis School of Law. Jim has startup in his blood. He’s been a serial entrepreneur dating back to his high school and college days.

Immediately prior to founding Maven Ventures, Jim was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Charles River Ventures (CRV), a leading venture firm where he helped source, vet, and advise their consumer portfolio companies. Jim is one of the early pioneers of the social networking phenomenon as one of the first employees and the former head of business development and sales at the first social networking site, Friendster. In 2005, Jim left Friendster to join co-founders Michael and Xochi Birch to launch Bebo as the first employee and Board member. Prior to his internet career, Jim practiced corporate and intellectual property law at a leading Silicon Valley law firm for 3 years.

Mada Seghete

Branch Metrics

Mada leads community and developer marketing at Branch. In the last year, Branch has grown a 17,000-person Mobile Growth community in 51 cities around the world. Mada was included in Linkedin’s Next Wave, 150 top professionals in 15 industries all 35 & under and sits on the board of the App Developer’s Alliance.

JT Marino

Tuft & Needle

After a miserable mattress buying experience, JT Marino partnered with Daehee Park to launch Tuft & Needle to change the way mattresses were designed and sold. Today, JT leads the product design, engineering and customer experience teams and can be followed at @johnmarino.

Daehee Park

Tuft & Needle

Daehee Park is the co-founder of Tuft & Needle. He works across a variety of disciplines including marketing, community relations, and risk management. Under his leadership, Tuft & Needle has grown exponentially to over $100 million in sales without raising any outside capital. He blogs at daehee.com.

Marcelo Camberos

Ipsy

Marcelo Camberos is CEO and Co-Founder of ipsy, the world’s largest and most passionate beauty community, anchored around sampling and entertainment. Prior to founding ipsy with Michelle Phan, Marcelo was VP of Business Development at Funny Or Die and graduated from Duke University and received an MBA from Stanford University.

Kurt Wagner

Recode

Kurt Wagner has been a business and tech journalist since 2012 and was previously reporting for Mashable. He also covered general tech and Silicon Valley news in his first job as a tech reporter with Fortune magazine, based in San Francisco. Originally from the Seattle area, Kurt graduated from Santa Clara University with a B.S. in communication and political science. He served as Editor-in-Chief of The Santa Clara, the university newspaper, for two years.

Sarah Cooper

The Cooper Review

Sarah Cooper is a writer, comedian and creator of satirical blog TheCooperReview.com, which attracts 100K+ readers per month. Her work has appeared on The Washington Post, Fast Company, Business Insider, and Huffington Post. Previously the design lead for Google Docs, she now focuses on writing and speaking on corporate and tech humor. Her first book, 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings, was published October 2016 by Andrews McMeel.

Nima Ghamsari

Blend

Nima is the CEO and Co-Founder of Blend, a Silicon Valley technology company empowering lenders to originate efficient, data-driven mortgages while offering their borrowers a compelling user experience. Prior to Blend, Nima was an early employee at Palantir Technologies where he co-founded its commercial group whose mission was to solve major data challenges for the financial sector. After the 2008 financial crisis, Nima worked directly with major banks and agencies to develop and implement software enabling underwater borrowers to avoid foreclosures while saving billions of dollars of debt. Nima is a graduate of Stanford University where he majored in Computer Science.

Brian Wong

Kiip

Brian Wong is the co-founder and CEO of Kiip (pronounced "keep"), a category-creating mobile rewards network that is redefining mobile advertising through an innovative platform that leverages "moments of achievement" in games and apps to simultaneously benefit users, developers and advertisers. Backed by Hummer Winblad, Relay Ventures, True Ventures, Verizon Ventures, and others, the company has raised $15.4 million in funding to date. Kiip has been listed by Forbes as one of the 4 Hot Online Ad Companies to Put on Your Watch List, and been named to the Dow Jones FasTech50 List.

Called the youngest person to ever receive venture capital funding by TechCrunch and the Wall Street Journal, Brian received his Bachelors of Commerce degree from the University of British Columbia at age 18, after skipping four K-12 grades. He has been recognized with many awards for his accomplishments and leadership, including: Forbes' 30 under 30; the Top 20 Under 20 awards for all of Canada; Business Insider's Top 25 Under 25 in Silicon Valley and 18 Most Important People in Mobile Advertising; Mashable's Top 5 Entrepreneurs to Watch; and the AdAge Creativity Top 50.

Nicole Sanchez

Vaya Consulting

Nicole is the Managing Partner + Founder of Vaya Consulting, a leader in workplace culture, diversity, and inclusion. Prior to Vaya, Nicole served as VP of Social Impact at GitHub, Managing Partner of the Kapor Center for Social Impact, and she helped build one of the first AmeriCorps programs in the US. Nicole earned her MBA from Haas School of Business where she has also lectured on diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

Patrick Mullane

HBX

Patrick Mullane is the Executive Director of HBX. He brings over 20 years of management experience across several industries to the position. As Executive Director, he is responsible for managing HBX’s growth, expansion in global markets, and long-term success. HBX leverages Harvard Business School’s reputation for excellence and impact in business education and the broader business community, as well as the vast intellectual property, academic pedagogy and faculty talent of the School to be the premier provider of high quality digital business education.

Manish Chandra

Poshmark

Manish Chandra is the founder and CEO of Poshmark, the largest community marketplace for fashion where millions of women come to buy, sell and share their personal style. Manish has always been passionate about building communities and founded the first social shopping company, Kaboodle, which was acquired by Hearst Corporation in 2007. With Poshmark, Manish has applied his understanding of technology to change the way women think about shopping, building a passionate community based around people’s love for fashion and each other. Manish received a BTech from IIT Kanpur, MS from UT Austin, and an MBA from Haas School of Business.

Rebecca Kaden

Union Square Ventures

Rebecca Kaden is a Partner at Union Square Ventures. She began her career as a journalist and, prior to USV, was a Partner at Maveron, a consumer-focused early stage fund. Rebecca was born in New York City. She studied English and American Literature at Harvard and received her MBA from Stanford.

Garrett Lord

Handshake

Garrett Lord is the co-founder and CEO of Handshake, the ultimate career network and recruiting platform for students. Handshake's mission is to democratize opportunity and make it easy for any student to build a great career, no matter where they go to school or who they know. Handshake has 3 million students and 100,000 employers (including 95% of the Fortune 500) recruiting students across 175 schools including Stanford, Princeton, UC-Berkeley, Michigan, UVA, Spelman and Harvey Mudd. Garrett grew up in the Detroit area and worked at Palantir before dropping out of Michigan Tech University in 2014 to build Handshake.

Everette Taylor

Skurt

Everette Taylor currently serves as Chief Marketing Officer at Skurt – the mobility company which delivers cars on-demand at the tap of a button. He founded the marketing firm MilliSense where he served as CEO, recently founded the company GrowthPup– an Instagram growth hacking tool/service and was part of the founding team of GrowthHackers. His work also includes serving as CMO of the e-commerce company StickerMule, running growth for new projects at Microsoft, leading marketing at the software company Qualaroo which was acquired by Xenon Ventures, and serving as an advisor to We Are Onyx – a beauty box subscription service for women of color. Taylor is also passionate about diversity in tech, serving as an ambassador to CODE2040, Black Girls Code, and Wonder Women Tech.

Derek Andersen

Startup Grind

Derek Andersen is the Founder & CEO of Startup Grind, a 400,000 person entrepreneurial community with 200 chapters in 85 countries run by more than 1,000 volunteers. Startup Grind's mission is to help every entrepreneur in the world. It's core values are giving before you take, helping others first, and making friends. Derek Andersen spent four years in product management at Electronic Arts working on games like The Godfather, Burnout, The Sims 3, and Mirror’s Edge. He left EA in 2009 to start Vaporware Labs, a product incubator which mostly failed but built products including Commonred which was acquired by Income.com in 2012, and Startup Grind. After running Startup Grind as a side project for 2 years, Derek turned his full attention to scaling it from 3 chapters to 200 chapters today. In 2015 Startup Grind will host 1,200 events for 75,000 entrepreneurs. He currently lives in Palo Alto, California but has lived eight years outside the U.S. in France, Germany, Switzerland, New Zealand, and the Cook Islands.

Doron Reuveni

Applause

As CEO and co-founder of Applause, Doron Reuveni is the driving force behind one of the fastest growing tech companies in New England. With clarity of vision about the future of web and mobile applications, Doron has grown the company exponentially. His idea for "in-the-wild" software testing through a crowdsourcing model was a radical notion in 2007. Today it has been enthusiastically adopted by 1000+ companies worldwide. Prior to Applause, Doron was the CEO and Owner of Re.D Consulting and the SVP of Technology at Enigma Technologies.

Penny Kim

ParkHub

Marketing Director and writer of the Medium article "I Got Scammed By a Silicon Valley", Penny Kim shares her experience with the ugly side of startup culture and the unexpected surprises that can come with viral marketing.

Steve Clemons

The Atlantic

Washington Editor-At-Large, The Atlantic Steve Clemons is Washington Editor-At-Large for The Atlantic and National Journal; and Editor-in-Chief of AtlanticLIVE, National Journal LIVE, and QuartzLIVE. He is also Editor-at-Large for Quartz and an MSNBC contributor. At AtlanticLIVE, The Atlantic’s premium events division, Clemons develops concepts and editorial content and leads programs as an interviewer, moderator, and host.

Charles Hudson

Precursor Ventures

Charles Hudson is the Managing Partner and Founder of Precursor Ventures, an earlystage venture capital firm focused on investing in the first institutional round of investment for the most promising software and hardware companies. Prior to founding Precursor Ventures, Charles was a Partner at SoftTech VC. In this role, he focused on identifying investment opportunities in mobile infrastructure, mobile applications, and marketplaces. In addition to his investment activities, he supports SoftTech portfolio companies on business and corporate development matters. He was also the CoFounder and CEO of Bionic Panda Games, an Androidfocused mobile games startup based in San Francisco, CA. Prior to joining SoftTech VC and cofounding Bionic Panda Games, Charles Hudson was the VP of Business Development for Serious Business until the company was acquired by Zynga in February 2010. Prior to Serious Business, he was the Sr. Director for Business Development at Gaia Interactive, an online hangout and virtual world for teens. Prior to Gaia, Charles worked in New Business Development at Google and focused on new partnership opportunities for earlystage products in the advertising, mobile, and ecommerce markets. Prior to joining Google, he was a Product Manager for IronPort Systems, a leading provider of antispam hardware appliances that was acquired by Cisco Systems for $830 million in 2007. Charles was also the founder of the Virtual Goods Summit and Social Gaming Summit, two of the leading conferences in the freetoplay games space. Charles spent several years working at InQTel, the strategic venture capital group for the Central Intelligence Agency. While at InQTel, he focused on identifying investment opportunities that could deliver significant value to the CIA and the commercial market in both the short and long term. He holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a B.A. in Economics and Spanish from Stanford University.

Eurie Kim

Forerunner Ventures

Eurie joined Forerunner Ventures in May 2012. Over the past 15 years, Eurie has evaluated and aided a wide variety of companies in their quest to define business models, identify target markets, understand consumer behavior, and overcome operational and competitive challenges to drive growth. As a management consultant at Bain and Company, Eurie advised large retail and e-commerce clients on strategy, identifying acquisition opportunities, and harnessing consumer insights to drive growth. Prior to Bain, Eurie was an investor at Castanea Partners where she evaluated growth investments in consumer and retail businesses. Eurie also has a personal passion for entrepreneurship, which inspired her to launch an artisanal leather goods brand as well as serve on the founding team of a European luxury brand incubator. At Forerunner, Eurie has supported investments in 30+ early stage companies and currently serves on the Board of Directors of several Forerunner portfolio companies including: Away, BloomThat, Curology, MoveWith, and Soma. Eurie earned an MBA with honors at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and holds a B.S. with honors in Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley.

Justin Kan

Y Combinator; Whale

Justin Kan is an internet entrepreneur and investor. Justin has founded various companies including: Kiko, the first AJAX web calendar; Justin.tv, a live video streaming platform; Socialcam, a mobile video sharing app (acquired for $60mm by Autodesk in 2012); Twitch, a video game streaming platform (acquired by for $970mm by Amazon in 2014); and Exec, an on demand home cleaning service (acquired by Handybook in 2014). More recently he has founded Whale, a video Q&A app. He has personally angel invested in over 65 companies, including Zenefits, Cruise, Tilt and Wave. Justin graduated from Yale University with a degree in Physics and Philosophy.

Alex Rampell

Andreessen Horowitz

Alex Rampell is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Previously, he was the CEO and cofounder of TrialPay, a transactional advertising and payments company serving clients such as Facebook, Zynga, and Gap, with over $300M in cumulative revenue. TrialPay was acquired by Visa in 2015. TrialPay also spun out another company, Yub, the first offline affiliate network, where Alex simultaneously served as CEO through Yub’s acquisition in late 2013 by Coupons.com.

Megan Rose Dickey

TechCrunch

Megan Rose Dickey is a reporter at TechCrunch focused on diversity, inclusion and social justice.

Alexei Agratchev

RetailNext

Alexei Agratchev is the CEO and Co-founder of RetailNext, the world’s first technology company dedicated to providing advanced in-store analytics for brick-and-mortar retail businesses. Alexei previously spent eight years at Cisco Systems where he held a number of leadership positions, and worked as a consultant at Accenture in its Electronics and High Tech Operating Unit.

Nancy Hua

Apptimize

Nancy Hua is the Founder and CEO of Apptimize (YC S13). Before Apptimize, Nancy was leading the GETCO (now KCG Holdings) FI Quantitative Strategies team in New York and Chicago. She is a world-class expert in algorithmic trading and electronic exchanges. She studied math with CS at MIT, where she was also the captain of the fencing team. In 2015 Nancy was listed in the Forbes “30 Under 30”.

Joel Flory

VSCO

Joel Flory is the co-founder and CEO of VSCO. A natural leader, Joel was integral in growing VSCO to over 30M monthly active users and securing over 70 million in funding for the company. Before co-founding VSCO, Joel was a successful commercial photographer. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Technology from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

Peter Pham

Science

Peter is a passionate entrepreneur with roots in Southern California starting his career with 8 years in the enterprise hardware and software space. Having success in building companies ranging from solid state storage to SAS businesses Peter then focused his time in the consumer internet space. At Photobucket he was the 5th employee and was responsible for driving growth to 61M users and leading its $300M acquisition in 2007 to Fox Interactive Media, a division of News Corporation. Peter then turned his energy in helping people save money as CEO of BillShrink from inception to their 1st Million users in a little over a year. BillShrink became TruAxis which was acquired by MasterCard in 2012.

Continuing the journey of building early stage companies Peter was the Co-Founder & President of Color exploring the future of mobile and social interactions through proximity. Most recently he spent time as a 2nd time Entrepreneur In Residence at Trinity Ventures.

Michele Perras

Pivotal

Michele Perras is an entrepreneur, consultant and advisor. She’s passionate about building and accelerating businesses, from early stage companies to enterprise. As Head of Strategy and Market Development at Pivotal, Michele leads new initiatives for revenue and innovation. She advises on product strategy, sales and digital transformation, working with startups, the Fortune 500 and Silicon Valley accelerators including Alchemist and 500 Startups. Michele is an angel investor, has spoken about innovation, technology and foresight at SXSW, Mobile World Congress, ATech, and has taught at Duke, UCLA and OCAD University. She is a member of Pivotal’s Diversity and Inclusion council, and is based in San Francisco.

Mike Brown

Win-Win

Mike Brown is the founder and CEO of Win-Win, the only sports gaming platform where users contribute to charities while competing for experiential prizes. Prior to Win-Win, Mike led the mid-market growth team at Kiip. Previously, he was on the first place team at Draper University in 2013, an entrepreneurial program founded by Tim Draper. Before moving to Silicon Valley in June 2014, Mike was a 2-time All American linebacker and early graduate from Duke University. He went on to play for the Indianapolis Colts.

Alex Fishman

Bugsee

He spent more than a decade as an engineer, engineering manager, and business development executive for digital camera manufacturing giants Nikon to Lytro. A serial entrepreneur and longtime mentor and technology advisor to the startup community, WhatsApp was invented at his kitchen counter. At Bugsee, Alex brings his practical experience, business connections and enthusiasm for innovation to his role as Chief Executive.

David Spinks

CMX

David Spinks is Founder and CEO of CMX, the hub for the community industry. Forever fascinated by how technology can bring people together, he's been studying and building communities online and offline since he was 13 years old. Spinks also cofounded Feast (acquired) and BlogDash (still going), launched communities for companies like Zaarly, LeWeb, and Udemy, and has worked with hundreds of the world's leading companies on community strategy.

Joshua Reeves

Gusto

Josh Reeves is the CEO and co-founder of Gusto, which provides HR, payroll, and benefits to over 40,000 customers nationwide. Josh was selected for the 2012 Forbes 30 Under 30 list. He holds a BS and MS in electrical engineering from Stanford University, where he was a Mayfield Fellow and a recipient of the Terman Engineering award.

Elena Grewal

Airbnb

Elena Grewal leads Airbnb’s team of data scientists, data analysts, and machine learning specialists. The team partners with the all parts of the company, from the product team to the policy team, enabling Airbnb to use data effectively throughout. Examples of team projects include price prediction, payments routing optimization, lead scoring for operations teams, and analytics around recruiting and performance. Prior to working at Airbnb Elena completed a doctorate in education at Stanford where she modeled friendship networks in schools and the impact of friendships on educational outcomes. She has a longstanding passion for diversity and inclusion and has championed diversity at Airbnb and beyond.

Noah Knauf

Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers

Noah Knauf joined KPCB in 2016 and focuses on investments in the firm’s digital growth practice, targeting high-growth consumer and enterprise Internet companies that have achieved strong adoption and scale.Before joining KPCB, Noah worked for nine years at Warburg Pincus, where he led investments in technology-enabled businesses and helped deploy $1.8 billion of equity capital across 18 companies. His investments ranged from early-stage companies to large growing enterprises with thousands of employees. Noah also led the firm’s successful investments in Constitution Medical (acquired by Roche), Lutonix (acquired by Bard), and JHP Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Par). He recently led the formation of Helix, a partnership with Illumina to build a digital consumer genomics platform. Noah served on the boards of innovative companies such as Outset Medical, Specialists On Call, ComplexCare Solutions, Silk Road Medical, Accriva Diagnostics, and Singular Bio. Earlier in his career, Noah was an investor at Parthenon Capital and a consultant at Bain & Company.

Sonja Gittens-Ottley

Asana

Sonja Gittens-Ottley is Diversity & Inclusion Lead at work tracking app Asana, where she’s responsible for crafting the company’s strategies for recruiting employees from under represented groups and creating an inclusive environment that allows them to thrive. Prior to her roles in diversity at Asana and at Facebook, she was global policy counsel for Yahoo’s Business & Human Rights Program. She is a native of Trinidad & Tobago.

Vincent Letteri

KKR

Vincent E. Letteri is a member of the TMT team, focusing on growth equity. Mr. Letteri originally joined KKR Capstone in 2007 before becoming a part of KKR’s TMT team in 2015. While at KKR Capstone he worked across a number of KKR portfolio companies including US Foods, Oriental Brewery, MMI, Yageo, and First Data. Mr. Letteri transferred to the Hong Kong office from 2009 to 2011 to assist in developing KKR Capstone’s Asia operations and to work with portfolio companies in the region. He also co-led KKR’s Green Portfolio Program from 2009 to 2012. Prior to KKR Capstone, Mr. Letteri worked for Nike, Inc., and McKinsey & Company in Boston, where he focused on private equity, retail, and consumer goods companies. He holds a B.A. with honors from Harvard University and an M.B.A. from Stanford University.

Susan Su

Reforge, 500 Startups

Susan Su is the head of marketing at Reforge, and a Venture Partner at 500 Startups, where she also coaches portfolio founders on growth marketing. She previously ran marketing for Inside Network (acquired byWebMediaBrands in 2011), AppSumo.com, and Ramit Sethi.

Karolis Balciunas

Google Play

Quinn Li

Qualcomm Ventures

Quinn Li is Vice President & Global Head of Qualcomm Ventures. In this role, Quinn oversees Qualcomm’s $1 billion strategic venture investment portfolio of over 140 investments. Prior to joining Qualcomm Ventures, Quinn held various engineering and management roles in the wireless industry at IBM Systems and Technology Group, Broadcom, and the wireless infrastructure group at Lucent Technologies.

Robin Thurston

Helix

Robin Thurston is the CEO of Helix, where he is helping build the world’s first personal genomics platform. Most recently, he served as chief digital officer at Under Armour and led the overall strategic direction of the company’s Connected Fitness business. Prior to joining Under Armour, Robin co-founded and built MapMyFitness into one of the world’s largest open fitness tracking platforms. Robin spent the first ten years of his career building a mutual fund classification and ratings platform at Lipper (a Thomson Reuters Company), as well as a manager risk and compensation platform at both American Century Investments and Wellington Management. He graduated with a MS in Finance from University of Colorado at Denver. Follow Robin on Twitter at @RobinJThurston.

Keyvan Mohajer

SoundHound

Keyvan is the founder, president and CEO of SoundHound, where he leads the company's management, corporate strategy and operations. He is also the principal executive responsible for SoundHound Inc.’s technology development. With more than 15 years of executive experience as a visionary entrepreneur and a results oriented general manager, Keyvan has played a key role in taking multiple startups from basic concept to profitability. Keyvan has a master’s and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

Christine Lemke

Evidation Health

Christine is the President of Evidation Health. Previously, Christine was the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Sense Networks, developers of the first machine learning platform for mobile phone activity data (exited to YP.com). She has also held roles at 3iGroup (Paris), Microsoft XBOX and co-founded Chicago-based Channel IQ, a product analytics platform. Christine has a BA from the University of Washington and an MBA from HEC Paris.

Kemar Newell

Flip

Kemar Newell — founder of Flip, the “eBay for the Snapchat generation,” started his career in Silicon Valley at age 19 back in 2008. As a former Apple & Google engineer, his startup grind had just begun after graduating from Y Combinator's Winter 2015 batch as a sole founder. Flip is a curated, auction-based marketplace that guarantees the sale of new sneakers in 90-minutes.

Jeff Rodman

Polycom

Jeff Rodman co-founded Polycom in 1990, and has been instrumental in the realization of Polycom’s iconic products for voice, video, and content sharing, accumulating over 30 patents in the process. Prior to co-founding Polycom, he spent six years developing and enhancing video and test capabilities for military guided-missile systems for Hughes Aircraft Company. Jeff also has a penchant for music and is a talented pianist, composing and recording in his spare time. Rodman holds both Bachelors and Masters of Science in Electronic Engineering from California State University, Northridge.

Marc Manara

Farm-Hill

Marc is co-founder of Farm Hill, a food-tech startup that's seeking to change the conversation around healthy food, starting with office lunch. Farm Hill prepares seasonal, healthy meals in its own kitchens and offers same-day lunch delivery to offices and teams throughout the Bay Area, proving that healthy food can be both delicious and convenient. After launching in 2014, Farm Hill now delivers thousands of lunches and serves hundreds of companies each day. Prior to Farm Hill, Marc worked as a portfolio manager at Acumen Fund, a social impact investment fund in New York, and as a software engineer at Appian Corporation, an enterprise software company. Marc holds a joint MBA/MS from Stanford and a BA in computer science from Harvard.

Amy Feldman

Forbes

Amy Feldman is a staff writer at Forbes, where she covers entrepreneurs for Forbes magazine and Forbes.com. Before returning to Forbes last year, she was a staff writer or senior writer at BusinessWeek, Money and the New York Daily News, as well as a contributor to numerous publications, including Barron’s, Fast Company and Inc. She is based in New York. Follow her on Twitter @amyfeldman.

Paul Martino

Bullpen Capital

Bullpen created post-seed investing for technology startups to help accelerate their growth. Paul is the founder of four companies including Ahpah Software (a computer security firm acquired by InterTrust); Tribe (one of the world’s first social networks), and Aggregate Knowledge (a big data advertising attribution company acquired in 2014 by Neustar).

Brad Brooks

DocuSign

Brad brings more than 25 years of global business leadership experience at enterprise and consumer technology companies to his role at DocuSign. As CMO, he is responsible for directing the company’s marketing, product, and engineering. Prior to DocuSign, he served as CMO and SVP at Juniper Networks, a company with annual revenues of $5B and sales in 30 countries globally. Previously, Brad led product management and marketing with P&L responsibility as corporate vice president for Microsoft‘s multi-billion dollar Windows Consumer Business where he oversaw the launch of Windows 7 — the most successful launch in Microsoft's history. Prior to Microsoft, Brad worked at Enron and AT&T Lucent Technologies. Brad earned his B.S. from California State University and his Masters in International Management from Thunderbird School of Management.

Bill Evans

Rock Health

Bill Evans is the Managing Director of Rock Health, the first venture fund dedicated to digital health. Prior to joining Rock Health, Bill held leadership roles within Roche Diagnostics delivering clinical decision support software and at Genentech developing partnerships expand the use of "real-world data" in the drug development process.

Olga Lozovskaya

Goldman Sachs

Olga Lozovskaya joined Goldman Sachs in 2010, where she leads technology investments for the firm’s Merchant Banking Division. She is focused on growth-stage investments in rapidly scaling SaaS, media, and tech-enabled services companies. Prior to Goldman Sachs, she held various roles at UBS, and graduated with an M.S. in Finance and a B.A. in Mathematics and Economics from Washington University in St. Louis. Olga also serves as president of the board of directors of Mission Graduates, a non-profit focused on enabling college access.

RJ Jain

Price.com

RJ Jain is the Founder and CEO of Price.com. Prior to Price, RJ co-founded Appurify, which pioneered on-device debugging, CI testing and performance optimization for mobile applications. Google acquired Appurify in 2014. Jain previously served as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Foundation Capital and as a technical advisor for Metamorphic Ventures, a New York City based venture capital firm. Additionally, he has held engineering leadership roles at the ride-sharing startup Sidecar and the gaming company Zynga.

Dennis Mortensen

x.ai

Dennis Mortensen is the CEO and Founder of x.ai, whose artificial intelligence driven personal assistant lets people schedule meetings using plain English and nothing more than a CC to amy@x.ai.

He’s a pioneer and expert in the analytics, optimization and big data space – and has been since its inception. He is also a fully-fledged entrepreneur and has successfully delivered a number of company exits.

Dennis is an accredited Associate Analytics Instructor at the University of British Columbia, the Author of Data Driven Insights from Wiley and a frequent speaker on the subject of Analytics and Data.

A native of Denmark, Mortensen currently calls New York City his home.

Caroline O'Donovan

BuzzFeed

Caroline O'Donovan is a reporter covering technology and labor for BuzzFeed News in San Francisco. Previously, she was a media reporter for the Nieman Journalism Lab. Her work has also appeared in The Atlantic, The New Republic, Marketplace, and Chicago Public Media's WBEZ, and been featured on CNBC, KQED and NPR's All Things Considered.

Clate Mask

Infusionsoft

Clate has been educating and inspiring entrepreneurs for over a decade, and is recognized by the small business community as a visionary leader. His passion for small business success stems from his personal experience taking Infusionsoft from a struggling startup to an eight-time Inc. 500/5000 winner. As CEO, Clate is leading Infusionsoft on its mission to create and dominate the market of sales and marketing software for small businesses. Under Clate's leadership, Infusionsoft has landed four rounds of venture capital including a $55 million Series D led by Bain Capital Ventures with contributions from prior investors, Signal Peak Ventures and Goldman Sachs. He was named an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year finalist, a Top 100 Small Business Influencer by Small Business Trends, one of the 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs of 2013 by Goldman Sachs, and Business Leader of the Year by the Arizona Technology Council. Clate is a national speaker on entrepreneurship and small business success, and co-author of the New York Times bestseller Conquer the Chaos: How to Grow a Successful Small Business Without Going Crazy. Clate has a BA in Economics from Arizona State University, as well as an MBA and a JD from Brigham Young University.

Bipin Sahni

Wells Fargo Innovation Group

Bipin Sahni is an executive vice president and head of research and development for the Wells Fargo Innovation Group, and a co-lead for the Wells Fargo Startup Accelerator program. Bipin and his team are focused on future technologies and defining the future vision for customer interactions, mobile solutions, and authentication solutions along with big data initiatives.

Elodie Dupuy

Full In Partners

Elodie is founder and MD at Full In Partners, a $200m growth equity firm that focuses primarily on software, mobile, and online marketplace investments. Elodie has evaluated investments in 35 countries, seen 28 deals close and been involved in boards in 5 countries.

She was at ICONIQ as a Principal on the Private Equity team, where she focused on tech investing. Prior to joining ICONIQ, Elodie spent nine years at Insight Venture Partners on their investment team where she led numerous investments in companies including Conga, Showpad, Bynder, and LetGo, among others. Elodie holds a B.A. in French and Spanish and a B.A. in German and Russian from The Ohio State University.

Michael Coscetta

Square

Michael Coscetta is an entrepreneur turned executive for Square, now running global sales for the financial technology company in San Francisco. Originally from NYC, Michael founded a sales training and consulting company shortly after graduating from college where he found a fit helping early stage companies build and grow their first sales teams. Michael has advised dozens of technology companies and has sat on the board of multiple non profit organizations. He graduated from Harvard University with Honors with a degree in Economics and is working on his first book, The Sales Gene, which will be published in 2018.

Cory Weinberg

The Information

Cory Weinberg covers Facebook, Airbnb and other mobile businesses for The Information. Previously, he reported on Bay Area housing and real estate for the San Francisco Business Times. He received a "best young journalist" award from the National Association of Real Estate Editors. His work has also appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek and the New York Times.

Ben Huh

Cheezburger

Ben has always been a start up guy. Ben founded the Cheezburger Network after acquiring I Can Has Cheezburger? in 2007 and grew it into one of the largest media networks in the world — while making a profit during one of the deepest recessions. Cheezburger has been credited with bringing Internet culture and memes to the mainstream. Ben credits the success of his company to the users and fans who create the content. His goal and Cheezburger’s mission is to make the world happy for 5-minutes a day. Ben was also a co-founder of Circa, a startup that helped redefine how we consume news on mobile. Ben is now at Y Combinator Research, working on how to bring affordable housing to everyone.

TD Lowe

42Phi Ventures, Startup Grind

TD Lowe is a Partner at 42Phi Ventures and is Founder of EnovationNation Inc. TD serves as faculty at Southern Methodist University and has served as a guest instructor at Stanford University’s School of Engineering. In addition to being a Politico Ambassador, she is an economist and self-taught developer who draws on her passion for innovation and her experience in technology, finance and strategy as driving forces to enhance, influence and educate the world on the power of innovation.

TD has worked in Technology, Strategy, Finance and Venture Capital at several Fortune 50 companies and smaller firms. During her tenure, TD assumed key roles as a leader in corporate innovation, finance, product marketing, contract negotiations, and technical development. Her passion for innovation and entrepreneurs has served as a catalyst for her work with Startup Grind’s Startup Exhibition.

Benjamin Todd

80,000 Hours

Ben managed 80,000 Hours while it grew from a lecture, to a student society, to the organisation it is today. Before 80,000 Hours, he was the first undergraduate to intern as an analyst at a top investment fund. He has a 1st from Oxford in Physics and Philosophy, has published in Climate Physics, once kick-boxed for Oxford, and speaks Chinese, badly.

Laura Gomez

Atipica

Laura is the founder and CEO of Atipica, a talent life cycle engine that that uniquely combines both artificial, human intelligence to help companies realize the lifetime value of their candidate and employee data. Additionally, she is a founding member of Project Include, a nonprofit formed to accelerate diversity and inclusion solutions in the tech industry. She previously worked at Twitter, where she was a founding team member of the International team and lead product expansion into 50 languages and in dozens of countries. Gómez has also worked at Hewlett-Packard, Jawbone and YouTube. Laura was recognized by the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for her involvement in the TechWomen Program 2012. She serves on the board of Institute for Technology and Public Policy alongside Lt Governor Gavin Newsom and FWD.us Innovation Council - which mobilizes the tech community in support of commonsense immigration reform.

Justin Wu

BlockchainNW

Justin Wu is a growth marketer & Information Architect. He is also co-founder of BlockchainNW, Seattle's First Blockchain Conference and has helped brands achieve over $3m in Kickstarter, 500k downloads in the app store and taken SaaS companies to over $100k MRR / $1MM ARR.

Cyril Ebersweiler

HAX

Cyril is a Partner at SOSV and the founder of HAX, the largest investor in hardware startups (200+). He is mentoring at Techstars and 500startups, and a board member/advisor to a few startups including Leap Motion, Collaborate (ACQ: CISCO), NextThingCo and Breather.

Arum Kang

Coffee Meets Bagel

After completing her BSE in Marketing from the University of Pennsylvania— The Wharton School, Arum Kang has focused in delighting customers in the consumer product space. She has worked with a variety of companies including Amazon and Avon Products. After obtaining her MBA degree from Harvard Business School, Arum co-founded Coffee Meets Bagel with sisters Soo and Dawoon Kang. As the CEO, Arum creates and executes the vision of Coffee Meets Bagel. With her various roles, her overarching goal is always to make sure the customers’ needs are heard and met with a superior product experience. She has been interviewed many times about the dating and startup scene and has given many talks about the subject alongside her sister, Dawoon.

Howard Love

LoveToKnow

Howard Love is a life-long entrepreneur who has founded, co-founded, funded and managed startups for over 30 years. He is the Founder & CEO of LoveToKnow, one of the largest US digital media companies, whose web properties include lovetoknow.com, yourdictionary.com, trails.com, and golflink.com. Love founded his first company, Inmark Development, while an undergraduate at Colgate University. Inmark Development was eventually sold as Rogue Wave and subsequently went public. Since then, Love has founded or co-founded over 15 businesses and invested in over 50 startups. Love speaks frequently on entrepreneurship for conferences, summits & events in North America and overseas, including Techtoberfest, Startup Grind, Start-Up Week, TechStars, Plug & Play, Capital Factory – as well as Slush Helsinki & the Government of Spain. Love recently published his first book, the Amazon bestseller The Start-Up J Curve.

John Boitnott

Entrepreneur

John Boitnott is a longtime journalist living in San Francisco who has worked for TV, radio, and tech publications. He currently writes primarily for Inc., Entrepreneur and BusinessInsider.com.

Khalid Halim

Reboot.io

Khalid Halim is a certified professional coach and founder of Reboot.io, a coaching company where he works directly with founders and leadership teams looking to move through periods of change and growth purposefully. He has over ten years of experience working in startups, both as a founder and turnaround CEO, providing the insight and empathy needed to help other leaders transform complicated webs of story into simple strings of actionable steps. His guiding purpose is to empower the people who will build the organizations he wants to see in the world his children will grow up in.

Ian Kalin

US Department of Commerce

Ian Kalin is passionate about empowering people. He started his career in the U.S. Navy as a Counter Terrorism Officer and later as a Nuclear Engineer. Ian built a successful clean-tech business called Power Advocate where he supported over $35 billion of power plant and transmission line construction. He supported Smart City data projects for companies like Socrata and Google and most recently served as the first-ever Chief Data Officer for the U.S. Department of Commerce. Ian has received awards and honors from Harvard Kennedy School, two Presidential Cabinet Secretaries and from President Barack Obama. He lives in San Francisco with his family.

Robyn Sue Fisher

Smitten

Robyn Sue Fisher is an ice cream fanatic who set out to create the freshest, most flavorful ice cream around, founding Smitten Ice Cream in 2009. She invented and patented a machine, fondly named Brrr™, to perfect the art of churning pure, fresh scoops to-order in about 90 seconds using liquid nitrogen and only the very best ingredients.

Jacob Jaber

Philz Coffee

Philz Coffee’s unique blends, community-oriented stores and one-cup-at-a-time approach have drawn a cult following nationwide. Founded by Phil (Jacobs Dad) with Jacob by his side, the first store opened in the Mission district of San Francisco in 2002. Jacob started running the business at the age of 18 and has since guided Philz to national expansion, opening more than 30 stores on the East and West coasts. Jacob aims to buck trends – from the coffee it serves, to its customer service approach and care for employees. Jacob believes his mission is to better people’s day, one coffee at a time. Philz has raised $75 million in venture capital, and the once-small Bay Area cult coffee shop is becoming a force to be reckoned with on the national coffee scene. His favorite Philz coffee: Tesora — the first blend his dad created — with honey and a bit of cream.

Michael Coren

Quartz

Michael Coren is technology and business reporter for Quartz in San Francisco. He focuses on the people, technology and companies of Silicon Valley. Michael founded the software startup Publet before returning to a career in science and technology journalism. He was managing editor of Cambodia’s Phnom Penh Post, science editor at CNN.com and has written for Fast Company, Foreign Policy, The Economist, and other publications.

Laura Shin

Forbes

I'm a freelance writer who has published in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times and others, co-lead reporter of the Forbes Fintech 50 list, and host of the podcast "Unchained: Big Ideas From The Worlds Of Blockchain And Fintech. I'm also the author of the Forbes ebook "The Millennial Game Plan: Career And Money Secrets To Succeed In Today’s World" and co-author of "Money Hacks: Forbes Stories Of Superstar Savers." I also teach freelance writers how to master the art and business of our profession at Ideas Words Empires. I graduated Phi Beta Kappa with Honors from Stanford University and have a master of arts from Columbia University’s School of Journalism. To learn more about me, go to www.laurashin.com, follow me at @laurashin or check out http://www.ideaswordsempires.com/.

Ted Blosser

WorkRamp

Ted is the Founder of WorkRamp, a startup that wants to change the way companies onboard and train their employees. He’s raised $1.8M and the company is a graduate of the Y Combinator Summer 2016 class. They’ve also recently brought on Slack as an investor. WorkRamp co-founder Ted Blosser, who spent almost five years at Box, wants to transform how training and development is done in the enterprise. WorkRamp customers include Mixpanel, Square, Twilio, Paypal, Pagerduty, Intercom and Udacity.

Kanishk Priyadarshi

IBM

Kanishk Priyadarshi captains the national AI App Engineering team for IBM. He leads the IBM Watson AI and Data Platforms practice for the west-coast out of Silicon Valley.

Toby Olshanetsky

prooV

Mr. Olshanetsky has 20+ years of senior management experience (CEO & Board member) and a diverse technology background in Cyber & IT Security, Social Network, Mobile, SAAS, e-commerce & Online Banking. As a serial entrepreneur, Mr. Olshanetsky has co-founded and led several startups (ULEI, MIC Mobile Security, Neteye, and others), raised over $62M, and has led significant contract negotiations for strategic partnerships, key customers, joint ventures and mergers and acquisitions.

Eli Bressert

Netflix

Eli Bressert loves big ideas and putting them into action by connecting the impossible. He manages the Growth and Messaging Analytics team at Netflix to help usher Netflix into the future on a global scale. Prior to Netflix Eli headed Data Labs at Stitch Fix where his team researched exponential technologies and methodologies for data science initiatives. Eli has an astronomically biased history where he obtained his PhD in astrophysics, produced media-quality visualizations for space telescopes at the Harvard-Smithsonian Institute for Astrophysics, and developed new models on star formation. He is a mentor to Singularity University and author of the NumPy & SciPy O'Reilly book.

Hulya Emir-Farinas

Pivotal

Hulya Emir-Farinas is a founding member of the data science team at Pivotal. She has extensive experience in applying algorithmic approaches to complex problems in multiple vertical industries. Before joining Pivotal, Hulya held positions at IBM and M-Factor, where she helped enterprise customers make better business decisions using machine learning algorithms with optimization routines. She holds a Ph.D. in Operations Research from the University of Florida.

Paul Levine

Trulia

As President, Paul Levine is the leading executive at Trulia. He joined in 2011 as COO, and helped lead Trulia through its 10x growth, successful IPO, and merger with Zillow in 2015. Paul has held positions across the tech sector, including with Yahoo!, E*TRADE, and Current TV, and he currently serves on TubeMogul’s board. He received his MBA from Stanford.

Josh Wills

Slack

Hannah Kuchler

Financial Times

Hannah Kuchler is a San Francisco Correspondent for the Financial Times, writing about technology with a particular focus on social media and cyber security. She enjoys telling the story of the Silicon Valley to the FT's broad international audience. Hannah has worked for the FT for over seven years in the US, Europe and Asia.

John Rampton

Calendar.com

John Rampton is an entrepreneur, investor, and startup enthusiast. He is founder of the calendar productivity tool Calendar.com.

Ryan Sweeney

Accel

Ryan Sweeney joined Accel in 2008 and manages its growth fund. He is the first outside investor and board member in a number of leading enterprise software companies like Atlassian, Hootsuite, Qualtrics, Squarespace and Xero. Ryan is also active with innovative mobile and payments startups like Invoice2go, Lightspeed and VSCO. He was also responsible for numerous investments with notable exits, including AirWatch (acquired by VMware), Braintree/Venmo (acquired by PayPal), Groupon (public), Lynda.com (acquired by Linkedin) and OzForex (public). Ryan grew up in South Jersey and graduated from Notre Dame and Harvard Business School.

Selena Larson

CNN

Jack Groetzinger

SeatGeek

Jack co-founded SeatGeek, where he currently focuses on Email and Slack Administration. Prior to SeatGeek he specialized in writing code for IE7 compatibility mode, a skill he is sad to observe is no longer valued in the job market. Jack studied math and econ at Dartmouth College, but also has a sensitive side.

John Locke

Accel

John Locke joined Accel in 2009 and helps lead the firm’s growth fund. He focuses on mobile, software, payments and marketplace companies. John is the lead investor and board member in SeatGeek, GoFundMe, Lightspeed, Wyzant, Invoice2Go, Pond5 and QMC Telecom. He also works closely with the teams at Prosper, Tenable Network Security, CrowdStrike, WorldRemit, Braintree/Venmo (acquired by PayPal) and OzForex (public). John grew up in Ashland, Ohio and graduated from Princeton.

Brett Wilson

TubeMogul

Under Brett’s leadership, TubeMogul has become widely recognized as the leading enterprise software company for digital branding by companies like IPG Mediabrands, Lenovo and Mondelez. Brett’s emphasis on company culture has translated into multiple awards for the company, including “Most Outstanding Customer Service” (iMedia) and “Best Place to Work” (San Francisco Business Times). Brett began his career at Accenture, where he led system implementations for Fortune 100 clients including Adecco, Republic Industries and Caesar’s World International. While securing his MBA at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, Brett won the UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition in 2007 for starting TubeMogul with John Hughes. A frequent speaker at industry conferences, Brett has been featured in Advertising Age, AdWeek and The New York Times.

S. Owais Ahmad

West Agile Labs

Owais is the President and Co-founder of West Agile Labs. With over 15 years of experience helping business grow he helps ensure success for West Agile Labs’ clients thinking through the Create, Build and Scale philosophy. Before West Agile Labs, Owais was an extremely active investor focusing on TMT, Software and Industrials. Owais loves bringing process to the creative things West Agile Labs does. Outside of work Owais is either chasing fast moving objects, spending time with his 18 month old son, or telling people to Git off his Lan while drinking coffee or scotch.

Brian Park

Startup Grind Washington D.C.

Brian is a startup evangelist, advisor, and angel investor. He is currently the Director of Product at Real Time Cases, an EdTech startup based in DC. He is also the director for Startup Grind DC and Executive-In- Residence at the AOL Fishbowl Labs. He was also formerly the global COO of Startup Grind and has started three previous startups.

Jeniece Pettitt

CNBC

Jeniece Pettitt is a producer for CNBC.com at the network's San Francisco bureau. She primarily covers technology and startups. Prior to CNBC, Pettitt worked at Bloomberg TV as a features and series producer. She has also created videos for Discovery Communications and ESPN. Pettitt got her start in television at Plum TV in Vail, Colorado. She holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Colorado and a master's degree from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.

Corey Anand

West Agile Labs

Corey is a partner at West Agile Labs and oversees product, creative strategy and business consulting. Corey spent his twenties diving into the startup scene gaining firsthand experience in the food, music, and travel industries, and has launched two startups leading one through an accelerator program. He holds degrees in Entrepreneurship and Business Management from Butler and DePaul University. Corey recently relocated to San Francisco late 2015 via Chicago to work for West Agile Labs and is a lifelong Chicago Cubs and Blackhawks fan. Outside of work, you can find Corey somewhere in Golden Gate Park playing fetch with his Kelpie, Juno, or exploring the winding trails of SF on his Cannondale, Ollie.

Zach Ferres

Coplex Ventures; Entrepreneur Magazine

Zach began his career in high school when he started a website hosting company called BounceHost. The company later pivoted to a digital marketing and software development company and rebranded to BounceFire. Before graduating college, Zach was recognized as one of the top 33 student entrepreneurs in the world for the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards (put on by Entrepreneurs Organization and the Kauffman Foundation) in 2010 and shortly after sold his company, BounceFire.

In 2012, Zach joined forces with Ilya Pozin and became the CEO of Coplex with the intent of shifting it to a Startup Studio business model. The company applies lean and agile techniques to repeatedly validate, build, and grow startup companies. By 2016, Zach acquired the company from the founders. To date, Coplex has worked alongside founding teams to create more than 250 startups. Later in 2016, Zach also became a founding partner of Coplex Ventures, a seed-stage venture fund that invests in select startups that go through the Coplex Startup Studio.

Zach has been involved as a mentor and advisor for a variety of other startups and maintains a column for Entrepreneur Magazine. He was recognized as one of “Arizona’s 35 Entrepreneurs Under 35,” an “Empact Showcase” award winner, and a winner of the Spirit of Enterprise “Social Impact” award by Arizona State University. Zach holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Ohio Northern University with a dual-minor in Mathematics and Entrepreneurship.

Sanjit Singh Dang

U First Capital, ex-Intel Capital

Sanjit has been a successful Venture Capitalist, Corporate Executive, Board Member, Speaker and Writer in Silicon Valley for almost two decades. He is currently the Co-Founder and Chairman of U First Capital which provides Venture Capital as a Service to Corporations. Prior to that, he was at Intel Capital where he had an excellent track record of driving 1 Exit every year: DocuSign (IPO 2018), Body Labs (Acquired by Amazon in 2017), VokeVR (Acquired by Intel in 2016), Maginatics (Acquired by EMC in 2015) and Basis Science (Acquired by Intel in 2014). He has been an Investor and Board Member of several companies, including True Fit (AI for eCommerce, raised $100M), Reflektion (AI recommendation for eCommerce, raised $42M), Helpshift (AI-driven Customer Service, raised $39M) and Enlighted (IoT, Acquired by Siemens in 2018). He is also an investor in Mirantis (Cloud Computing), GoodData (SaaS BI) and Arcadia Data (Big Data 2.0).

Sanjit has experience investing in Consumer and Enterprise sectors across several areas: Transportation, Artificial Intelligence, Security, Big Data, IoT, Virtual Reality, eCommerce, etc.

Sanjit has been an Advisor to Richard Branson’s Extreme Tech Challenge and Google Launchpad. Sanjit has been on US Govt Innovation Policy Advisory team. He is on Advisory Council of UN’s World Artificial Intelligence Organization. He has also been on University of California President's Innovation Council. Sanjit has the fastest Eng PhD from University of Illinois (2yrs 9mo after undergrad), which he received in 2000 with top research awards. He also attended the VC Executive program at Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. He’s an invited Speaker at several top conferences, eg SURGE/WebSummit, TiECon, ShopTalk, McKinsey Leadership Summit, Silicon Valley Open Doors, Global AI conference, etc. He’s a mentor at Stanford and Berkeley’s Entrepreneurship programs.

Jack Nicas

WSJ

Jack Nicas covers Google and its sister companies for the Wall Street Journal. Jack joined the WSJ in 2011 in Chicago, where he covered national news and aviation. He joined the San Francisco bureau in 2015, and has also written about emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, virtual reality and robotics. He previously wrote for the Boston Globe.

Ike DeLorenzo

Heroku

Ike DeLorenzo leads Heroku’s product efforts in the areas of developer experience and the overall management experience of the Heroku platform. Ike has led similar efforts at Atlassian, Genius, and the New York Times Company. A long-time engineer, he has developed Internet servers and a variety of web software and is also a widely published author on food, cooking, and technology.

Joel Riddell

Dining Around with Joel Riddell

Joel Riddell is an Emmy Nominated IACP award-winning journalist and talk show host who happily the calls the San Francisco Bay Area Home. When not recording or writing, Riddell is out and about emceeing culinary events, judging wine, or researching the next story in some far-off nation. A passion for Food, Wine, and Travel keeps Joel on the go, tasting everything from Haute Cuisine to farm cooking. Find out more about Joel via T - @joelriddell I- @diningaround and on www.diningaround.com.

Jeff Richards

GGV Capital

A Managing Partner at GGV Capital, Jeff joined the firm in 2008 after spending 13 years as an entrepreneur and operating executive in the US and Asia. Jeff focuses on the Internet, Software and Mobile sectors, and currently sits on the boards of Appirio, BIG COMMERCE, Boxed, Percolate, Reebonz and Tile. Jeff led GGV’s investments in BlueKai (acquired in 2014 by Oracle), Buddy Media (acquired in 2012 by Salesforce.com), Citrus Lane (acquired in 2014 by Care.com), Evolv (acquired in 2014 by Cornerstone OnDemand), Flipboard, HOTELTONIGHT, Quixey, SHIFTGIG and Spreecast, and is actively involved in GGV’s investments in DOMO, GRAB, OPENDOOR, Qunar (NASDAQ: QUNR), SLACK, Square and Wish. Prior to joining GGV, Jeff founded two software companies (R4, acquired by VeriSign, and QuantumShift) and spent three years as an executive at VeriSign.

Murray Newlands

Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine

Murray Newlands FRSA is an entrepreneur, investor, business advisor and speaker. He is founder of Sighted.com an online invoicing company based in Palo Alto, just south of San Francisco. Newlands is also an adviser to the Draper Nexus Network of Things Fund that invests in IOT companies. He advises entrepreneurs and start-ups on various subjects from funding to growth strategies. Newlands received a Bachelor of Laws and he is qualified as a Lawyer. He gained his Green Card by being recognized by the US government as an “alien of extraordinary ability.” Newlands is the author of “Online Marketing: A User’s Manual” published by John Wiley & Sons. He contributes to Forbes and Entrepreneur.com.