Global Conference

Stewart Butterfield is the co-founder and CEO of Slack. Stewart has built a distinguished career as a designer, entrepreneur, and technologist. A co-founder of Flickr, he has been named to Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World, BusinessWeek's Top 50 Leaders and Vanity Fair’s New Establishment List.

Biz Stone is an American entrepreneur and co-founder of Twitter. A progenitor of social media, Stone has been developing large scale systems that facilitate the open exchange of information for more than fifteen years. Today, Biz is Co-founder and CEO of Jelly Industries—making consumer web and mobile products that are fun first, and hopefully useful later. Having started out as an artist, Biz stresses creativity, learning from mistakes, and celebrating the triumph of humanity with a little help from technology. Inc. Magazine named him Entrepreneur of the Decade, TIME listed him as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, and GQ named him Nerd of the Year. Biz is also an author, filmmaker, and painter.

Jessica Livingston is a founding partner at Y Combinator. She is also the organizer of Startup School, the big annual startup conference, and the author of Founders at Work, a collection of interviews with successful startup founders. Y Combinator was the first of the new startup "incubators" that fund a bunch of startups at once. Since 2005 YC has funded over 560 companies, including Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, and Reddit.

Megan is an entrepreneur, tech evangelist, engineer, catalyst and connector. As VP at Google[x], Megan works on a range of projects including co-creating/hosting SolveForX to encourage and amplify technology-based moonshot thinking and collaboration. For nine years prior she led Google’s New Business Development team managing early-stage partnerships, pilot explorations, and technology licensing for Google’s global engineering and product teams. She led the acquisitions of Keyhole (Google Earth), Where2Tech (Google Maps) and Picasa, and also led the Google.org team transition to add more engineering with Google Crisis Response, GoogleforNonprofits, and Earth Outreach. Prior to joining Google, Megan was CEO and earlier, COO of PlanetOut, the leading LGBT online community. Over the years, Megan has contributed to a wide range of engineering projects, including an award-winning bicycle lock, space station construction program, and solar cookstoves. She holds a bachelor's and master's degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT, where she now serves on the board. She completed her master's thesis work at the MIT Media Lab.

Justin Kan is an internet entrepreneur. He is best known for founding 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 Amazon for $970mm); and Exec, an on demand maid service (acquired by Handybook in 2014). He is currently a partner at the seed fund Y Combinator. He graduated from Yale University with a degree in Physics and Philosophy.

Marc Andreessen is an innovator and creator who pioneered a software category used by more than a billion people and established multiple billion-dollar companies. Marc co-created the highly influential Mosaic Internet browser and co-founded both Netscape and Loudcloud (Opsware). Most recently, Marc co-founded the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz which invests in technology companies including Airbnb, Actifio, BuzzFeed, Coinbase, Facebook, Github, Pinterest, Honor, and Twitter, among others.

MC Hammer is an American MC who brought rap music to a mass pop audience during the late 1980s and early 1990s, selling millions of copies of his chart topping albums. He is known for his important influence on hip hop culture and music. Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, Hammer released the patriotic album Active Duty on his own WorldHit label and donated portions of the proceeds to 9/11 charities. MC Hammer has a television show on the Trinity Broadcasting Network. Hammer is an advisor to the online video site for the dance community, Dance Jam.

Adi Tatarko is the CEO and co-founder of Houzz, the leading platform for home remodeling and design that brings together both professionals and homeowners via mobile, local and social tools. Adi and her husband and cofounder, Alon Cohen, started Houzz out of challenges that they faced during their own home remodel. Today, millions of homeowners and more than 400,000 architects, designers, contractors and other remodeling professionals connect through Houzz.com and its mobile apps every month, sharing their photos, advice and product recommendations. Houzz has raised nearly $50 million from top VC firms and Adi was recently on Forbes' cover along other top companies backed by Sequoia Capital. 

Ben Horowitz is a founder and partner of Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm that helps entrepreneurs become successful CEOs and build important and enduring companies. Andreessen Horowitz provides seed, venture and growth-stage funding to the best new technology companies, and the firm currently has $2.5 billion under management across two funds. Among its investments are Airbnb, Facebook, Foursquare, Jawbone, Coinbase, Pinterest, and Zulily. Ben was a co-founder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), which was acquired by HP 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 a BA in Computer Science from Columbia University and an MS in Computer Science from UCLA. He serves on the board of many companies including Foursquare, Jawbone, Okta, Magnet, Nicira and Tidemark. Ben also pens his own blog, Ben’s Blog (www.bhorowitz.com), where he covers everything from how CEOs should hire executives to how to minimize politics in your company. You can also find him on Twitter at @bhorowitz

Anne co-founded 23andMe in 2006 after a decade spent in healthcare investing. Under her leadership, 23andMe has built one of the world's largest databases of individual genetic information and made significant advances in bringing personalized medicine directly to the public. Anne graduated from Yale University with a BS in Biology.

Payal Kadakia is the CEO and Co-Founder of ClassPass, a monthly membership program that provides people of all fitness levels unlimited access to the best boutique fitness classes and gyms across the US and internationally. Since its launch in 2013, ClassPass has facilitated more than 11 million reservations across 7,000 studios in 36 markets. Payal is also the Founder and Artistic Director of The Sa Dance Company, founded in 2009 with the mission to increase awareness of Indian Dance in the mainstream and serve as a platform for expressing the Indian-American identity through movement. Payal previously worked as a consultant at Bain & Company and holds a degree in Operations Research from MIT.

Selina joined SurveyMonkey in October 2009. Previously Selina was Senior Vice President of Product and Technology at Ticketmaster’s Europe division, where she managed the 200-person Product, Technology and Operations team. Prior to that, Selina was Vice President of Online Product and Technology at Entertainment Publications, where she led the company’s online sales and technology initiatives. In 1997 Selina founded Evite.com, an online invitation service that lets users organize an offline event online, and which currently sends over three million invitations per month. As VP of Engineering for Evite.com, she led the company’s development and operations and played a key role in setting the strategic direction with the board of directors. In 2001, Evite.com was sold to Ticketmaster. Tobaccowala holds a BS degree in Computer Science from Stanford University.

is the technical lead and co-founder of Instagram, a global community that shares more than 60 million photos every day. As the head of engineering, Mike focuses on building products that bring out the creativity in all of us. A native of São Paulo, Brazil, Mike holds an MS in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University. Prior to founding Instagram, he worked at Meebo as a user experience designer and front-end engineer.

Logan Green, co-founder and CEO of Lyft, has long been fascinated by innovation in transportation, having grown up in Southern California with much of his childhood spent stuck in traffic. Lyft, the on-demand ridesharing platform, was founded in 2007 with Zimride as the first of two products built to create a more social, sustainable and affordable transportation system. The idea for Zimride (and ultimately Lyft) struck while Logan was studying in Zimbabwe during college, where carpooling is a common form of transportation among neighbors and communities. Logan also created the first car-share program at UC Santa Barbara and served on the board of the Santa Barbara Metropolitan Transit District prior to starting Zimride. As a Lyft driver himself, Logan has a vision to fill the 80 percent of empty seats on the road and ultimately transform the face of transportation around the world. Since unveiling the product in June 2012, Lyft has quickly become one of the fastest-growing tech companies with more than $330 million raised from leading investors Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue and Founders Fund and has been featured in The Economist, the New York Times and on NBC’s TODAY Show. Lyft is currently in 65 cities across the country with more than 10 million rides shared to date.

Bill founded Google Ventures in 2009 and oversees all of the fund’s global activities. GV is one of the most active investors in the world, with approximately $1.5 billion under management, 250 portfolio companies and offices in Mountain View, San Francisco, Boston, New York, and London. The fund’s early track record includes investments in pioneers like Uber, Nest, DocuSign, and Cloudera; IPOs like Foundation Medicine and RetailMeNot; and exits to industry leaders like Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo.

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.