See Startup Grind Global Conference 2021 at Startup Grind Oslo

Stacey Abrams

Fair Fight Action

Stacey Abrams is the two-time New York Times bestselling author of Our Time is Now and Lead from the Outside, an entrepreneur, and political leader. A tax attorney by training, she served eleven years in the Georgia House of Representatives, seven as Minority Leader, and became the 2018 Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia. She has launched multiple organizations devoted to voting rights, training and hiring young people of color, and tackling social issues at the state, national, and international levels.

Biz Stone

Twitter + Future Positive

Biz is a co-founder of Twitter, Medium, and Jelly. A progenitor of social media, and early Google employee, Biz has long been developing large scale systems that serve the global conversation. As an investor, Biz has backed notable startups such as Square, Slack, and Beyond Meat. In 2017, Pinterest acquired Jelly. As of late he's spent much of his time mentoring and investing in startups in the health, future of work, and sustainability through his new fund, Future Positive.Biz has been recognized as one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People and is a Fellow at the University of Oxford.

Jeff Lawson

Twilio

Jeff Lawson is the founder and CEO of Twilio. A serial entrepreneur and a software developer, Jeff co-founded Twilio in 2008 to bring communications into the world of software. He is also the author of Ask Your Developer, a new playbook for unleashing the full potential of software developers in any organization, showing management how to unleash this workforce to enable growth, solve a wide range of business problems and drive digital transformation. Prior to Twilio, Jeff was co-founder & CTO of NineStar, founding CTO of Stubhub.com, and one of the first product managers for Amazon Web Services.

Tamar Yehoshua

Slack

Tamar Yehoshua oversees product strategy and development, design, and research at Slack.

Previously, Tamar was a Vice President at Google holding product and engineering leadership roles on Google’s most important products, including Search, Identity and Privacy. Prior to that, she was the Vice President of Advertising Technologies at Amazon’s A9.

Tamar has a BA in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania and an MSc in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Michelle Zatlyn

Cloudflare

Michelle Zatlyn is co-founder, President and COO of Cloudflare, the Internet security, performance, and reliability company on a mission to help build a better Internet. Cloudflare is a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: NET). Prior to co-founding Cloudflare, Michelle held positions at Google and Toshiba and launched two successful startups. Michelle sits on the World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders Foundation Board. Michelle has been named to Fortune’s 40 Under 40 list and was part of Marie Claire’s 7th Annual New Guard. She holds a B.S. degree, with distinction, from McGill University, and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where she was awarded the Dubilier Prize for Entrepreneurship.

Noah Kerner

Acorns

Born in New York City’s east village, Noah Kerner is the CEO of the micro-investing app Acorns and co-founder of the shareholder rights startup Say. His background is colorful: 4X entrepreneur, Co-author of "Chasing Cool” with the former CEO of Barneys, and former DJ for Jennifer Lopez. In his 20s, Noah built the leading creative agency for the young adult market, Noise. Before being acquired by Engine, Noise developed hundreds of products and marketing campaigns for this generation including Facebook’s first application, the first credit card to reward responsibility rather than spending for Chase, Vice's music site Noisey, and the top branded game in the App Store. Noah has been recognized as one of Billboard Magazine’s “Top 30 Under 30,” AdWeek’s “Top 20 Under 40,” Fast Company’s “Innovation Agents” and “Impact Council” members, and as a judge for the Webby Awards. He has also advised and invested in a variety of fast-growing startups, including WeWork, where he served as the first Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer from 2013-2014. Passionate about educating today’s youth, Noah has lectured on entrepreneurialism, fintech, and media at NYU, UCLA, Stanford, and Columbia and currently serves on the Board of VH1's Save The Music Foundation. Noah is a graduate of Cornell University where he studied Psychology and Economics.

Benoit Dageville

Snowflake

Benoit co-founded Snowflake and currently serves as President of the Product division. Benoit is a leading expert in parallel execution and self-tuning database systems. Prior to founding Snowflake, Benoit was with Oracle for over 10 years as a lead architect for parallel execution in Oracle RAC and a key architect in the SQL Manageability group. Prior to Oracle, Benoit worked at Bull Information Systems. He helped define the architecture and lead database performance efforts for Bull’s parallel systems. Benoit has a PhD in Computer Science with a focus in Parallel Database Systems and holds more than 80 patents.

Lucy Liu

Airwallex

Lucy Liu is President and Co-founder at Airwallex. She is responsible for the company’s branding and operations. Before establishing Airwallex in 2015 with her co-founders, Lucy was an investment consultant in CICC (China International Capital Corporation) and served as a board director of Hong Stone Investment Development Limited, a Hong Kong based investment company.

Lucy has won a series of awards for her outstanding entrepreneurial achievements including Forbes “Asia’s Top 25 Power Businesswomen” 2020, Ernst & Young ""Top 22 Entrepreneurial Winning Women in APAC” (2020), Fintech Australia Female Leader of the Year (2018) and Forbes “30 Young Entrepreneurs in Asia” (2017).

Parker Conrad

Rippling

Parker Conrad believes that sometimes you’re the fire hydrant, sometimes you’re the dog. He speaks from experience -- he graduated from Harvard after flunking out, beat testicular cancer at 24, founded three companies, and left two of them. In 2013, he launched Zenefits, the first all-in-one HR platform that allowed businesses to sign up and manage payroll and benefits online. Today he leads Rippling, the only platform that unifies every employee system across departments to truly automate administrative work.

Markus Villig

Bolt

Markus Villig is the founder and CEO of Bolt (formerly Taxify).

Bolt is the leading European mobility platform that’s focused on making urban travel more affordable, convenient and responsible. The company’s services range from ride-hailing to micromobility with e-scooters and electric bikes to food and package delivery.

Markus teamed up with his brother Martin, ex-Skype, to build the first version of Bolt in 2013 when he was 19 years old. Markus has been featured as the youngest tech CEO in Forbes Europe 30 under 30 list and is the youngest founder of a billion-dollar company in Europe.

Hayley Barna

First Round Capital, Birchbox

Hayley Barna is a Partner at First Round Capital based in New York. Prior to joining First Round she co-founded and scaled Birchbox, the leading beauty and grooming retailer seed funded by First Round in 2010. Since joining First Round in 2016, Hayley has led investments across many industries and business models including healthcare, consumer, tech-enabled hardware and marketplaces among others.

Prakash Janakiraman

Nextdoor

Prakash began his career as a software engineer at Excite@Home in 1996 before moving into engineering management at Shopping.com and Epinions. Prior to Nextdoor, Prakash spent nearly three years at Google, where he managed engineering teams for Google Maps, Google Base, and Froogle. Prakash is from Hayward, California, and attended the University of California, Berkeley.

Eren Bali

Carbon Health

Eren Bali is the CEO and co-founder of Carbon Health. Eren leads the Carbon team towards his vision to democratize healthcare and make quality care accessible for everyone. Previously, Eren paved the way to make education accessible by founding Udemy, the world's largest marketplace for online courses, with more than 10 million students worldwide. In his youth, Eren was a star mathematician, winning awards in mathematics, physics, computer science and chess including the International Mathematical Olympiads. He still loves chess today and plays to unwind after a long day at the office.

Emily Melton

Threshold

Emily Melton is a partner and co-founder of Threshold. Her portfolio includes BetterUp, Brightline, Elation Health, Imagen, Livongo (NASDAQ: LVGO), Ooda Health, Redfin (NASDAQ: RDFN), Shift (NASDAQ: SFT), Tia, Verge Genomics, Vineti, Vital, Viz, and Wellframe.

In 2019, Forbes recognized Emily on the Midas Brink List. Emily is an active founding member of All Raise, a non-profit dedicated to improving access for women and others to start and invest in companies. She also serves on the board of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA).

Emily is a Stanford grad with a BA in political philosophy with honors and an MBA.

Shishir Mehrotra

Coda

Shishir Mehrotra is the cofounder and CEO of Coda, a new doc for teams that combines documents, spreadsheets, and applications into a single canvas. Shishir was formerly an executive at YouTube, overseeing the YouTube product, where he helped grow YouTube to the world's largest video destination, one of Google's largest and fastest growing businesses, and the platform of choice for a new generation of video creators. Prior to Google, Shishir spent 6 years at Microsoft and before that, he was the founding CEO of Centrata. He is currently a board member of Spotify.

Jean-Denis Greze

Plaid

Jean-Denis Greze is Chief Technology Officer at Plaid. He oversees Plaid’s global engineering, core product and security teams with over 300 engineers across North America and Europe, as well as Plaid’s core products. He leads the technical vision and infrastructure of Plaid, with a focus on delivering a secure and reliable platform that enables the fintech ecosystem to unlock financial freedom for everyone.

Prior to joining Plaid, Jean-Denis was Director of Engineering at Dropbox. Before that, Jean-Denis worked at a fintech in New York and holds a CS & MS degree from Columbia as well as a JD from Harvard Law School. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and son and has spent time all over the world including: Boston, Chicago, Lausanne (Switzerland), Los Angeles, New York City, Paris (France), Santiago (Chile), and Shanghai (China) over the last four decades.

Alda Leu Dennis

Initialized Capital

Alda brings over a decade of investing and legal experience to Initialized Capital. Prior to Initialized, she was a managing partner at 137 Ventures where she led investments in Planet Labs, Wish, Coupang, CourseHero, and Work Market. Additionally, she made personal early-stage investments in companies such as Maven, Common Networks, Legalzoom, SpaceX, and Osaro. Previously she was COO at Airtime, General Counsel at Founders Fund, Assistant General Counsel at Peter Thiel’s Clarium Capital Management, and practiced as a litigator for IP disputes at WSGR. She graduated from Stanford with BAs in economics and political science, and a JD from UCLA.

Ali Parsa

Babylon

Dr Ali Parsa is a British-Iranian healthcare entrepreneur and engineer. He’s the founder and CEO of Babylon, the revolutionary AI and digital health company. Babylon’s mission is to put an accessible and affordable health service in the hands of every person on earth. Dr Parsa was listed in The Times 100 people to watch. He was featured in the Maserati 100, a list that recognises game-changing entrepreneurs. He was formerly a UK Cabinet Office Ambassador for Mutuals and the Chair of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) Tech Forum. He has a PhD in Engineering Physics.

Claire Diaz-Ortiz

Magma Partners

Claire Diaz-Ortiz (@claire) is an author and startup investor who was an early employee at Twitter. Named one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company, she has written nine books that have been translated into 10 languages. She holds an MBA and other degrees from Stanford and Oxford and has been featured widely in print and broadcast media. She writes a popular business blog at ClaireDiazOrtiz.com.

Songe LaRon

Squire

Songe is the CEO and co-founder of Squire, the all-in-one point-of-sale and business management platform for barbershops.

Michele Romanow

Clearbanc

Tech titan Michele Romanow is a serial entrepreneur who started five companies before her 33rd birthday. A “Dragon” on CBC’s hit show Dragons’ Den, Romanow is the Co-founder and President of Clearbanc. Clearbanc has invested more than $1.5B into 4,000 companies making them the biggest ecommerce investor in the world. She previously co-founded SnapSaves, acquired by American tech giant, Groupon, and Buytopia.ca.

A prolific investor, Michele was recently named Fortune’s 40 under 40, a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, one of Canada’s Most Powerful Women and Canada’s Angel Investor of the Year.

Alvin Graylin

HTC

Mr. Graylin is the China President at HTC, leading all aspects of HTC’s business in the region (Vive/VR, phone, content platform, partnerships and investments) and the company’s SW business globally. He is also currently Vice-Chairman of the Industry of Virtual Reality Alliance, President of the $18B Virtual Reality Venture Capital Alliance and oversees the Vive X VR Accelerators in Beijing, Shenzhen and Tel Aviv.

Mr. Graylin has over 28 years of management experience in the tech industry, including 20 years in Greater China. Prior to HTC, he was a serial entrepreneur, having founded four venture-backed startups and has held $100+ million P&L roles at a number of public companies.

Mr. Graylin received his MS in computer science from MIT, MBA from MIT’s Sloan School and BS in EE from the University of Washington, where he had specialized in VR and AI. Mr. Graylin is fluent in English, Mandarin, and Cantonese.

Amandine Lobelle

Paystack

Amandine is currently Head of Business Operations at Paystack, an online payments company based in Lagos, Nigeria, which helps merchants to collect payments from their customers.

Previously, Amandine was an investor at IFC (the private sector investment arm of the World Bank), where she invested in early stage FinTech companies in Sub-Saharan Africa. She was based in Washington, Lagos, and Johannesburg.

She started her career in investment banking, working in M&A for Morgan Stanley based in London and Johannesburg.

Amandine holds a BA in Business & Economics from Trinity College, Dublin, and a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard University.

George Arison

Shift

George Arison is the Co-founder and Co-CEO of Shift, an online marketplace innovating the car sales industry. Previously, he co-founded Taxi Magic (now known as Curb), the first on-demand mobile transportation booking technology, and worked at Google and BCG. A Georgian immigrant, he was also the first student from the Soviet Union allowed to attend a private U.S. high school without a government sponsorship. He holds a BA in Political Science from Middlebury College.

Jaime Schmidt

Schmidt's Naturals/Color Capital

Jaime Schmidt is an entrepreneur and the founder of Schmidt’s Naturals, a brand of natural personal care products that she started in her kitchen in Portland, Oregon in 2010. Jaime is known for modernizing natural personal care products, including the customer-favorite deodorant. Under her leadership, Schmidt’s grew into a household name lining the shelves of retailers including Target, Costco, Whole Foods, Walmart and CVS across 30 countries. Jaime is the co-founder of Color, an investment portfolio that supports women and people of color. Jaime recently released her first book entitled “Supermaker: Crafting Business on Your Own Terms.”

Anis Uzzaman

Pegasus Tech Ventures

Anis Uzzaman, Ph.D. is the General Partner, and Founder of Pegasus Tech Ventures. He serves as the CEO of the company, overlooking overall management and operations.

Located in Silicon Valley, USA, Pegasus Tech Ventures provides funding to innovative startups around the world. With more than a dozen multi-million dollar funds under management, Pegasus Tech Ventures focuses its investment in IT, Health IT, Artificial Intelligence, IoT, Robotics, Big Data, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, FinTech and Next Generation Technologies.

Anis is also the Chairman of Startup World Cup, a global startup pitch competition with 50+ regional events across the 6 continents, leading up to $1,000,000 in investment prize.

He holds a B.Eng. degree from Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan, an M.S. in Engineering from Oklahoma State University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Tokyo Metropolitan University in Tokyo, Japan.

Aviad Pinkovezky

Hippo

Aviad Pinkovezky is the Head of Product at Hippo Insurance, where he joined the company in 2016 as employee number one. Prior to Hippo, Aviad served as Senior Product Manager at LinkedIn, spearheading the growth of its Company Page ecosystem by nearly 300%. Before that, Aviad spent 10 years as an officer in the Israeli Military Intelligence, working closely with engineers and military product managers. Aviad holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science from Ben Gurion University and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Harry Stebbings

The Twenty Minute VC

Harry Stebbings is the Founder of The Twenty Minute VC, the world's largest media asset in Venture Capital with over 16m downloads per month, partnerships with Mattermark and ProductHunt and guests from over 2,500 leading VC’s including Sequoia, Founders Fund, Y Combinator, Benchmark, Accel and Index. Harry currently invests with Jason Lemkin out of SaaStr, San Francisco's pre-eminent SaaS fund. Previously, Harry has worked with Atomico (the UK’s largest venture capital fund) as an EiR where he worked to establish Atomico's west coast presence and provide follow-on funding options to the current European portfolio. Harry has also been featured in the likes of WIRED, TechCrunch and Business Insider.

Sujeet Kumar

udaan

Sujeet Kumar is a co-founder of udaan. He founded udaan in 2016 with Vaibhav Gupta and Amod Malviya, who were both former senior executives at Flipkart.Prior to founding udaan, Sujeet was President of Operations at Flipkart where he built operations and supply-chain network for the company. He conceptualised and built the logistics and supply-chain arm of Flipkart - Ekart, which, today, is India’s largest logistics and supply chain company and the backbone of eCommerce distribution.Sujeet has done his BTech in Civil Engineering from IIT, Delhi.

KR Sridhar

Bloom Energy

Prior to founding Bloom Energy, Dr. Sridhar was Director of the Space Technologies Laboratory at the University of Arizona, where he created technology to convert Martian atmospheric gases to oxygen for propulsion and life support. Recognized by Fortune Magazine as ""one of the top five futurists inventing tomorrow, today,"" Dr. Sridhar is a pioneer in green tech, leading major consortia of industry, academia, and national labs.A member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering , Dr. Sridhar also serves as a strategic limited partner at Kleiner Perkins and as a special advisor to New Enterprise Associates.

Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau

MIT Technology Review

Elizabeth has a 20-year background in building and running teams at world-leading media companies. As CEO and publisher of MIT Technology Review Elizabeth facilitated a massive transformation from a niche print magazine to a global, multi-platform media brand. Prior to joining MIT Technology Review, Elizabeth held a senior executive role at The Economist Group, where her leadership stretched across business lines and included mergers and acquisitions; editorial and product creation and modernization; sales; marketing; and events. Elizabeth holds an executive MBA from the London Business School,an MSc from the London School of Economics, and a Bachelor’s Degree from Swarthmore College.

Alexa von Tobel

LearnVest, Inspired Capital

Alexa is the co-founder and managing partner of Inspired Capital.Prior to Inspired Capital, Alexa founded LearnVest in 2008 with the goal of helping people make progress on their money. After raising nearly $75 million in venture capital, LearnVest was acquired by Northwestern Mutual in May 2015 in one of the biggest fintech acquisitions of the decade. Following the acquisition, von Tobel joined the management team of Northwestern Mutual as the company’s first-ever Chief Digital Officer. She later assumed the role of Chief Innovation Officer through which she oversaw Northwestern Mutual’s venture arm.

Gary Stewart

FounderTribes

Gary is the founder and CEO of FounderTribes, an innovative learning platform that empowers you to raise capital and upskill your business. He is the former CEO of Wayra UK, where he built a portfolio of 185 start-ups worth $1.1bn and scaled Wayra UK to 7 cities. He’s also a former entrepreneurship professor at IE Business School and a Governor of the University of East London. Serial entrepreneur with a successful exit. Yale College and Yale Law School graduate, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa.

Alexi Robichaux

BetterUp

Recognized as a leadership and development innovator, Alexi is the co-founder and CEO of BetterUp, the first leadership development platform to connect coaching to sustainable behavior change. As CEO, Alexi leads BetterUp on its mission to enable all professionals to live with greater clarity, purpose, and passion.Prior to BetterUp, Alexi was Director of Product Management at VMware. He led product and design teams to build enterprise collaboration software that earned Gartner’s “best in class” distinction. He also witnessed the changing relationship between employees and employers that’ll be key to future human flourishing and innovation.Alexi is Chairman of Youth Leadership America (YLA), a nonprofit he co-founded in 2003, to foster peer-to-peer leadership development and civic engagement in high school students. YLA has collaborated with leading companies including Disney, Google, and Hilton Hotels to coach and mentor future leaders.Alexi holds a B.A. in political science and non-profit management with summa cum laude distinction from the University of Southern California.

Maya Horgan Famodu

Ingressive Capital

Maya Horgan Famodu is Founder & MD at Ingressive Capital, a $10 Million VC Fund I and $50 Million Fund II targeting early stage startups across Sub-Saharan Africa’s key tech markets. Ingressive Capital Fund I has seeded some of Africa’s fastest-growing businesses, including Paystack (sold for $200M+ to Stripe); 54gene (Series A led by Adjuvant, an IFC fund); Tizeti (Series A led by 4DX). 33% of portfolio companies are female founded and 31% of companies are Y Combinator alumni. Maya and her team are building a pipeline from the time a student thinks “I want to be in tech” all the way to the time they IPO. As such, she co-founded Ingressive for Good, a nonprofit focused on cultivating technical talent and resources for the African startup ecosystems; and founded Ingressive Advisory, a market entry / market operations firm that has assisted more than 50 international companies to enter and operate across Africa, and they’ve done a collective 40+ deals on the continent. Many of these clients became investors in her fund, which has led to 80% of Ingressive Capital’s limited partners running their own later stage fund, and providing companies with access to international capital. She is a two-time Forbes 30 under 30 nominee (Africa and VC), United Nation’s Most Influential Person of African Descent, and worked previously in private equity research and at JPMorgan after completing Cornell Prelaw Program and attending Pomona College.

Kamran Elahian

Global Innovation Catalyst

Kamran ElahianHigh Tech Entrepreneur with 3 Unicorn IPOsKamran is Founder and Chairman, Global Innovation Catalyst, LLC and advises various governments on the needed transition from fossil-based economies to sustainable innovation economies. In the past, as a global high-tech entrepreneur, he co- founded ten companies, had 6 exits, 3 of them were Unicorn IPOs with a total market cap of over $8B. For 15 yrs., he was Chairman of Global Catalyst Partners, a global VC firm ($350M under management) with investments in the U.S., Japan, China, India, Israel and Singapore. Underlying his vision for global philanthropy is the conviction that modern Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can be instrumental in dissolving barriers between nations and bridging the social and political differences among people. This vision was reflected in Schools-Online, a nonprofit he co-founded in 1996 to connect theworld, one school at a time (6400 schools in 36 countries were provided with computers and access to the Internet) and merged with Relief International in 2003; Global Catalyst Foundation, co-founded in 2000 to improve lives through effective education and empowerment of the youth (with special emphasis on young women) using the leverage of ICT, and UN-GAID, a United Nations global forum that promotes ICT in developing countries where he served as Co-Chairman (2009-2011).

Áine Kerr

Kinzen

Áine Kerr is a serial risk taker and trailblazer with more than 10 years’ experience in the specialist cross-over space between journalism and technology. Co-founder and COO of technology start-up Kinzen, she is a former Global Head of Journalism Partners at Facebook in New York, former Managing Editor at social media news agency Storyful, and a former political correspondent with Irish newspapers. She is a member of the European Council’s committee of experts on quality journalism in the digital age and advisor to the Institute for Future of Media and Journalism (Fujo). Áine is a Fellow of the Sulzberger Leadership Program in Columbia University, NYC and has a Masters in Journalism (MAJ) with Dublin City University [DCU]. Áine is also a qualified Executive Coach and a regular presenter with RTÉ.

Sriram Krishnan

Andreessen Horowitz

Sriram Krishnan is an experienced product leader and investor. He has lead core product at Twitter and previously revenue products at Snap and Facebook. He writes at sriramk.com.

Sonja Gittens Ottley

Asana

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

Tien Tzuo

Zuora

Tien Tzuo is the world’s foremost authority on the “The Subscription Economy.” He is CEO of Zuora (NYSE: ZUO), the leading subscription management platform company, which he founded after 11 years at Salesforce, having served as the company’s chief marketing officer and chief strategy officer. He is the author of the USA Today, LA Times and Amazon best selling book, “SUBSCRIBED: Why the Subscription Model Will be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It” and a sought after speaker by the world’s largest companies to present his definitive playbook for thriving in this new business era.

Laura Holliday

Depop

Laura Holliday is the former CMO of successful start ups Zola and Rent the Runway, and held senior marketing roles at Ralph Lauren and J.Crew. She is currently a Marketing Consultant for Depop, Strategic Advisor for Soshe, and Board Member of January Digital. In addition, Laura is a children's book author and motivational speaker.She holds a BA from UCLA and an MBA from Stanford.

Byron Deeter

Bessemer Venture Partners

Byron Deeter is a leading investor in SaaS and Cloud. He co-authors Bessemer’s iconic 10 Laws of Cloud Computing and the annual State of the Cloud Report. He created the Bessemer Forbes Cloud 100 and BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index and works closely with many of the best founders in the cloud world. And now he is the host of Bessemer’s newest podcast, Cloud Giants. To date, nineteen of Byron’s investments are valued above $1 billion, including ten IPOs and counting.Byron first raised a Series A with Bessemer Venture Partners back in 2000, as CEO and founder of Trigo Technologies. His company grew to be one of the first global SaaS companies, reaching profitability and was successfully sold to IBM. Byron foresaw that cloud computing would not only change the way people built new technologies but also how The Cloud would systematically run the world. In 2005, Byron returned to Bessemer, this time to lead the fund’s global cloud practice.He graduated with honors from The University of California, Berkeley, where he met his then college sweetheart and now wife. Byron is a perennial Midas List investor and active board member/advisor to numerous causes including National Venture Capital Association, Pledge 1% and Cal Rugby. Although he’s a four-time Rugby Collegiate National Champion and Ironman finisher, nothing competes with being a father of three children

Liana Douillet Guzmán

Skillshare

Liana Douillet Guzmán is the Chief Marketing Officer at Skillshare. As CMO, Liana helps to set Skillshare’s long-term strategy and drives its growth and retention through brand, acquisition, communications, partnerships and sales. Prior to Skillshare, Liana helped Blockchain grow from 4M to 40M+ users. She was the company’s first marketing executive hire, eventually became COO, and led its Expansion, Partnerships, Operations, Talent, User Success, Research, Marketing, Growth and Communications functions through a phase of unparalleled growth. Before joining Blockchain, Liana led Branding and Communications at Axiom.

Courtney McKlveen

Convoy

Courtney is a proven leader with a track record of successfully building and scaling high-performing teams across sales, strategy, and operations. She excels in leading teams within technology and media companies ranging in size from <$10M to $1B+ in revenue. I achieve results through data, communications, and building a customer oriented go-to-market.

Stephen McIntyre

Frontline Ventures

Stephen McIntyre, is Founding Partner at Frontline Ventures where he leads Frontline X, an $80M growth-stage fund for US B2B companies eyeing Europe expansion, specialising in backing Series B+ SaaS firms on the road to IPO-path.Stephen is former VP and MD for Twitter EMEA, where he set up EMEA headquarters and regional Sales and Marketing teams, starting with no people and $0 revenue. He was also one of the people responsible for setting up Google’s largest office outside the US, running a multi-billion dollar ads business at Google.He is a seasoned General Manager with particular functional expertise in Sales, Operations, and Talent.

Sarah Shewey

Happily

Sarah Shewey is an experience economy pioneer with a background in film and tech. She is the Founder & CEO of Happily, a global event company network of over 50,000 sustainable event producers, technologists and creatives who produce world-class virtual and live events. Sarah co-founded TEDActive, is the founder of EXP, and is the board president of dublab.com, LA's first Internet radio station - established in 1999. She recently "broke the Internet" with her cyberwedding, which was streamed live on every continent. An environmentalist, Sarah has spoken about the importance of sustainable event practices on NPR, the Associated Press, and publications around the world. She also co-invented the world’s first underwater projector. Stay connected with Sarah Shewey on Linkedin.

Vieje Piauwasdy

Secfi

Vieje leads the Equity Advisory team at Secfi where we help startups and their employees make informed decisions to get the most value out of their equity. Our in-house education, online forecasting tools, and financing products enable startup employees to afford to exercise, save on taxes, and unlock liquidity without selling so they can get the most out of their equity.

Allison Robinson

The Mom Project

After having her first child in 2015, founder Allison Robinson identified how universally challenging it can be for American mothers to juggle the demands of motherhood with a full-time career. She knew there had to be a better way to help women stay engaged in the workforce on their own terms. Since launching in 2016, The Mom Project has grown its talent community to over 175K women and has supported over 2000 companies across the United States.

Albrey Brown

Airtable

Albrey leads diversity, equity, and inclusion at Airtable -- start up focused on democratizing software creation. Albrey is a former founder and software engineer. Albrey is passionate about understanding how technology companies can affect systems of oppression. And in his spare time he likes to do yoga, meditate, find obscure music, and tweet.

Mae Karwowski

Obviously

Mae Karwowski is the founder and CEO of Obviously, a leading global influencer marketing agency and technology platform. Under her leadership since she launched the agency in 2014, Obviously has become the global standard of influencer marketing by providing the best full service client experience, managing complexity and scale of influencer work, and using data analysis to inform all strategies.With thousands of campaigns under her belt, Mae is a recognized expert on the influencer industry and has been widely quoted in the press, appearing in publications such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, NPR, CNBC, and the Washington Post.Obviously’s clients include iconic brands such as Amazon, Ulta, Lyft, Google, Coca-Cola, and Hasbro, and in 2019, Mae won both the Campaign Female Frontier Award and the Adweek Fastest Growing Agency award. Before founding Obviously, Mae directed social media for Gilt City, part of Gilt Groupe, and oversaw social execution for clients such as Bravo, UGG, and Coca-Cola with the agency 360i.

Javier Mata

Yalochat

Javier Mata is the founder and CEO of Yalo, the leading conversational commerce platform in emerging markets. The platform helps enterprises optimize critical processes and improve relationships with customers through messaging applications such as Whatsapp. Born in Guatemala, Javier is a serial entrepreneur who founded his first start-up at age 19.

Luke Anear

SafetyCulture

Former covert surveillance private investigator who built an international multi-million dollar business from his suburban garage in Townsville. Luke is the CEO and Founder of SafetyCulture. Its flagship products iAuditor and EdApp power over 600 million checks per year, approximately 50,000 lessons per day and millions of corrective actions. SafetyCulture currently employs 500 people across AU, UK, US and the Philippines.

Alexa Hall

Google

Alexa Hall is a California native interested in economic development, arts & culture and travel. She holds a Masters degree in Management and has more than 10 years of experience at high value organizations. As an angel investor, she focuses on frontier technologies that can improve the lives of people living in growing globalized cities. Alexa has also been an operator at Google for the past two years catalyzing business growth with global startup facing teams. Previous to which, she was a funder at the Hewlett Foundation to over 250 organizations and managed $11M in impact investments.

Chris Giovanniello

Menlo Micro

Chris has more than 20 years of experience in the electronic systems and semiconductor industries. Chris oversees all aspects of Menlo’s product roadmap, leading product development, product marketing, and developing go-to-market strategies. Prior to Menlo Micro, Chris was Vice President, Business Development for GE Ventures. At GE Ventures, Chris was responsible for developing new programs and monetization strategies for key technologies developed at General Electric’s R&D center in Schenectady, NY. Prior to GE, Chris served in a variety of management and leadership positions over an 18-year career at Teradyne, world leader in semiconductor test equipment.

Shuo Wang

Deel

Shuo Wang is a technology entrepreneur most notable for co-founding Deel, the market-leading international compliance and payments platform that automates international hiring and payroll for companies of all sizes. Prior to founding Deel, Shuo co-founded Aeris, a cutting-edge smart home health technology company. Shuo holds a B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering, concentrate on Robotics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Job van der Voort

Remote

Job is the CEO and co-founder of Remote, the company making global employment accessible for businesses of all sizes. Job previously worked as a neuroscientist before leaving academia to become the VP of Product at GitLab, the world’s largest all-remote company, where he hired talent in 67 different countries. Job is the dad of one dog and two humans.

Christina Cacioppo

Vanta

Born in the Midwest and based in Silicon Valley, Christina Cacioppo sits at the intersection of security, tech, and business. After starting her career in early stage VC at Union Square Ventures, Christina went on to lead product management for Dropbox Paper, bringing the product to market. At Dropbox, Christina experienced firsthand the challenges and tradeoffs many teams face when trying to scale adoption of a SaaS product without first having security certifications in place. The Y Combinator alum is now the co-founder and CEO at Vanta, a leading security and compliance platform backed by Sequoia Capital, where she is pioneering a continuous, automated approach to security monitoring. Christina received her Masters in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University and has taught Entrepreneurial Design courses at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. In her spare time, she reads books, runs with no destination, and cooks Sunday dinners for friends.

Dan DeFrancesco

Business Insider

Dan is an associate finance editor at Business Insider, based in New York. He covers financial technology and market structure.Whether it's a startup looking to disrupt the way Wall Street trades or a big bank hoping to keep pace with the evolving markets, Dan focuses on how financial firms both big and small look to leverage interesting, innovative technology. His coverage includes artificial intelligence and machine learning, the public cloud, alternative data, and the struggles firms sometimes face when trying to use the often complex technology.

Aaron Jacobson

New Enterprise Associates (NEA)

Aaron Jacobson invests in entrepreneurs seeking to build, scale and secure the next-generation of SaaS applications, big data platforms, cloud infrastructure, and robotics. He serves as a board director or observer for Outrider, Tigera, Bitglass, illusive networks, Streamsets, Built Robotics, and ForAllSecure. He has also worked closely with Box (NYSE:Box), NGINX (acquired by F5), Databricks, Bloom Energy, and Coursera. In 2016 he was named to Forbes Magazine’s “30 Under 30” in Venture Capital and the Silicon Valley Business Journal's "40 Under 40".

Ashley Brucker-Stepien

Webflow

Ashley has led numerous marketing organizations and guided companies through their greatest stages of growth and in most cases, successful exits. She helped to trail blaze the concept of marketing automation with Marketo, lead the demand and go-to-market functions at companies like Pendo, and she currently drives the growth marketing and market strategy at Webflow. Her great passion is supporting women in the workforce and helping mothers to come back to work after leave. Outside of work, she spends as much time as possible away from screens with her three children and husband in Carmel, California.

Eric Rea

Podium

Eric Rea is a Canadian entrepreneur and Co-founder and CEO of Podium, the leading communication and payments platform for local businesses. Used by over 90,000 businesses across the U.S., Canada and Australia, Podium has connected over half of cell phone owners in the U.S. with a local business through messaging. The company has been recognized by Fast Company as one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies and by Forbes as a part of the Cloud 100. Rea is a graduate of Brigham Young University and in his free time enjoys backcountry skiing, golf, and spending time with his wife, Kimmi, and their four children.

Rashmi Gopinath

B Capital Group

Rashmi Gopinath is a Partner at B Capital Group where she focuses on investments in cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, devops, and artificial intelligence and machine learning. She brings over two decades of experience investing and operating in enterprise technologies.Ms. Gopinath was previously a Managing Director at M12, Microsoft's venture fund, where she led investments globally in the enterprise space. At M12, Ms. Gopinath sat on several Boards including Synack, Innovaccer, Contrast Security, UnravelData, Incorta, among others..Prior to M12, Ms. Gopinath was an Investment Director with Intel Capital where she was involved in the firm’s investments in startups including MongoDB, ForeScout, Maginatics, BlueData, among others. Ms. Gopinath held operating roles at high-growth startups such as BlueData and Couchbase where she led global business development and product marketing roles. She began her career in engineering and product roles at Oracle and GE Healthcare. Ms. Gopinath earned an M.B.A. from Northwestern University, and a B.S. in Engineering from University of Mumbai in India.

Mike Radice

Toptal

As Toptal's Director of Recruiting, Mike is responsible for leading our elite team of recruiting professionals to identify and hire high-impact resources across the full breadth of Toptal's growing organization. Prior to Toptal, Mike spent over a decade in recruitment firms and various start-ups, primarily supporting the full-time hiring efforts of companies of all sizes across the Enterprise and SMB landscape. He holds a BS in Business Administration from Villanova University.

Tsune Shirota

World Innovation Lab

Tsune focuses on investing in mid-to-late stage, high-growth technology companies. He led World Innovation Lab investments in Asana, Auth0, Kong, and TransferWise. Prior to joining WiL, Tsune was VP of Business Operations and Strategy at Evernote, where he spearheaded analytics and was instrumental in improving the company’s revenue growth and financial stability.Tsune has worked for Blue Ridge Capital and T. Rowe Price analyzing publicly traded internet companies. Earlier in his career, Tsune was an investment banker at Lehman Brothers/Barclays Capital.Tsune holds an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BA in Economics from the University of Tokyo.

Wayne Berger

International Workplace Group (IWG)

Wayne Berger is the CEO of IWG Americas: United States, Canada and Latin America, the global coworking and workspace leader. The company harnesses the power of flexible working through its companies Regus, Spaces, No. 18, Open Office, HQ, and Signature by Regus. Wayne is a leader and advocate for the transforming world of work. With over 20 years in multi-national leadership positions helping companies improve the way they maximize their office and communities, Wayne is helping lead the acceleration of the workplace revolution— evolving from traditional office space to the new flexible work world. Follow Wayne Berger @wayneberger.

Ian Gardiner

Innovation Bay

Ian is co-founder of Innovation Bay. He is also an active investor as a partner at Jelix Ventures. Prior to this he spent four years at AWS as Head of Startups for Australia & NZ. He has founded and run several technology startups, including video software platform Viostream. When he's not working, he is a cyclist, gamer, skier, husband, Scotsman, squash player. geek, father (not in that order). A long time ago he rowed for Oxford in the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race. He has also won the Pearcy Award for Technology Entrepreneur of the Year.

Blessing Abeng

Ingressive for Good

Blessing Abeng, a branding and communications expert helps brands discover their unique identity to tell better stories. She has worked with brands across industries in unique capacities globally, including Seedstars, Facebook, Taeillo, Diageo, Heritage Bank, Dark and Lovely, Bolt, Lemi Ghariokwu, Victor Ehikhamenor, QuickCheck and more. As the Director of Communications at Ingressive for Good, she supports the nonprofit’s mission to increase the earning power of African youths through tech training and resources. She has trained 5000+ creators and currently nurtures a growing community of over 40,000 individuals curious about branding, community building, and leveraging technology tools for growth.

Jason Williamson

Oracle for Startups

Jason Williamson is vice president and global head of Oracle for Startups, Oracle’s program for startups and innovators worldwide. Oracle for Startups helps people build things never built before, and helps them to do it with Oracle.

Prior to Oracle, Jason was at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he created and led several key initiatives within the investment and startup community. He has a background in both Fortune 500 firms and the startup world.

As an entrepreneur, he co-founded the construction industry’s first CRM SaaS offering, served as an assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce, and authored three books.

Stephen Hamm

I am a freelance writer and documentary filmmaker. I co-authored with Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman the book Rise of the Data Cloud. My most recent previous book was Smart Machines, co-authored with John Kelly of IBM. I'm making a documentary about rivers.

Madeline Ulivieri

Startup Grind

Madeline first joined the Startup Grind community over three years ago as Co-Director of the Chicago Chapter. Her involvement with the organization grew deeper over time and Madeline now serves as Chapter Lead for the startup grind community where she oversees the growth and management of Chapters, events and sponsorship.

Adi Engel

vcita

As Chief Marketing Officer, Adi is responsible for leading vcita’s strategic thinking and global marketing objectives in supporting micro and small businesses on their journey to success and digital transformation. Coupled with her business acumen, Adi has a host of experience and customer-centric product knowledge, which she constantly brings into new, innovative, company-wide, initiatives that are guided by her passion for enabling the inclusion of the underserved. Driving a growth culture and mentality, Adi, together with her team, are helping to positively impact hundreds of thousands of small businesses around the world to build businesses they are proud of.

David Cohen

Techstars

David Cohen is the Founder and Managing Partner at Techstars, the worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed. David has been an entrepreneur and investor for his entire life. He has only had one job interview in his career, successfully got that job but then quit shortly thereafter to start his first company. Since then, he has founded several companies and has invested in hundreds of startups such as Uber, Twilio, SendGrid, Pillpack, Classpass, and FullContact. In total, these investments have gone on to create more than $100B in value.

Jomaree Pinkard

Hella Cocktail

Jomaree Pinkard is a native New Yorker who graduated from the University of Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce and also earned his MBA from The Wharton School of Business. His career journey has taken him from helping to develop and implement The Salvation Army's September 11 World Trade Center Recovery Program to consulting for the NFL. In 2011, he became the Co-Founder and CEO of a minority-owned craft cocktail company, Hella Cocktail Co. In almost a decade, Jomaree has helped transform the company into a nationwide tale of success, with products now sold all over the country in retailers including Whole Foods, Fairway, Stop&Shop and Walmart, as well as bars, restaurants, hotels and Delta Airlines.

Alec Wright

OneValley

Alec is the Chief Innovation Officer & Managing Director at OneValley and OneValley Ventures, where he leads Acceleration, Ventures and Enterprise Innovation efforts. He has served as an advisor to 25+ Seed startups and Fortune 500 companies like 3M, Fidelity, MassMutual, Cisco and Fujifilm. He founded the Pioneer Accelerator, a Pre-Seed accelerator in partnership with Google Developers Launchpad that has supported startups emerging from global innovation markets like Korea, Mexico, Brazil and Russia. Alec is a Partner in the Maverick Fund, where he actively invests in enterprise AI, digital health and marketplace technologies. Maverick investments include Tueo Health (acquired), Kylie.ai (acquired), Facet Wealth, Tara.ai, BidOps and NuvoCargo.

Christine Feng

Blackstone

Christine Feng is a Senior Managing Director at Blackstone. Ms. Feng focuses on technology investing for Blackstone Tactical Opportunities and Blackstone Credit.Prior to joining Blackstone, Ms. Feng was on the Corporate Development teams at Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, where she sourced, evaluated, negotiated and executed acquisitions and investments. Previously, Ms. Feng was at Rhone Capital, where she worked on private equity buyouts. She started her career on the M&A Investment Banking team at JPMorgan.Ms. Feng received a BSE, cum laude, in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Brian Brackeen

Kairos.com

Brian Brackeen is the Founder of Kairos, a innovative facial recognition company that graduated the NewMe Accelerator's 2nd class. The Kairos API are helping companies everywhere to change the way they interact with their employees, patients, and customers. Kairos makes face recognition and emotion analysis easy for developers and marketers. What if you could pay for a coffee with your smile? What if one glance was enough to skip the line at JFK? What if your smartphone knew when you were lonely or frustrated? That’s what Kairos is helping their customers achieve. In his role as CEO Brian has managed explosive growth at the firm, raising over 5 million dollars in venture capital and hiring some of the best talent in the world. Kairos recently acquired IMRSV (formerly CaraCV), making Kairos the only facial biometrics company in the world offering both facial recognition and emotion analysis tools for developers. Prior to Kairos, Brian cut his technological teeth at Apple in Cupertino California. As a Sr. Project Manager / Architect he designed solutions that managed Apple's workforce across the globe including Apple's interests in Hong Kong, Rome, London, Toronto, San Francisco, New York, etc. Before Apple, Brian held Senior positions at IBM, Comcast, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, General Motors, PetSmart, Scottrade, and others. His specialty is helping companies to create a positive culture, utilize technology to manage your workforce effectively, and helping companies large and small navigate robust growth and international expansion.

Kyle Lui

DCM

Kyle is a Partner at DCM, an early-stage global venture capital firm with offices in Silicon Valley, Beijing and Tokyo. At DCM, Kyle focuses on consumer internet, SaaS and financial technology. Kyle’s investments include Lime, Eaze, hims & hers, DocSend, Tempo, Shift (Nasdaq: SFT), Grin Scooters (Grow Mobility), TravelBank, Mendel Health, Wrike (Acquired by Vista Equity Partners) and Tapingo (Acquired by Grubhub). Kyle also served as a board member for BitTorrent (Acquired by Tron) and SavingStar (Acquired by Quotient/Coupons.com), and is actively involved with SoFi, SigFig and Matterport.

Russ Heddleston

DocSend

Russ Heddleston is the CEO and co-founder of DocSend, which he started in 2013 with Tony Cassanego and Dave Koslow. Previously, Russ was a co-founder of Pursuit, a social referral company that helped source referral candidates and a product manager at Facebook. Russ received his B.S. and M.S. in computer science from Stanford University and his Masters of Business Administration from Harvard Business School.

Rebecca Kaden

Union Square Ventures

Rebecca Kaden is a managing partner at Union Square Ventures. She began her career as a journalist and prior to USV was a General 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.

Rajiv Nathan

Startup Hypeman

Known as the Heavyweight Champion of Story, Rajiv 'RajNATION' Nathan is Founder of Startup Hypeman, helping growing companies not suck at telling their story so they stand out to their audience, stand apart from competitors, and break through in their category. He was named an ""Agent of Change"" by Huffington Post, has given a TED Talk, and been featured in Inc, Forbes, and more. He's also a hip hop artist, yoga instructor, and host of the popular show Startup Hypeman: The Podcast. Talk to him about Hamilton, WWE, or Seinfeld and you'll have a friend for life.

Hubert Palan

Productboard

Hubert Palan is Founder and CEO of Productboard. Driven by a passion for building excellent products, he started the company quietly and built a small team in Prague before launching at TechCrunch Disrupt. Before Productboard, Hubert was VP of Product Management at GoodData and a management consultant at Accenture. Hubert mentors and advises startups and frequently speaks at his alma maters – UC Berkeley (MBA) and the Czech Technical University (MSc. in Computer Science).

Andrew Lee

Initialized Capital

Andrew is a former founder/executive dedicated to solving the world’s inefficiencies with technology. He has invested in various startups, incl. SandboxVR and CaseText. Andrew started Esper, a startup that uses machine learning to automate the work of an assistant, and social music-gaming startup JamLegend (acquired in 2011). He has served in product and advising roles at Facebook, the U.S. Small Business Administration, and FarmVille (played by 1 in 10 Americans at its peak). Andrew holds a B.A. in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Claremont McKenna College, where he was a Truman Scholar, Udall Scholar, a USA Today All-Academic Team member. Andrew also created the game Fantasy Congress.

Startup Grind Global Conference 2021

About this event

Speakers

Stacey Abrams

Biz Stone

Jeff Lawson

Tamar Yehoshua

Michelle Zatlyn

Noah Kerner

Benoit Dageville

Lucy Liu

Parker Conrad

Markus Villig

Hayley Barna

Prakash Janakiraman

Eren Bali

Emily Melton

Shishir Mehrotra

Jean-Denis Greze

Alda Leu Dennis

Ali Parsa

Claire Diaz-Ortiz

Songe LaRon

Michele Romanow

Alvin Graylin

Amandine Lobelle

George Arison

Jaime Schmidt

Anis Uzzaman

Aviad Pinkovezky

Harry Stebbings

Sujeet Kumar

KR Sridhar

Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau

Alexa von Tobel

Gary Stewart

Alexi Robichaux

Maya Horgan Famodu

Kamran Elahian

Áine Kerr

Sriram Krishnan

Sonja Gittens Ottley

Tien Tzuo

Laura Holliday

Byron Deeter

Liana Douillet Guzmán

Courtney McKlveen

Stephen McIntyre

Sarah Shewey

Vieje Piauwasdy

Allison Robinson

Albrey Brown

Mae Karwowski

Javier Mata

Luke Anear

Alexa Hall

Chris Giovanniello

Shuo Wang

Job van der Voort

Christina Cacioppo

Dan DeFrancesco

Aaron Jacobson

Ashley Brucker-Stepien

Eric Rea

Rashmi Gopinath

Mike Radice

Tsune Shirota

Wayne Berger

Ian Gardiner

Blessing Abeng

Jason Williamson

Stephen Hamm

Madeline Ulivieri

Adi Engel

David Cohen

Jomaree Pinkard

Alec Wright

Christine Feng

Brian Brackeen

Kyle Lui