Name: 2021 Startup Grind Europe
Start: 2021-06-29T13:30:00+01:00
End: 2021-06-30T20:00:00+01:00

Yoni Assia

eToro

Yoni is the CEO of eToro, the world's leading social investment network. Yoni showed great interest in finance and computer science since his youth, and so decided to merge his passions. In 2007, he founded eToro with the vision of opening up the global markets so that everyone can trade and invest in a simple and transparent way. Today, he oversees a multi-asset platform that enables a 20 million strong community to connect, share, trade and invest in the global financial markets. Yoni is a member of the YPO, and was included by Financial News in its prestigious Fintech 40 ranking and by City A.M. as a Fintech 100 top influencer. He was named as one of Fortune's 40 under 40 in 2020.

Jessica Schultz

Northzone

Jessica is a General Partner at Northzone, where her main focus is DTC and consumer internet. Her portfolio includes Red Points, Na-Kd, Matsmart, Klarna, Outfittery, Flink and Fyndiq.Prior to joining Northzone, Jessica co-founded and was CMO of market-leading meal-kit service HelloFresh, spearheading the global marketing operations. She started her career in consulting at LEK, and holds an MSc, Economics & Business from the Stockholm School of Economics.

Eilon Reshef

Gong

Eilon Reshef is a co-founder and a Chief Product Officer at Gong, the leading revenue intelligence platform. Gong modernizes revenue organizations by collecting all first-hand interactions with their customers and guiding team members towards the best actions. As a CPO, Eilon is responsible for Gong's product strategy and execution.

Eynat Guez

Papaya Global

Eynat has over 20 year of experience in Global workforce management, and she is one of the leading experts in HR and payroll Management in the industry. She holds a BA from The Open University in Israel in Business administration and international affairs.From 2002 to 2008 Eynat had served as a COO at LR Group, a global holdings group with extensive operations in developing countries. In 2009 she founded Relocation Source, a DSP and Global Mobility Solutions provider that served hundreds of multi nationals' companies. A few year later Eynat had founded Expert Source, an Asian PEO organization helping US corporates expand their business into Asia. From 2016, Eynat is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of Papaya Global, one of the fastest growing startups in Israel (recently became a unicorn with a valuation of more than $1B), developing global people management platform, covering all employment needs from on boarding to payment at 140 countries.

Johannes Schildt

Kry/Livi

Johannes Schildt is the CEO and co-founder of Kry/Livi, Europe’s largest digital healthcare company. Kry/Livi revolutionize the way people access primary care by combining medical expertise with state-of-the-art technology. Kry/Livi has completed over 3 million on-demand video consultations since its inception in 2015. Johannes has been named one of the 2018 “30 under 30” in Europe by Forbes Magazine. Kry/Livi has been ranked as one of Wired’s Hottest Start-Ups in Stockholm and recently achieved a unicorn valuation of $2bn following closure of its series D funding round.

Sacha Michaud

Glovo

"Sacha Michaud is the co-founder and Vice-President of Public Affairs at Glovo, one of the world’s fastest-growing on-demand delivery players. After launching his first company at 25, LatinRed, which went on to become the world’s largest Spanish-speaking internet services provider, he then joined Betfair. He spent nine years leading the Iberia team for the online gambling giant and helping their global expansion. In late 2014, he decided to launch an ‘everything-on-demand’ service and began talking to investors. Soon after he was introduced to Oscar Pierre, who was about to launch a similar project, and he decided to join him. Together they founded Glovo."

Matt Miller

Sequoia Capital

Matt Miller is a partner at Sequoia focused on early and growth stage investments in technology companies. A self-proclaimed nerd from an early age, Matt started building computers and writing code at 12 years old in his mother’s kitchen. He has worked as an entrepreneur, an advisor and now an investor. At Sequoia, Matt has worked closely with companies like Carbon Black, Confluent, Docker, Fishtown Analytics, Graphcore, n8n, Simplisafe, Tecton and Tessian. Prior to Sequoia, Matt worked at Goldman Sachs and graduated from Brigham Young University. In his spare time, Matt is wrangling three young kids with his wife and looking for people with whom he can practice his Swedish.

Julia Hawkins

LocalGlobe

Julia Hawkins is a Partner at LocalGlobe. Previously, Julia worked at Goldman Sachs, Last.fm, BBC Worldwide and most recently Universal Music where she set up their Corporate Venture arm. Julia enjoys working with mission driven founders and has a keen interest in entertainment, media and digital health from wellness to genomics. Companies within her portfolio include sexual wellness app, Ferly, the messaging platform for doctors and patients Accurx and deep-tech startup, Apheris. She is also a Kauffman Fellow and Board Trustee of Shwachman Diamond Syndrome UK, a charity dedicated to finding a cure for SDS, a rare genetic disease.

Fredrik Hjelm

Voi Technology

Fredrik Hjelm co-founded Voi Technology in 2018 with a vision of improving the way people move around congested urban centres by offering fleets of electric scooters as a cleaner, affordable and exhilarating alternative to cars. Prior to Voi, Fredrik founded Guestit, the Nordics’ most successful Airbnb management company, and worked in business development for Avito.ru, Russia’s leading - and the world’s third largest – classified advertising site. Fredrik’s entrepreneurial career began at 12 years of age when he ran a number of commercial projects including forestry work (he grew up in rural Sweden), events and website sales. After graduating from high school, he attended the Armed Forces Interpreter Academy, within the intelligence branch of Sweden’s special forces, where he studied Russian and linguistics. He went on to study business and economics at the Stockholm School of Economics.

Sukhinder Singh Cassidy

theBoardlist/ Choose Possibility

Sukhinder Singh Cassidy is a leading technology executive and entrepreneur, board member, and investor with 25 years of experience founding and helping to scale companies, including Google, Amazon, Yodlee, and StubHub. She is the founder and chairman of theBoardlist and has been profiled in Fortune, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. Sukhinder has been named one of Elle’s Power Women, one of the Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company, and one of the Top 100 People in the Valley by Business Insider. Her forthcoming book is entitled Choose Possibility (on sale: August 17th).

Ben Marrel

Breega

Ben's experience as a founder and his passion for entrepreneurship led him to co-found Breega, a founder-friendly European VC specialised in financing early-stage tech startups from PreSeed to Series B stage. Prior to that, Ben debuted his entrepreneurial journey by launching FiftyFour, the first financial rating platform for SME’s in Africa, and then Rugby Division, a disruptive rugbywear brand. He began his career in corporate finance, working on large cross-border M&A deals and Series D+ in tech for Macquarie Bank in London and Sydney.Today, Ben & Breega advise and finance highly promising startups such as Curve, Cuvva, Exotec, Ibanfirst, udelv or NinetyNine with the aim of propelling them to global success. #entrepreneur / #VC / #techlover / #sportaddict For more info : www.breega.com

Ira Krachanovskaya

Launchpad

Results driven, growth focused marketing leader with 7 years of experience across B2C, B2B and D2C sectors at start-up and scale-up levels. Having worked as Head of Growth Marketing at Badoo/Bumble, Ira currently leads marketing for Launchpad and it’s portfolio of 5 technology-focused start-ups.

Cristina Fonseca

Indico Capital Partners

Cristina is a technology entrepreneur and investor. In 2011, she co-founded Talkdesk, one of the few Portuguese “unicorns”. Talkdesk is the leading global Cloud-Based Call Center Solution, having raised $267 million from top Silicon Valley investors and employing over 1000 people today.As a Partner at Indico Capital Partners, the first private institutional early-stage venture capital fund in Portugal, with 66 million euros under management and backed by institutional and individual investors from 16 countries, Cristina works closely with the portfolio of 21 global tech disruptors. Indico invested over 28 million euros since early 2019 in its companies, who in turn, raised a collective amount of more than 600 million Euros and created more than 1000 jobs.Cristina is also a non-executive Board Member and Member of the Sustainability Committee of Galp since 2019 and a co-founder at Cleverly.ai, a startup that automates customer service with Artificial Intelligence, eliminating manual and repetitive work and making customer service teams 30% more productive on average.

Erika Batista

On Deck

Erika Batista is the Head of International at On Deck. Before that, she was founding team member and director at the European accelerator The Family. She has been working with early stage founders for nearly a decade, and her specialties include fundraising, education, and community building.

Rory O'Driscoll

Scale Venture Partners

Rory has been investing in enterprise software for 25 years. An active investor in the rise of SaaS and wider transition of enterprise computing to the cloud, Rory led investments in Bill.com (BILL), Box (BOX), DocuSign (DOCU), ExactTarget (ET; Acq: SFDC), Omniture (OMTR; Acq: ADBE), Placeware (Acq: MSFT), and WalkMe (WKME) among others. Currently, Rory's focused on investing in business applications powered by AI (cognitive applications), frontier tech, and the continuing adoption of SaaS and cloud. He currently sits on the board of directors at Bill.com, Chef Software, Cognata, DroneDeploy, Flatfile, Forter, Locus Robotics, OM1, OneLogin, Pantheon, Papaya Global, Socure, Soft Robotics, Solvvy, Viz.ai, and WalkMe.

Suzanne Ashman

LocalGlobe

Suzanne Ashman is a Partner at LocalGlobe, a London-based VC fund. LocalGlobe has been seeding companies for almost two decades, backing companies including Zoopla, Citymapper, Improbable, Robinhood and Transferwise. Suzanne enjoys working with entrepreneurs using technology to solve some of humanity’s greatest challenges, from healthcare to agriculture, and education to space. Previously, Suzanne spent five years at Social Finance, an impact investing firm seeking to generate both social change and a return on capital.

Katie Carroll

LinkedIn

Katie Carroll is LinkedIn’s Head of News, UK and North America. She and her team work to foster timely discussions on the platform, through a range of media and news products. Before landing in London, she worked for several tech startups in San Francisco, Calif., including news-reading app Pulse, acquired by LinkedIn in 2013, and Apple award-winning photography app Hipstamatic. She was a Regents’ and Chancellor’s Scholar at UC Berkeley and graduated with a double major in Rhetoric and Political Science.

Christopher Herd

Fistbase

Chris Herd is the Founder & CEO of Firstbase. Firstbase is an all-in-one provisioning platform for remote teams. Their platform lets companies setup, supply, maintain, manage and retrieve all the physical equipment remote workers need to do great work at home as a monthly subscription.

Kate Afanasyeva

Google

Kate leads Growth Marketing for EMEA Google Store. She volunteers as Google for Startups Accelerator Mentor and Femtech Lab Marketing Advisor to mentor startups on go-to-market and marketing strategy. Kate is ex-Marketing Lead for Yandex Internal Incubator where she led marketing for new experimental products and has more than 5 years of experience with various marketing channels and tactics from paid media, to brand campaigns, to market research and positioning.

Sofia Dolfe

Index Ventures

Sofia is an investor at Index Ventures. She spends time primarily in the Nordics and The Netherlands, and focuses on investments in consumer internet and marketplace businesses across all stages. Prior to joining Index, Sofia was an investor at EQT Ventures in Stockholm. Sofia is a graduate of the London School of Economics (M.Sc. Management) and of the University of Edinburgh (M.A.)

Jason Williamson

Oracle

Jason Williamson is vice president of the Oracle Global Startup Ecosystem, Oracle’s startup program for entrepreneurs worldwide. In this capacity, he leads the business development initiatives and strategies across the program’s key audiences, including startups, customers, partners and 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. Among his startup efforts, he co-founded the construction industry’s first CRM SaaS offering, an International NGO for Entrepreneurial Development, and is currently launching a company in the pediatric healthcare space. Jason also served as an assistant professor for five years at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce and has authored three books. He served his country as a United States Marine and lives in Raleigh with his wife and four children, where he coaches high school girls’ basketball, drinks sweet tea and eats bbq as much as possible.

Sharon Lee Thony

Fiverr

Sharon Lee Thony is a brand and marketing executive, with nearly two decades of experience creating award-winning marketing campaigns for travel, beauty and luxury lifestyle brands. She is Director of Digital Marketing Agencies at Fiverr and is also CEO of SLT Consulting (acquired by Fiverr), a boutique digital marketing collective that partners with savvy businesses looking to scale their efforts in various integrated marketing channels for growth: social media, search marketing, website optimization, email marketing, digital performance and brand strategy. Notable clients include: Peloton, Warby Parker, sweetgreen and Facebook.In her spare time, Sharon is co-host of Top 50 Podcast Modern Minorities and a Distinguished Faculty member at General Assembly. She has earned a BA from New York University and an MBA from The Wharton School. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband, their two adorable sons and their dog.

Vikram Bhaskaran

Chargebee

Vikram has been with Chargebee since 2018, during which time the company has grown rapidly. Chargebee’s leading marketing metrics in this time have grown a whopping 20X. He is one of the most experienced SaaS marketers in India, with more than 15 years of SaaS marketing experience. He has handled marketing at some of the most successful SaaS startups in India like Zoho in 2006 (when Zoho was known as AdventNet) and Freshworks (then known as Freshdesk) in 2012, when they had just raised their first round of funding. An ex-founder himself, he has been involved in the SaaS space during these formative years and has contributed to the evolution of SaaS marketing in India.

Ann Hiatt

Ann Hiatt received her initial business training during 15 years as the Executive Business Partner to Jeff Bezos (CEO of Amazon) and Chief-of-Staff to Eric Schmidt (CEO and Executive Chairman at Google/Alphabet). Ann now consults with executives and companies across the globe to reverse engineer their moonshot goals and get results. Ann is a sought-after international speaker, angel investor and sits on several boards in the UK. Ann has recently relocated from Silicon Valley to Europe and brings with her a unique perspective on what it takes to succeed in business today. Ann is also the author of Bet On Yourself, published by HarperCollins in 2021.

Saira Gill

Antler

Saira is the Global Head of Portfolio Management for Antler, investing in and supporting a portfolio of over 280 investments across 10 countries. She has led the strategies across Antler to help support founders to have maximal impact, fundraise and grow. This includes creating content, events and workshops for founders, building up an international community of VCs and doing fundraising sprints with founders particularly from pre-seed to Series A. Previously, she founded two companies, one focussed on reducing food waste, the other on improving mental health using sound. She scaled two companies internationally, MyCitydeal (later bought by Groupon) and Antler, and worked in Venture Capital at Balderton Capital. Saira holds a Masters Degree in Biological and Biomedical Sciences, where she specialised in Neuroscience and Psychology. Her hobbies include kitesurfing, raw food cooking, yoga and breathwork.

Jessica Hayes

Whereby

I am a person and I like to think I am good enough to do it professionally. So that's what I do. I'm a hands-on Chief People Officer. I find my joy in diverse, kind, and world-changing companies of excellent people, which is why I am at Whereby, where our mission is to give people freedom to live and work where they thrive. I'm a regular panellist and speaker: Presenting at local and international events on how to positively influence culture, strategise a modern People function, improve your employer brand, advocate for a human experience, and generally how think about People Ops as a product. I am also a host and panelist on the podcast, ""There's This Thing at Work"" find it where you usually find your podcasts.

Thomas Lueke

Cherry Ventures

Thomas is a Partner at Cherry Ventures and is particularly excited about product-centric founders and industry-defining opportunities in software. Prior to Cherry, Thomas gained experience as an entrepreneur building Bonusbox, an e-commerce data and loyalty network. He also worked as assistant to the CEO and in corporate development at Penguin Random House in New York and in the e-commerce division of Bertelsmann/Arvato. He gained additional experience at McKinsey and in several startups. Thomas studied economics in Essen, London, and Berkeley and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Kelly Lyons

Lyonshare

Kelly is the founder of Lyonshare, a strategic startup studio that offers Wall Street grade investment banking and management consulting services to startup founders. Kelly’s clients include Chelsea Clinton, Bain Capital, Imaginary Ventures, Billboard Music, and hundreds of startups that have received funding from investors such as RRE, Greycroft, USV, and Catterton. Previously Kelly was President of consumer fin-tech startup Casa and an investment banker and investor at Morgan Stanley and Golub Capital. Shen also invests in her clients and is a business coach to early-stage founders through Tory Burch Foundation, xrcLabs and other organizations.

Tom Jewell

Unleashed

Applying lessons learnt as Head of People at HelloFresh, Tom's role at Unleashed is to enable some of Europe's fastest-growing Tech start-ups to scale successfully through the People & Culture lens!

Amy Lewin

Sifted

Amy Lewin is deputy editor of Sifted, the media platform for Europe's startups, backed by the Financial Times. She reports on topics from venture capital to food tech to diversity in tech, runs Sifted's newsletter and regularly moderates panel events across the continent (remotely, for now!)

Derek Andersen

Startup Grind/Bevy

For the past 15 years Derek has been building communities. He is the Co-founder/CEO of Bevy, a SaaS product that helps companies like Salesforce, Atlassian, Google, Snowflake, and Adobe build virtual and in-person communities. He co-founded Startup Grind, a community of 600 Chapters in 125 countries educating, inspiring, and connecting startup people. Since 2012, Startup Grind has hosted 15,000 events for more than 500,000 people. In 2010, he co-founded Commonred which was acquired by Income.com. Derek also previously worked as a product manager at Electronic Arts. He currently lives in Palo Alto, CA with his wife and four children.

Simon Hudson

Cheeze, Inc

Simon Hudson is the Founder & CEO of Cheeze, Inc - an app that lets photographers mint their photo NFTs onto the Blockchain. Prior to Cheeze he was the Founder and CEO of Brndstr, a Social Intelligent company, established in 2013 and based in Dubai. Brndstr helped brands integrate social chat technologies into their company’s internal systems. Before moving to Dubai in 2011, Simon was on the founding team of a London based company Streetlife.com that sold to Nextdoor in 2017.

Konrad 'Kocu' Kocowski

Startup Development House

If I had to describe myself in one sentence it would be „I like doing things”. I am in love with challenges and do not run away from problems, but solved them. Dog lover, part time digital nomad, coffee addict and outdoors enthusiast.

Marek Pałys

Startup Development House

I have over 10 years of experience in developing digital businesses. I was the Head of Goods of the Polish division of Groupon, one of the fastest-growing startups ever. My experience lets me create successful strategies for business development.

Alex Pleasants

Tech Nation

Alex is Head of Government Relations at Tech Nation - the government-backed growth platform for game-changing tech scaleups and founders. Alex was previously senior policy adviser to Ed Vaizey MP - the UK’s longest-serving digital and culture minister. He also founded and runs the APPG for Creative Diversity in Parliament, backed by King’s College London and NBCUniversal, among other organisations.

Emma Young

Bulb

Emma is responsible for the company's communications strategy. She was previously Head of Communications and Public Affairs for WeWork EMEA, Head of International Communications for Disney’s digital studio and ran global comms for SoundCloud. She began her career working in book publishing where she spent nearly a decade running high profile campaigns for well-known authors and breakthrough talent.

Rachael Carolan

what3words

Rachael is General Counsel of global technology company what3words, having joined the business as its first lawyer in 2018. Rachael qualified at Herbert Smith Freehills and since then has worked for a variety of high growth technology businesses including Accenture, Deliveroo, GoCardless and what3words. During her time at these businesses, she has advised on crisis response, new product launches, international expansion, privacy and IP strategy.

Catherine Birkett

GoCardless

Catherine has been CFO for three years. Before that, she was CFO for one of Europe’s fastest-growing telecoms providers, Interoute, where she completed 10 acquisitions and took the business from $20m to €700m in turnover over 16 years, leading equity and debt raises, including an inaugural high-yield debt issue.

Daniel Lanyon

AlfFi

Daniel Lanyon is the Editor-in-Chief of AltFi, focusing on fintech and alternative finance space. He was formerly a senior and award-winning journalist at FE Trustnet covering the world of financial markets and asset management. Having attained a degree in economics, he went on to work as a journalist at several of the world’s leading media organisations including The Times, BBC and Reuters covering economics, business and politics. Before this, he worked as an economics and business correspondent for Hurriyet Daily News in Istanbul, Turkey.

Tal Berman

Startup Grind

Tal Berman is a Chapter Director for Startup Grind in Rishon Lezion. He is a global innovation expert and leader with many years of international experience. He has led international joint projects with partners in Germany, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, and The US, such as: Mercedes, Pfizer, the city of Skopje (North Macedonia), and numerous academic institutions. He created a novell startup EcoSystem in the area of Hashfela (the Plain) and created, developed, and ran multiple entrepreneurship programs, incubators and accelerators. Furthermore, he is a junior academic researcher with one publication confirmed and another on the way.

Andrew Kumar

Contentful

Andrew is a global leader of high-performing and diverse digital teams, with a 20 year track record in technology, marketing, commerce, and content.Currently, Andrew leads platform strategy at Contentful, supporting teams tackling complex and scaling challenges in customer experience, platform, go to market, and strategy.

Wahid Tashkandi

Paddle

An experienced revenue growth specialist, Wahid joined Paddle in 2017 as one of the first employees. He is an expert on pricing or billing model strategies. During his tenure at Paddle he has seen behind the scenes in some of the fastest growing SaaS companies and has advised them on optimising net revenue retention (NRR) and growth-readiness.

Rebecca Kilkelly

Personio

As Head of International Sales Development, Rebecca is supporting a team driving Personio’s goal of becoming Europe’s leading HR software solution for SMBs. She is passionate about scaling high performing teams, developing talent and being a cultural leader within the organization. Prior to joining Personio, Rebecca gained experience with global market expansion, sales enablement and process optimization while working within fast-scaling teams at CarGurus, Microsoft, NextRoll and Google.

2021 Startup Grind Europe

Silicon Valley, San Francisco Bay Area Jun 29 - 30, 2021, 1:30 PM (BST)

About this event

Speakers

Yoni Assia

Jessica Schultz

Eilon Reshef

Eynat Guez

Johannes Schildt

Sacha Michaud

Matt Miller

Julia Hawkins

Fredrik Hjelm

Sukhinder Singh Cassidy

Ben Marrel

Ira Krachanovskaya

Cristina Fonseca

Erika Batista

Rory O'Driscoll

Suzanne Ashman

Katie Carroll

Christopher Herd

Kate Afanasyeva

Sofia Dolfe

Jason Williamson

Sharon Lee Thony

Vikram Bhaskaran

Ann Hiatt

Saira Gill

Jessica Hayes

Thomas Lueke

Kelly Lyons

Tom Jewell

Amy Lewin

Derek Andersen

Simon Hudson

Konrad 'Kocu' Kocowski

Marek Pałys

Alex Pleasants

Emma Young

Rachael Carolan

Catherine Birkett

Daniel Lanyon

Tal Berman

Andrew Kumar

Wahid Tashkandi

Rebecca Kilkelly

Yoni Assia

eToro

Jessica Schultz

Northzone

Eilon Reshef

Gong

Eynat Guez

Papaya Global

Johannes Schildt

Kry/Livi

Sacha Michaud

Glovo

Matt Miller

Sequoia Capital

Julia Hawkins

LocalGlobe

Fredrik Hjelm

Voi Technology

Sukhinder Singh Cassidy

theBoardlist/ Choose Possibility

Ben Marrel

Breega

Ira Krachanovskaya

Launchpad

Cristina Fonseca

Indico Capital Partners

Erika Batista

On Deck

Rory O'Driscoll

Scale Venture Partners

Suzanne Ashman

LocalGlobe

Katie Carroll

Silicon Valley, San Francisco Bay Area
Jun 29 - 30, 2021, 1:30 PM (BST)