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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 is Head of Engineering at Plaid. He oversees Plaid’s global engineering and design teams and sets the technical vision of the company.

Prior to joining Plaid, Jean-Denis was Director of Engineering at Dropbox, where he led the growth, identity, notifications, and payments teams. Before Dropbox, Jean-Denis worked in 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 (People’s Republic of China) over the last four decades.

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.

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

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. 

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 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 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 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, 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. 

Jason Williamson is the VP of the Startup Ecosystem at Oracle. He leads Oracle’s collaboration with the VC and PE comminuties and their portfolio companies around the globe. Prior to Oracle, jason was atAmazon Web Services (AWS), where he created and led several key initiatives within the investment community including Amazon’s Private Equity Program and Management Consulting efforts. He has a background in both Fortune 500 firms (Amazon, Capital One, GE) and the startup world. Among his startup efforts, he co-founded the construction industry’s first CRM SaaS offering, a faith-based NGO for entrepreneurial development based in Latin America, and is currently launching a company in the pediatric healthcare space. In addition to his work in the commercial sector, Jason served as an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce and now works part time in academia in home state of North Carolina. He has authored three books on Data Integration and Migration and Big Data. Jason also served his country as a United States Marine and lives in North Carolina with his wife and four children where he coaches High School Girls Basketball, drinks sweat tea and eats bbq as much as possible.